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TRANSFORMING TEXTS 47

is used, the philosophy has been to focus on exploring weaknesses
and contradictions in what students know about writing. Likewise,
in many instances, instructors follow the premise that all students
in a class are not expected to do equally well.
Composition's convergence with computers expands the notion of
what it means for an individual to write to various social, political,
economic, and cultural conditions. Convergence also requires
compositionists to reconsider how we assess one's literacy. Thus,
through convergence, writing instructors can hold out hope for the
act of writing and literacy becoming more inclusive than both may
be in present academic settings. Tyner argued, and I agree with her
analysis, that convergence shatters the monolithic understanding of
literacy into smaller, multiliteracy blocs that correspond to
"oral/aural, visual, and alphabetic/text modalities" (1997, p. 60).
This multimodality is the characteristic that has the potential to re-
duce what many writing teachers consider the violence in literacy.
Similarly to what postmodern and poststructural theories proposed
for truth in the 1960s to 1990s, once literacy diffuses into multiple
literacies, no single form of literacy is positioned ahead of another.
Each type of literacy can run concurrently with the others. The diffi-
cult question becomes, How can we assess these multiple literacies?
Thinking about multiliteracies for Composition acknowledges the
various competencies and learning preferences student writers bring
with them to the classroom experience that are drawn from race,
class, gender, sexual orientation, and physical ability as well as gen-
eral interest. Teaching writing in the technologically converged
classroom, then, means that writing specialists can offer more op-
portunities for students to become adept in several literacies beyond
those they come to class with on the first day. Presently, our society
daily handles orality, visuality, and textuality quite well in various
media contexts. Melding these aspects into computer-mediated writ-
ing experiences should enrich our students' literacy levels while still
focusing on the relationship of a writer and a reader to the text.
As Composition moves increasingly toward greater use of net-
worked writing and the formation of networked communities of
writers in the classroom, how faculties adjust their definitions of text
and what their expectations are for an acceptable text in an online
environment become critical. A writing teacher's enthusiasm alone
for computer-assisted writing instruction and for the use of e-texts
that emerge from her students' learning experiences in networked