Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia

What changes when college writing reaches beyond the instructor and addresses a real, networked audience? In Lazy Virtues: Teaching Writing in the Age of Wikipedia, Robert E. Cummings takes that question into the composition classroom, treating Wikipedia not simply as an encyclopedia to approve or dismiss, but as a setting for collaborative writing and public knowledge-making.

Writing for readers beyond the classroom

Cummings draws on the idea of commons-based peer production to consider how shared online work might inform writing instruction. His central concern is the shift from writing only to satisfy a class assignment toward contributing to a community where other people can encounter, assess, and build on what students write.

From a Wikipedia assignment to classroom practice

The book moves from the theory of commons-based peer production to a proposed Wikipedia writing assignment and classroom case studies. That progression gives the discussion both a conceptual frame and a practical teaching focus: how networked writing might be introduced, experienced, and understood in composition courses.

Rethinking audience, effort, and authorship

Across its chapters, Lazy Virtues considers how an external audience can affect student motivation, how writers participate in making knowledge rather than only consuming it, and how a different understanding of effort may emerge when students choose where and how to contribute. Cummings also places these questions within composition and rhetoric theory.

For teachers and readers of writing studies

College writing instructors, composition scholars, and readers interested in Wikipedia, online collaboration, and academic writing will find a focused examination of what networked publishing can mean for teaching. The book is especially relevant to those thinking about the relationship between classroom assignments and writing communities beyond the classroom.

Lazy Virtues offers a considered perspective on teaching writing in a digital environment—one that takes collaboration seriously and asks what students can learn by writing for more than a grade.