Volume 1, Number 1<1> In 1990 Marcia Peoples Halio published "Student Writing, Can the Machine Maim the Message?" and renewed interest in the debate over the impact of emerging technology on student compositions. Instructors who taught with computers were quick to question Halio's findings, and more importantly, her underlying typographic preferences. In the short time that has followed, thinking about writing has begun to welcome the kind of graphic elements that so troubled Halio. Instructors like Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan have suggested that a new rhetoric should emerge as well, one which considers the inclusion of non-typographic elements in compositions.
<2> It's important to note that we mustn't let our enthusiasm for new forms of composition carry us too quickly away from the knowledge base we've already built. Statements like those of Jay David Bolter, which claim that there may no longer be any distinction between words or images, are insightful as theoretical concepts, but worrisome as pedagogical dictum. I have suggested that the tension between typographic and graphic or other non-traditional forms of composition will provide the space for a new writing and rhetoric to emerge.
<3> Part of this project examines that space. Student compositions in hypertext are shown to suffer from a sense of false presentation that can take place in traditional writing, but that the inclusion of pictures in composition may amplify. At the same time, the inclusion of pictures can allow students to refine their discussion of a theme by examining the particulars of an image. Pictures can also, as Halio anticipates, distract an author from traditional text in worrisome ways; the potential for poor sentence construction and mechanical errors may increase with the inclusion of graphic elements in compositions.
<4> This should not, however, lead us to abandon the inclusion of pictures in our works; the point of this project is that we must rise to meet the new challenges raised by emerging forms of writing. Our stance must admit the strengths of traditional composition, even as they question the renewing power of evolving forms that we wish to champion. We must also prepare for the unknown; if students veer from our expectations we cannot dismiss or condemn them; we'd be better served by dismissing old expectations and learning to work the new discoveries and variations. Our stance must include the old, the new and the unexpected, only then will it truly evolve in a way which brings new life. And this stand should take place here, in essays like this; arguments about non-traditional writing should themselves emerge in renewed form; they would meet in a place where word and image merge, where thought and sight and language pour together, not maimed but malted.
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