introduction | background | terms | webbing | samples | possibilities | acknowledgements What Process Promises vs. What it Delivers As Ed White notes in Teaching and Assessing Writing (1994), the intersection of the writing process with theories of reading and criticism have significantly shifted the goal of the writer and the burden of the reader. He says that "the text has lost its privileged status as an object of study or reference and becomes 'strings of differential traces' with which the reader can play" (95). This being the case, it becomes the By encouraging writing as learning – writing to create and not merely disseminate knowledge – the hypertext portfolio can transcend the reductive nature of a "final" product while in the act of creating one. reader's responsibility to create meaning – a task previously assigned to the writer. The writer's responsibility then shifts from producing a definitive text to creating a "reading environment" that encourages readers to "see" from the writer's perspective with no guarantees that the reader will do so. Such a reading environment encourages writing as a process, shifting the focus from an ideal end product to successive revisions building toward, although never quite reaching, the goal of universal or ideal meaning. The emphasis is on writing's recursive nature, but students are not rewarded for recursivity or reflection.           While this conceptual shift holds out the promise that both students and instructors will see writing as the complex cognitive activity that it is, and respect it as such, traditional methods for teaching the process of writing (and assessing it) have lagged behind in delivering on that promise. In one sense, we have constructed an impossible goal: that of bridging the gap between ideal text and reader response. Writing as process encourages first-year students to construct texts that keep in mind the audiences who will read them, but at the same time continues to privilege an ideal finished product: at the (foreseeable) end of the process, audiences will perceive the text within the context and intentions of the original author. In this sense, we are setting our students up for failure. First-year composition students in particular fail to see the process for what it is, and in the words of Nancy Sommors, they "sabotage their own best interests when they revise, searching for errors and assuming, like the eighteenth-century theory of words parodied in Gulliver's Travels, that words are a load of things to be carried around and exchanged" (315). In addition, we promise these students that the process we teach them – usually brainstorming, successive peer- and instructor-reviewed drafts, and final proofing – will eventually net them an ideal text. Sommors suggests that when students (and instructors) view revision as an either/or process with successively "improved" choices, they "exclude life and real revision by pushing [us] to safe positions […] that exclude each other and don't allow for any ambiguity or uncertainty" (317). Students, then, are still seeking an ideal text, and instructors are still reinforcing that goal, promising that each successive draft will bring them closer to the nirvana of texts; one that will unequivocally achieve universal meaning, despite the fact that theory tells us that there is no such product, and even though encouraging one, and only one, process, reaffirms the "authority" of text and teacher at the expense of the above-mentioned ambiguity and uncertainty inherent in any writing situation.            If such an ideal text were possible, assessment of writing would be easy. We could construct a "do-loop": Do both reader and writer perceive the same meaning in a particular text? If yes, then the writing goal is accomplished. Can the writer reproduce this writing/reading ideal across situations? If yes, then writing program goals have been accomplished: writing has been successfully taught and learned. However, since the absence of this ideal goal is a given, writing instructors are placed in the unenviable position of trying to teach an ethereal concept perpetually eluding their grasps and defying either/or solutions to the problem of writing instruction and assessment. Traditional writing spaces encourage students' belief in the ideal text. By contrast, Webbed writing is the ultimate reader response model. Because of its rhizomatic (linking) nature, it foregrounds the reader as the determining element in a document's meaning. It can encourage the construction of multiple reader-driven texts, demonstrating context and intention in concrete ways. In addition, the ability of readers to "reinvent" the text at every reading encourage writers to think of their texts as evolving organisms rather than final, finished products. In the "topographic writing" of exploratory hypertext (Bolter in Joyce 42) both scriptors (Yellowlees Douglas, 1987) and audience "should be able to readily understand the elements that make up a developing body of knowledge, plot their progress through these elements, chart new ones, and locate them at will" (Joyce 42).            In terms of teaching writing and assessment, then, hypertextual writing appears to meet the goals of critical thinking, problem solving, and communication set forth in White's 1994 study. It foregrounds "the principles of association in writing, defining alternative organizations in writing and reading" (Bolter 22), thus both inviting the reader to construct in alternative ways, and encouraging the writer to contextualize alternative ways of reading and construct accordingly. As Jay Bolter notes in Writing Space (1991): "Although the computer is not necessary for topographical writing, it is only in the computer that the mode becomes a natural, and therefore conventional, way to write" (16). These associative aspects of hypertext as a writing environment improve upon the original hard-copy portfolio as a tool for teaching the importance of (and reason for) revision. In the first place, it allows students the opportunity to examine their own knowledge-building process and its affect on their writing through reflective self-assessment within the hypertext itself. In the second place, it opens a window for the instructor into the author's context and intentions by creating within the text a forum for presenting the purposes of writing, the reasoning behind revisions, and the contextual basis for the student's knowledge. By encouraging writing as learning – writing to create and not merely disseminate knowledge – the hypertext portfolio can transcend the reductive nature of a "final" product while in the act of creating one.

 

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vol. 6 Iss. 2 Fall 2001