Page 54 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

INTERNETWORKED WRITING 21

knowledge of linguistic devices (techniques writers use to help reader
make connections among ideas). In addition, writing is also affected by
the writer's command of production components, such as handwrit-
ing, spelling, and punctuation. (Leslie & Jett-Simpson, 1997, p. 19)

Few in Composition would argue with the opening line of these
authors' description of composition, regardless of our pedagogical
inclinations. Generally, writing instructors of any persuasion would
agree that the writing process depends on how writers interact with
what they know, the genre, and the situation in which they are writ-
ing. However, given the vast amount of research done in the writing
process over the last 30 years, Leslie and Jett-Simpson' s oversimpli-
fication of what comprises "writer 's knowledge" in their definition is
astounding. If the composing process were as easily defined and clas-
sified as these authors suggest — even in a F2F writing class — evalu-
ating a student writer 's progress would not be the painstaking event
it frequently seems to be for writing faculty each semester. What
these authors (and those who subscribe to this understanding of
composition in the field of tests and measurements) fail to acknowl-
edge is each of these reductive categories is highly mediated and ne-
gotiated by the texts students produce and the contexts in which
students produce those texts, as Composition has discovered over the
last 3 to 5 decades. Yet what Leslie and Jett-Simpson (1997) proffered
in their basic, but problematic, definition is an all-too-common one
guiding both the assessment of student writing at the college level
and the definition of assessment used by hundreds of writing in-
structors and their program administrators. This definition of writ-
ing assessment is the one most subject to transformation in
Composition's convergence with technology.
A writer 's knowledge in networked spaces is quite different from
what is presented in the Leslie and Jett-Simpson (1997) model.
Christina Haas (1996) noted that the student writer must adapt to
the material changes in the writing process caused by computer
technology. Writers plan, write, and revise differently when word
processing compared with pen-and-paper production. For in-
stance, Haas (1996) explained that studies indicate writers may do
less higher level text planning (organization, thesis development,
and decisions about tone or rhetorical selections) with the com-
puter. Instead, writers may focus more on low-level text planning
(surface level error) because small computer screens constrain the
writer from seeing the entire text and direct the writer to think in