Page 71 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

38 CHAPTER 2

reference. This same idea can be applied to computer-mediated texts
and writing assessment. On the surface, with the computer, a text and
a student's writing process may appear visible to the instructor, yet
are writing teachers sure of what they see? And if writing instructors
are not sure of what they see, how can they ever evaluate what stu-
dents produce?
A mundane text can also be considered transparent in that, politi-
cally, the agenda or the ideas one has are fully visible to the audience,
often as frequently as the political message occurs in the culturally
salient text. However, the composing process of the mundane text,
especially on a networked system, may be considered transparent in
a different sense because the inner dynamics of writing—the plan-
ning, drafting, revising, adding of graphics if on a web site—are gen-
erally invisible for both the writer and the instructor even though
the text is quite visible. Pamela Takayoshi at the University of Louis-
ville noted in 1996 that through cut-and-paste techniques, comput-
ers create a "seamless flow of text" in composing that "dissolv[es]
distinct segments of writing processes" (p. 245) for a writer. Conse-
quently, with this new transparent medium compositionists find
themselves working in a state of in/visibility. For every element of
the writing that instructors see, there are distinct sections of the
writing process that become hidden.
If instructors add hypertext or hyperlinked writing to the online
classroom composing activities, then the transparency of the text is
made even more in/visible in the process. The visibility of the nonlin-
ear aspects of writing and reading hypertexts increases with the
webbed structures. Likewise, the in/visibility of the writer's pro-
cesses is established by the reader's decisions to select links in any or-
der—unless, of course, the writer deliberately locks in the linkages to
follow a particular path. So, if a writer chooses to, she could replicate
standard textual conventions in hypertextual writing situations.
This would make writing assessment easier for the instructor. But,
this process defeats the idea of multivocality and nonlinearity inher-
ent in cyberspace and merely reproduces a conventional text struc-
ture on screen. Moreover, assessing a hypertext or hyperlinked
document in the same manner as a papertext clearly misses the full
rhetorical, situational, and contextual elements of a student's work.
Therefore, the malleability of the mundane text makes it an excel-
lent form for internetworked writing. As Takayoshi (1996) ex-
plained, even a simple piece of prose becomes a seamless production