One of the great liabilities of undergraduate and graduate writing is that it rarely enters a scholarly community of the writer's peers. When student papers are published in some fashion or another, they must consider and in some degree respond to the interests of a broader community than that comprised of the student and the teacher. But the effects of publication go beyond the particular qualities of the work itself. Publishing allows students to receive a varied response to their work; it shows them how other students write; and it can create academic community. The World Wide Web can be a good venue for student work, especially work done at the graduate level, since it hasn't yet caught up with the journal market in terms of professional regimentation. The Dictionary of Sensibility was a quick hit on the web; just from its public reception, I've learned things about the project that I couldn't see the day it was completed. For instance, the Dictionary has been taken up by many undergraduate curricula, as a supplement to eighteenth-century syllabi. This surprised me, since within a community of eighteenth-century scholars the project would not be taken to be a reference work or a survey, but an interpretation. Additionally, the project has often been cited as a model for collaborative student work; this aspect of the project has significantly informed subsequent departmental discussions of pedagogy. Electronic publishing is surely one way, but not the only way, to get beyond the insular academic product.
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