Page 195 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

162 CHAPTER 7

colleagues in other departments come across our screens asking us
why students can't use appositives correctly; the daily paper has an
op-ed piece from some think tank stating that Johnny, Jose, and
Janiqua can't write well because of Instant Messenger; and the den-
tist asks why his kids don't write five-paragraph themes like he did
when he was in school. Putting aside the old grammar game of in-
correctly placing the comma in the legislative order so the world
would be destroyed if the bill was enacted, listening to these various
societal voices frequently makes a writing teacher wonder how civ-
ilization survived most people's wanton or wayward punctuation
habits. Talk of lax writing standards abound everywhere, and the
computer is blamed for much of students' real or perceived decline
in written communication; the problem is not primarily with the
computer, however. It is with how we perceive standards. Stan-
dards are representations that are subject to changes in language
use and public literacy.
As Guenther Kress proposed, "In periods of great social flux, the de-
gree of dynamism, the rate of change, can lead to a sense that there is
no such stability to social-textual forms" (2003, p. 87). The rise of
computer technology in writing has generated more social flux in lan-
guage use, and it presents a far greater degree of linguistic dynamism
than has occurred in earlier decades. The rate of change in introducing
newer linguistic entries and discourse strategies in electronic commu-
nication has increased exponentially as well. Consequently, to those
outside of writing or language studies, it may seem as though there
are no standards in writing produced via networked environments.
Some critics perceive, perhaps, that there is no hope for the written
word now that computers have entered the fray.
As those who teach and write extensively in and for electronic
communities realize, distinct standards exist for each online group.
Discourse rules vary depending on who participates in the discus-
sion. The community of users shapes the standards for language use
and topic control. Standards that are violated tend to be sanctioned
in some way by group members or moderators. What we learn from
these communal practices is that writing standards adapt to shifts in
both technology and culture. Standards are fluid and are formed by
habituated practices that become internalized as ingrained represen-
tations. Those who lead the call concerning the demise of students'
writing standards have internalized ingrained representations of
print-based models of writing as being the standards for writing.