Volume 1, Number 1

Halio and fonts

<1> In "Student Writing: Can the Machine Maim the Message?" Marcia Peoples Halio suggests that students produce better essays when writing on an IBM based computer instead of a Macintosh. This suggestion is driven by her experiences teaching freshmen composition at the University of Delaware. The connection between this experience and the conclusions drawn by Halio has been critiqued thoroughly in "Computer Teachers Respond to Halio." "Seeing through the Interface: Computers and the Future of Composition" by Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan also has many sections that question Halio's findings. I'm mostly pointing toward discussions of the problems with Halio's platform study, because I want to focus here on the larger issue of reevaluating composition that her discussion brings into focus.

<2> Halio's critique of the way her Macintosh users played with fonts, for example, touches on the issue of deciding what the aim of our composition classes should be. It has been noted that Halio's disparagement of font play may belie a prejudice against iconographic writing (see Moulthrop and Kaplan and Bolter). The point that I'll suggest is that the disparagement also belies an almost painful shortsightedness and a gap in rhetorical instruction. Halio forwards the complaint that "'.....students in [a University of Delaware freshmen Composition] Mac section end up unnecessarily emphasizing ten or twenty words in each of their papers because they like to use the different kinds of type!'"(18). An instructor of composition should understand, however, that professional writing demands that there be definite roles for varied type fonts. A student who failed to emphasize the title of a book, for example, would be writing in error. The point is that varying type fonts is an important writing skill and the fact that Halio's students misuse this skill merely points to the need for more careful instruction. The rhetoric of fonts needs to be considered and taught, and Halio's knock against font play when carefully considered can teach us something else as well.

<3> The engagement of students in font play which Halio observed between 1988 and 1990 insightfully anticipates the commercial and aesthetic interest in fonts today. Given that entire sections of computer product catalogs are devoted to font collections and software, and online services focus careful attention on providing fonts to their members, the student experimentation with fonts four or five years ago seems a lot less trivial. Indeed, one of Halio's frivolous students might be making a comfortable living today playing around in the publishing industry. I'm not saying that we should only prepare our students for financial windfalls in the future, although that might be considered as we evaluate our roles. The point is that from behind the instructor's desk in the present we sometimes fail to see the course of the future. As we reassess our goals as composition instructors we should not make light of the forms of composition emerging in our classes; rather we should look toward their potential influences and seek to understand and work with their emerging rhetoric. Move on to the conclusion or return to Not Maimed but Malted.
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