One of the main purposes of the course is help you adapt your writing for various audiences. So in addition to writing essays that are directed primarily to your professor (me), I want you to have the opportunity to write for each other, and to practice writing as if your audience were considerably larger and more diverse. So we’re doing two shorter assignments in the form of blog posts, where the form and tone of your writing might be different than it is with an assignment that’s basically “a paper for an English class.”