Page 59 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

26 CHAPTER 1

expertise in a topic under discussion. In these instances, students'
discursive acumen turns on complex reasoning to draw out the
shared sentiments to a diverse group of writers and thinkers, partic-
ularly if third-party participants (not the course instructor or class-
mates) become involved in the reading of the text.
Therefore, a change must happen in the ways in which composi-
tionists assess e-texts in the writing classroom. Written discourse
shaped by computer technology requires instructors to return to
Composition's rhetorical roots to find a language and a methodol-
ogy to evaluate e-texts. A reintroduction of terms like kairos, copia,
expediency, and techne becomes important to represent different ap-
plications of how student writers manipulate language and text to
respond to their global audiences. These terms offer instructors a
name for the types of intended effects that occur in an electronically
produced text as well as for those that occur in papertext formats. To
assess students' use of these concepts in the context of an electronic
text, though, one needs to be attentive not only to how well student
writers address situational time, linguistic and argumentative facil-
ity, and community values but also to the art of offering all this in-
formation in a productive way (techne).
Techne is a critical criterion for evaluating the communicative
worth of e-texts, because it reflects the writers' ability to handle
typography, graphics, color, white or blank space, and even sound
in addition to the students' competence with the written word. In-
tentionally or not, writers who misapply techne by incorrectly se-
lecting hyperlinks, audio, fonts, graphics, color, background
colors, or white space may not understand or recognize a certain
community's values for clarity or coherence in navigation or de-
sign. In networked writing, students and instructors must be
aware that clarity and coherence extend beyond the sentences on
screen. For a web page, a hypertext story, or any other form of on-
line writing, the entire context becomes a communicative act, and
all aspects of the genre have to work in concert for the item to be
considered meaningful.
Thus, in networked writing contexts, missteps grounded in techne
can affect a writer's argumentative eloquence, as the audience's at-
tention moves from the point of argument to a series of running
Java applets, clashes between background and font colors, unread-
able typefaces, or nonfunctioning links or commands. This is why