Page 69 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

36 CHAPTER 2

fice papertext communications to flyers for used books on sale at the
off-campus bookstore or an apartment rental, the mundane text
must be understood by a wide audience. These texts are highly con-
text-dependent. This occurs because a single, closed-minded account
of what transpires is not always readily available. As Kress noted,
mundane texts engage us in change, as "the pace of change, and the
linguistic resources — a full knowledge of grammar, a deep under-
standing of text and the forms of texts . . . will be essential ... to write
the text that [writers] both need and wish to write in a time of per-
plexing uncertainties" (1994, p. 39, brackets mine). Therefore, read-
ers and writers of mundane texts must cue into certain verb
structures, deixis, or noun-pronoun references. To reach the widest
audience possible, writers of mundane texts hope to draw on a
panoply of accounts based on multiple and distinct social positions.
When the mundane text moves into computer-mediated writing
instruction through the use of e-mail, chat, lists, web pages,
weblogs, or hypertext or hypercard products, even more fragmenta-
tion of the single coherent sentence can occur. Instead of the standard
subject-predicate constructions so familiar to written discourse,
networked mundane texts shatter all expectations. These e-texts re-
place standard written discourse forms with iconography
(emoticons, capitalized letters to indicate shouting, jpeg or gif im-
ages, or some of the more clever ASCII-generated signature files or
V-cards), acronyms, hybridized grammatical structures that blend
standard and phonetic discourse, or repetitious short postings of
agreement that show support for the original poster's viewpoint
(the "ditto" message). This type of fragmentation in a text ruptures
the aesthetically valued sensibilities that many writing instructors
develop during the course of their studies. Ditto messages, acro-
nyms, and other common e-text elements may also disturb those
who demand cultural salience in their writing. Consequently, in-
structors who hold too strongly to these textual categories often find
themselves lamenting the laxity of networked writing.
However, rather than occurring because of student laziness or the
use of some unconventional shorthand, some of the e-textual conven-
tions listed here arise because the student writers are clearly aware of
who will be writing and reading these texts. These readers are imme-
diate in the sense that they are in the same room or same course as the
writer. The context dependency in e-mail that Tornow described
(Tornow, 1997) permits the use of mundane texts and alternative con-