Page 99 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

66 CHAPTER 3

or speaker makes statements regardless of their veracity. Likewise,
illocutionary acts demonstrate the force of an action or stating a
claim—such as a student on a discussion list ordering another par-
ticipant to do something or pronouncing another's claim as factual
or not. Perlocutionary acts in e-texts achieve certain semantic effects
by writing something, for instance, annoying someone through an
e-mail flame or by sending a "ditto" post to agree with a point.
Yet cyberwriting is not as simple as Austin (1962) offered. Unlike
Austin's rigid distinctions among these three speech act categories,
composing in electronic space reinforces Derrida's claim of
iterability in writing (1988). In e-texts, the same expressions or
word types can occur in different contexts that transform the in-
tended meaning to the degree that multiple, unintended meanings
arise beyond the simple speech act categories Austin presents. These
iterations give rise to polysemy in e-texts. Moreover, the iterability
of speech acts in e-texts suggests that although the student writers
have power and intent over their words as they type them on
screen, once those words are transmitted into cyberspace, readers
can discard the writers' power and intent as being irrelevant. The
writers' power and intent become inconsequential as time, place,
and conditions under which the audience receives the message
shape the speech act. So even though the act of writing on screen
frees student writers from the ponderous nature of traditional aca-
demic styles of writing in favor of immediacy and interactivity,
networked writing demands that students be even more vigilant
about the words they select and the rhetorical strategies they use.
Frequently, students' words often take on a life of their own when
set into cyberspace.
There is no doubt that writing in electronic spaces does indeed in-
fuse writers with power over the words they write. Paul Gilster
(1997) noted that the basic distinction between traditional media
and the Internet is that instead of offering content, as is the case with
traditional media, the individual using the Internet must create the
content from the volume of information available to a writer. In a
very real sense, student writers do own their own words, as they
compile and create new knowledge from found knowledge. With
this newfound ownership regarding students' use of language, how-
ever, comes not only various levels of rhetorical responsibility but
also several concerns related to the production of a student's e-text.