Cynicism or Criticism?
In this confusion between cynicism and criticism, we see how many students have been trained to believe that it is a negative trait to critique our cultural and educational systems. To be more precise, students often dismiss academic critics by claiming that the critics are just being cynical. While many students do present a fear of being critical, they also reveal that they desire to have their academic work read by other people. For instance, the following student comment reflects the common idea that writing for a real audience makes academic discourse more meaningful and enjoyable:
"I think it's a cool idea, it's very organized, easy to read, I like the idea that other people can read my paper, but there's a lot of grammatical mistakes in people's papers and that could reflect poorly on us or on UCLA as a whole (until the mistakes are corrected)."
Like many other students, this writer is excited about writing for a general audience, but she is also afraid that the lack of current-traditional grammatical correctness will expose the students’ writing problems and make them look bad. notion of grammatical correctness in a non-traditional writing space. In fact, in order to respond to this concern, I have my students work in groups to review and correct the individual hypertextual papers. In many ways, I share the same desire to retain a traditional notion of grammatical correctness in a non-traditional writing space. By combining a non-traditional writing format with current-traditional (Crowley, 1998) concerns for stylistic and semantic order and coherence, I am best able to help students write successfully for their other courses as they learn new modes of expression.
Technology, Writing, and Higher Education
Student Writers as Hypertext Users
Changing Conceptions of Academic Writing
Home and School Models of Literacy