Page 111 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

78 CHAPTER 3

ownership of the text is a genuine goal, then why wouldn't instruc-
tors encourage this role reversal?
Nor am I sure that an active reader is an actual coproducer of the
e-text in the ways Blair and Takayoshi (in Yancey & Weiser, 1997)
suggest. Yes, in hypertext particularly, it is accurate to say that
readers "write" as they link events in countless ways. But the com-
poser of the hypertext document still constructs the links and im-
ages in multiple paths to lead readers through various readings of
the text. Also, it is still the hypertext writer who determines the
possible variations a reader can make. A similar point occurs with
students writing HTML documents for web sites. The finished web
site may be highly interactive and offer viewers innumerable per-
spectives regarding sensory and support items. However, the un-
derlying HTML code is developed by the original writer and offers
select options for the future reader, who then "writes" the docu-
ment at a sitting. So, although the e-text reader may be an active
one compared with traditional print forms, she may not be an au-
thentic coproducer of the e-text.
The matters raised by Blair and Takayoshi (in Yancey & Weiser,
1997), as well as those elicited by Wickliff's language in assignment
construction (in Yancey & Weiser, 1997), allude to why students do
not always gain the ownership in their writing promised to them by
computer-based composition. Because most compositionists still only
recognize customary expository or argumentative forms in writing,
the student writers' shift to a nonstandard or a mundane textual
form—even if the student writer selects a most useful melding of gen-
res for the context—leads to a corrective reaction from the more tradi-
tional writing teacher. Instructors' correctives may be anything from
overcommenting on the material or hypercorrecting word choice,
grammar usage, and other sentence-level errors to becoming a
coproducer of the student's text. The correctives emerge when and if
instructors perceive that the student writers are not somehow creat-
ing threads in the e-text that do not make meaning happen in predict-
able, learned ways. What arises in these situations is the conservative
voice of writing assessment; the instructor's need and expectation to
evaluate, to draw conclusions, about the text based on what can be
normed or replicated.
Thus, the ownership issue of student e-texts is complicated by how
instructors view students' work and student learning. Some composi-
tionists see writing instruction as teaching sets of discrete, portable