First Ink: the development of a magazine of exemplary academic writing ‘by students, for students’

Exemplars of student work can help demystify the critical, rhetorical, and linguistic expectations that underpin academic writing. Marking criteria, no matter how plainly expressed, are necessarily abstract and so may seem remote—even opaque—to our students. Seeing ‘critical thinking’, ‘breadth of research’, or ‘clear expression’ exemplified in a piece of student writing can make the conceptual concrete. Certainly, research attests to the power of student exemplars in making tacit knowledge about academic writing visible and making disciplinary notions of quality clear (see, for instance, Handley and Williams, 2011; Hendry, Bromberger and Armstrong, 2012; Wingate, 2015; To and Carless, 2016). This paper began by tracing the conceptual evolution of First Ink from its origins in an internal proposal paper in 2014 to the idea of a website that combines the engaging properties of a student magazine with the educational benefits of a learning resource. First Ink 2024 offers a range of first-class undergraduate writing across different genres in the Arts and Humanities. The magazine invites readers to discover the stories behind the writing through author interviews, essay commentaries, podcasts, lecturer advice, and other resources that shed light on the craft of good writing—what it looks like on the page, what inspired it, and how it was put together. Following an account of how the magazine was developed by a staff-student team in the summers of 2022 and 2023, the presentation reflected on several issues related to co-creation, exemplar selection, student engagement, the representation of diverse voices, funding, and sustainability.