Page 64 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

TRANSFORMING TEXTS 31

• Editing. Editing is a critical stage in the production of e-texts.
Not only must long sentences be pared down to their essences,
but errors have to be reduced so as not to interfere with the con-
tent or become magnified on screen.
• Cross-trained skills. Effective e-text writers need to be compe-
tent in their use of a number of electronic genres (such as lists,
MOOs, and web pages or e-mail) and software programs (such
as Photoshop, Adobe PDF, Java, Flash, and HTML or its equiva-
lent in FrontPage or Dreamweaver). Writers cross-trained in the
various e-genres and tools become cognizant of what design
and content issues arise for readers and the expectations readers
have for obtaining information.

One way for composition specialists to consider the changes a
writer must make to adapt to new media writing is to first think
about the levels of rhetorical sophistication that students need to de-
velop. Unlike papertexts, where crafting words and phrases elicits
various audience responses, with e-texts the students must also
layer graphics and design into the text so they can gain an immediate
effect. Anyone who has watched students directly import a paper
written for a class assignment to a web site recognizes a thoughtless
use of bandwidth. In these instances, the student's paper is too long
for readers to navigate easily or to absorb. Additionally, other prob-
lems exist. The ideas and the goal of that web page are unclear, and
the academic style of most class papers is a mismatch for the lighter,
more informative tones of an e-text.
In internetworked spaces, student writers have multiple opportu-
nities to select and blend genres and techniques beyond those that oc-
cur in print formats. Yet students are also constrained by the design
tools and the stylistic concerns that affect a reader's experience of
viewing type on screen. It is this broad scope of electronic textual
possibilities and the ability for an e-text to cross over into one or
more textual genres that offer the immediate differences between
networked and non-networked texts. It is also what confounds writ-
ing teachers in their evaluation of an e-text. E-text genres range
from e-mail postings to complex hyperlinked (Hypertext) stories
and articles to student-developed web pages grounded in a research
topic or an electronic portfolio that traces a semesters, a year's, or an
entire college career's worth of work. This is not to mention other
e-texts, like MOOs or weblogs, which blend text and cyberspace.