Page 74 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

TRANSFORMING TEXTS 41

greater interest. Generally, the instructor reads the product in a lin-
ear manner. On completing the paper's reading, the professor de-
velops a judgment about the student writer's competence based on
the language of a discipline or of an argument. The professor bases
her evaluation on the textual structures and conventions she has
internalized throughout her studies and her research, much like
Kress (1994) described in his outlining of the genres found in the
English curriculum.
However, if the student writes a hypertext or webbed research
work, once the student gathers the information, she has no pre-
scribed order in which to place the evidence. To compensate for the
computer's small screen and lack of strict spatial boundaries to
mark page breaks, the student writer must think differently when
organizing her material. Instead of writing long blocks of text that
fill the computer screen and strain readers' eyes, as she might do in
her papertext assignment, the student writer now considers con-
structing smaller data packets or chunks that are more reader-
friendly. The student may decide to connect various ideas together or
show the relation between specific events or characters using a
hyperlink. To support her claim beyond her printed text, the student
writer can incorporate photographs, video clips, sound, and line art.
Now the student is writing interactively, drawing on multiple media
to conjoin with her argument through the hyperlinking of external
authorities, images, or sounds to engage the reader in a fuller discus-
sion of the topic. In this situation the student is thinking and writing
in a process that is completely different from what she would in a
papertext system. Likewise, to receive and respond to this type of in-
teractive writing, an instructor must reconfigure her ideas about
textual structures, conventions, and organization to match the
student writer's shift in medium.
Hyperlinks are sometimes considered as being digitized footnotes
in an e-text. Although this is a familiar-sounding metaphor for
some, it is an inaccurate observation. As Gilster (1997) suggested, a
footnote narrows the discussion by offering readers a precise addi-
tion to an idea. Hyperlinks function in the opposite manner. They
broaden the conversation by providing an extensive look at an idea.
The result of a student's hyperlinked e-text is that the instructor, as
reader, can enter the student's discussion from any number of places
within the text, not necessarily at the linearly generated beginning,
and glean different meanings from the student's writing and link-