Page 91 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

58 CHAPTER 2

the word-processing abilities of a student writer. However, writing
instructors must take care not to equate interactive writing with
word processing; the two are very different methods for composing
and each rely on particular ways for students to classify the written
word. Therefore, let me offer a brief description of what good
writing often means in networked environments.
In interactive writing contexts, for instance, good writing tends to
mean layering the e-text with multiple sensory and support experi-
ences. That is why e-texts include many elements from hyperlinks to
archived data, to PowerPoint slide shows and Quick Time movies, to
a link to a discussion site, to gallery exhibits of still photos, to any
number of other possibilities that regularly emphasize a personal
voice over an instructive one. Generally, networked writers' person-
alized discursive structures attempt to foster audience interaction
with the text, to establish what Ann Hill Duin and Craig Hansen de-
scribed as "situational literacy" (in Selfe & Hilligoss, 1994, p. 98). Ac-
cording to Duin and Hansen (1994), situational literacy resists
external pressures from those outside the immediate community of
writers. So, not only do student writers have to master multiple
literacies in the production of an e-text, but they must also learn
how to negotiate situational literacy. Therefore, when student writ-
ers' immediate electronic community reflects a nonacademic cul-
ture, the writer will adopt a less academic discourse style (perhaps
even adopting an alternative discourse style). This is what writing
teachers often see in underlife postings to a class list, for instance.
The students are not seeing the class list discussion as part of the aca-
demic culture and take up nonacademic speech styles and subjects.
Clearly this reflects the students' misreading of the situation.
Conversely, in situational literacy, if students are part of a writing
community that is more academic or professional in character, they
will write in a corresponding manner. This frequently happens when
students directly respond to a text in an online assignment or when
they are engaged in e-mail exchanges with a member of the profes-
sional community a student aspires to enter (Duin & Hansen, 1994).
In these networked writing spaces, as Denise Murray noted, student
writers adapt "their composing processes to the particular task envi-
ronment, [and] create a new mode of discourse, one that is more ap-
propriate for particular tasks..., for particular interpersonal
relations..., and for particular modes" (1991, p. 53). In short, situa-
tional literacy coincides with the multimodal representations found