IT'S IMPORTANT TO KNOW why you're writing. If your purpose in is to please your instructor or to get a better grade, that may not be enough. Many instructors devise strategies to persuade their students to write for a larger community - publishing students' best work in a newsletter or online publication, asking students to send their papers to local newspapers, putting their best papers in a collection in the college library - something that allows students to feel that more than one person, sitting alone at the kitchen table, is going to read this bit of writing.