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have more authority in working with e-texts than many of their
professors. Compositionists should surely expect this trend toward
hyperliterate computer users entering their classes to continue in
the future, because state legislatures, public and private K-12
schools, and parents have made teaching with technology a pri-
mary goal for elementary and secondary education in the 21 st cen-
tury. Until Composition's culture as a whole recognizes the
necessity for its practitioners to have more than a basic under-
standing of how to teach writing using computers and until com-
position and rhetoric programs implement a series of courses for
graduate students and current writing faculty to show them how
to incorporate these two technologies, it will be difficult to promote
the development of reasonable, pedagogically sound measurement
practices for networked writing beyond what currently exists.
While the field awaits the occurrence of these events, it opens itself
to external charges of a lack in accountablity that may not be true
but still cannot be defended because little has been articulated.
For the sake of argument, let us say that Composition's conver-
gence between computer technology and writing assessment can
usher in a more humane, more performative, student-centered type
of evaluation process than has existed to date. The push for elec-
tronic portfolio grading, most recently discussed by Trent Batson
(2002) and the NCTE statement on writing assessment (2001), re-
flects this growing trend toward greater student autonomy in writ-
ing assessment. Brian Huot's most recent work (2002) proposed
that it is time for Composition to (re)articulate writing assessment,
and I concur. Not only do compositionists need to learn how to read
and respond differently, as Huot elegantly argued, but writing spe-
cialists have to think differently about what a text is in the writing
classroom and how a text functions in cyberspace. This means in-
structors have to become more comfortable with the place of the
mundane text in the teaching of writing.
As Composition makes the turn toward introducing mundane
texts in writing classes, even at the first-year levels, the field will
eventually see writing that is less academic and more performative
in public spaces. A synergy between visual and textual rhetoric must
also emerge over time to motivate a change in the presentation of
what writing is in this environment and how students' multiple
literacies become engaged in the writing process. Mundane texts can
help students and instructors understand this interconnectedness