what is a writer?" (I must admit I didn't come up with this brilliant idea, but adapted it from a suggestion from another instructor.) Students would always come up with different ideas about what that meant, but more often than not they never talked about themselves as writers. They thought of published authors as writers. They thought of people who sat in a sunlit room all day with a stack of white pages (or in front of a computer) as writers. They thought of people who were paid to write as writers. My students often did not think of themselves, or their instructors, as writers.
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