Today, we are in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen in at least two thousand years—or perhaps ever. One hallmark of this revolution is that students today are no longer just consumers of information; rather, they are active producers of knowledge. More than ever before, students today are writers—every day, every night, all the time; writing is all around them, like the air they breathe, so much so that they don’t even notice. From contributing entries to Wikipedia to blogging, texting, tweeting, and posting to YouTube and Facebook, student writers are participating widely in what philosopher Kenneth Burke calls “the conversation of humankind.” As access to new writing spaces grows, so too do the potential audiences: many writers, for example, are in daily contact with people around the world, and their work goes out to millions. In such a time, writers need to think more carefully than ever about how to craft effective messages and how best to represent themselves to others.

These ever-expanding opportunities for writers, as well as the challenges that inevitably come with them, have inspired this edition of Writer's Help 2.0 for Lunsford Handbooks—from the focus on thinking carefully about audience and purposes for writing and on attending to the “look” of writing; to an emphasis on moving smoothly between informal, social-media writing and academic writing; to a focus on writing to make something happen in the world; to an emphasis on the ways writing works across disciplines; to the questions that new genres and forms of writing raise about citing and documenting sources and about understanding and avoiding plagiarism. What remains constant is the focus on the “everydayness” of writing and on down-to-earth, practical advice for how to write well in a multitude of situations as well as across a range of genres and media.

What also remains constant is the focus on rhetorical concerns. In a time of such challenging possibilities, taking a rhetorical perspective is particularly important. Why? Because a rhetorical perspective rejects either/or, right/wrong, black/white approaches to writing in favor of asking what choices will be most appropriate, effective, and ethical in a given writing situation. A rhetorical perspective also means paying careful attention to the purposes we want to achieve and the audiences we want to address. Writers today need to maintain such a rhetorical perspective every single day, and Writer's Help 2.0 for Lunsford Handbooks, provides them with the tools for doing so.