At the end of each semester, composition instructors at the University of Dayton (UD) collected portfolios of student writing for the annual program assessment, encouraging their students to return the following semester to pick up their folders of work. However, the stacks of unclaimed portfolios that piled up in faculty offices each year was an indication that students cared little about what they had written, perhaps believing no one beyond their instructor was interested in reading their writing now or in the future. Nevertheless, academic scholars have recognized that student writing improves—as do a sense of ownership and pride in one’s writing—when students know their work will be shared with authentic audiences in wider, public spaces. As such, many institutions have created journals of outstanding undergraduate research. Today, the Council on Undergraduate Research lists well over 200 journals, the majority of which include work from advanced students’ disciplinary research; however, few journals exist to celebrate the work of beginning student writers.

In 2014, Line by Line: A Journal of Beginning Student Writing (ecommons.udayton.edu/lxl) was created, in part, to provide undergraduates with an authentic audience and to celebrate the wide variety of writing emerging from first- and second-year composition courses.