Computer Writing, Rhetoric and Literature

Albert Rouzie
Dept. of English/ Div. of Rhetoric/Comp.
Parlin 108
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas. 78712
rouzie@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu

<1> In the 1993 Fall and Spring semesters, I taught a course in the Division of Rhetoric and Composition of the University of Texas at Austin called "Writing about the Holocaust," with "writing" taken in the doubled sense as both verb and noun. This course was one of a number of second year level courses classified as "topics in writing" that are almost exclusively designed and taught by PHD students in the department of English. Though these are composition classes that stress rhetoric and the writing process, inevitably they bring literature and rhetoric together in productive ways. I chose to focus a course on the Holocaust because I felt that students needed to know more about it, but I also thought that the extremity of the Holocaust made it an ideal topic for discussing the problematics of history and representations of historical events, anti-semitism, and issues surrounding interpretation of literary and rhetorical expressions of a relatively recent, traumatic event. The varied genres of expression from classic memoirs such as Wiesel's Night and Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen to Spiegelman's two volume comic book Maus and the films Schindler's List and Europa Europa among others, would provide ways of contrasting the representations and prevent monotony, while sampling some of the recent explosion of discourse, popular and academic, about the Holocaust. I hoped for students to gain some understanding of the difficult issues raised by representation of the Holocaust. Writing in the course would culminate in a research project that followed their curiosity about a distinct issue.

<2> Taught in an electronic classroom of Macintoshes linked together by a local area network and employing Daedalus software (DIWE, an acronym for the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment), class discussions were held largely on InterChange with some communication handled through the Mail bulletin board. InterChange is an intense mode of synchronous electronic discussion. In InterChange, participants oscillate between reading a scrolling field of messages labeled with the sender's name and arranged in the order in which it is sent, and writing messages to send in a writing field positioned on the screen below the reading space. The result is printed into a transcript and made available to class members.

<3> My first semester students produced InterChanges of fairly consistent quality. There was very little off-track writing, their messages were predominantly long and substantive, and they engaged each other with a modicum of cordiality. Most of the introductory questions were written in advance by students in groups; however, I abandoned this tactic in the second term. Whether as a result of this change or not, the second semester class was a completely different story. Many members of this semester's class had shown a marked proclivity toward "wilding" in InterChange, a virus that seemed to infect most of the students at some time during the term. A number of students, both male and female, indulged in this mostly sexual bantering in between composing and sending "on track" messages about the readings or in response to issues brought up in the InterChange. The following is an example of an "on-track" message sent in an InterChange on the film Schindler's List (1993):

James Holt:

The one thing that was hard for me to believe was how Schindler, at the end of the movie, broke down completely. He cried like a baby. This was very unlike his character throughout the movie. Any comments? [Note 1]

<4> This message elicited and received responses, both agreements and disagreements, that helped to focus on a question I had asked about the director Steven Speilberg's sentimentality. Early in the term, the class tended to stay on task, but as the term progressed, so did the percentage of off-task, playful messages. By April 1, when we did an InterChange on the film Europa Europa, play messages were woven into substantial commentary and debate about the film. In that InterChange, one young woman asked "What is a penis?" Penis jokes predictably peppered a subsequent InterChange: "Is the plural of penis penii?"

<5> The Spring semester class had an end of the term InterChange session focused on course evaluation that I can only describe as fiercely negative, full of exaggerated assertions, obscenity and sexism. One student even came out as an anti-semite, referring to me as a "Jew-lover," who forced "jewish ideas" on the class, a surprising fact at the end of a Holocaust course. The reasons for this debacle are complexly overdetermined, but includes, among other factors, instructor mistakes and student irresponsibility, the use of pseudonyms and the tendency for disembodied writing on computers to encourage flaming. The experience was painful for me, but has brought its lessons and has raised some issues for me about how we can use InterChange and about our pedagogical expectations of its function in learning and writing.

<6> When the class discussed the eruption of quite hateful discourse in the evaluation InterChange, the perpetrators discounted the reality of the attacks by claiming that it was not meant to hurt anyone's feelings- one student called it "trash talk"- and claimed that therefore, the people at which the vitriol was aimed should not have taken it personally, a twist on the blame the victim stance we had noted in Nazi rhetoric. Few in the class had challenged the student's anti-semitic statements. When some did criticize the attack, they wrote that I was not guilty of the charges, not that the charges themselves were patently anti-semitic. In other words, my defenders asserted that I had not pushed "Jewish ideas" on the class, not that there was anything wrong with the category of "Jewish ideas," nor did they equate the epithet "jew-lover" with the racist "nigger-lover." When asked why they had not challenged this, many replied that they didn't take it seriously or that they "didn't want to touch it." This unwillingness to take responsibility for messages in InterChange, while not shared by all the students, predominated, I believe, in part because of the intensity of the subject matter, but also because of their attitudes toward the relative weight of discourse in InterChange.

<7> I believe that this was so partly because of the inherent ambiguity of InterChange discourse as a mode of writing, as a newly emergent genre, if you will, and its relation to the course's design and other forms of class writing. The paradox is that writing in InterChange is instantaneously rhetorical- students are able to see the impact of their writing - while at the same time, the virtual space of InterChange seems to undercut writers' positionality and free them to some degree from ethical constraints. InterChange's democratic virtues have often been touted in what Susan Romano calls "the egalitarianism narrative," a representation of the computer classroom that she asserts creates pressure for some minority students to occupy particular subject positions from which they may not wish to speak (10-11). Similarly, Alison Regan points out that homophobic statements, made easier to express in InterChange, can effectively silence gay students in a class. These two Computers and Composition articles warn against naive assumptions about the democratizing effects of InterChange. Increased participation does not guarantee desirable effects. These articles show that the instructor's narrative, or the lack of one, powerfully influence who is empowered to speak and how their utterances get dealt with subsequently by the class.

<8> In this particular class, earlier interchanges featured long, thoughtful messages by many students, but as the term progressed, long statements were often ignored, students responded more often to pithy messages, and in effect, trained each other to eschew longer, perhaps more thoughtfully composed messages for shorter reactive ones. For example, in an InterChange on the film Europa Europa, one student's relevant question about circumcision stimulated a mix of playfully suggestive repartee, mostly one-liners, and substantive discussion. In the film, the main character, Solly, hides his circumcision and even ties up his penis to simulate foreskin The young woman who had asked about circumcision made a serious point about his actions: :

Mary Lowell:

I think that there is great symbolism in the fact that the most shameful part of Solly was his sexuality, and the part which he worked hardest to conceal. After all, sexuality is one of the most important aspects of our bodies as well as minds, and by concealing and mutilating himself, he was infact doing the same to his body and identity. (InterChange, 4/01/93)

Rani Rajmani:

He's a Nazi, couldn't ya'll tell? Blond hair, blue eyes..oh, his name's Adolphus.

Rani Rajmani:

I always thought it [circumcision] was good for you. That's why I circumcized Adolphus myself.

<9> Whether wilding occurs or discussion stays on track, it is all too easy for InterChange discourse to occupy its own hermetic zone, to remain alienated from other forms of writing, to inhabit an electronic ghetto. I think that it is likely that perceptions of InterChange as unreal may contribute to ethical irresponsibility in the form of flaming and a higher percentage of playful off-task writing. In the evaluation InterChange session, a student complained that we did little writing in the course. This assertion surprised me and made me realize that, for this student and probably for many others, writing in InterChange did not count as "real" writing. In a class discussion about this InterChange, the student who had written it defended his point. To him writing is formal writing that can help him in the "real world" or that might get published. The function of writing classes is to help in that endeavor. Once the course is over, he said, the writing done in InterChange and StorySpace (a hypertext program used for one of the projects) is not useful; the course, he concluded, should have required more conventional writing practice. My reply was that in the Computer Writing and Research Lab where the computer-based classes are held, we think of writing as including these forms, that these writing situations ask students to try out modes of thinking and expression different from those required to compose the logical, linear structure of a formal essay. He wasn't buying, but, under duress, I had overlooked much else that I could have said: that writing in Mail, our class' electronic bulletin board, as well as in InterChange more closely approximates communication trends in American corporations, that he would be asked to write to and communicate with others via similar programs in the work environment. In fact, seldom, if ever, would he be called upon to produce the sort of essays he is asked to write in college. I could also have spoken of the value of associative thinking encouraged by composing in hypertext and of the social and collaborative nature of making knowledge in InterChange. But I doubt that these points would have convinced him. Students must feel themselves a part of the social and collaborative nature of making knowledge in InterChange; that is to say, they must approach InterChange with some knowledge and awareness of how InterChange fits into their writing process, into the class' process of "making knowledge," and their particular role in that collaborative process.

<10> If students don't seem to view InterChange discourse as full-fledged writing, neither do they place it on par with oral exchange. Some students recognized that they wrote comments in InterChange they would not have said to someone's face- one male student called a female student whose initials are B.C. "breast cancer" and was angrily rebuked for it- but others blamed the computer classroom's lack of paralinguistic and intonational cues on the supposed misreading of their barbs. Given the nature of InterChange discourse, it is not surprising that students have difficulty taking it and their role in it as seriously as we might like. InterChange discourse is not oral conversation and it is not exactly writing in the commonly accepted senses. If it is a hybrid form constituting a new genre of written discourse, then the problems I cite above are not so surprising. How this genre gets put in relation to other genres, particularly assigned, evaluated writing- the writing students view as counting the most- also (in)forms our and our students' view of it, and perhaps more importantly, can help to reform our conventional notions of the acceptable parameters of assigned writing.

<11> The written result of an InterChange session is socially and collaboratively produced, and, defying our traditional notions of authorship, resembles postmodernist pastiche. Lester Faigley maintains that InterChange is an essentially postmodern form that disperses formerly well-located subjects across electronic networks and invites them "to take on multiple identities"(200): "student writers try on and exchange identities in electronic discussions, even from one message to the next" (191). In InterChange, students (and instructors to a lesser extent) occupy multiple roles, subject positions, and personae. Romano notes that "students engaged in interactive discourse find themselves situated in multiple, contradictory, rhetorical contexts with the making of each message, and these contexts alter with each successive message" (24). Moreover, written discussion on InterChange is "inherently multiaccentual and defies the conventions of clarity, unity, and coherence" (Faigley 184), while it "displaces the modernist conception of writing as hard work aimed at producing an enduring object" (191). Considering this, it is understandable when students do not perceive InterChange as writing, for it is not like any writing they have done before. The gap between the modernist model of arduous production of "an enduring object" that typifies many discipline's approaches to writing and InterChange's anarchic process can lead to discounting InterChange as writing and increased wilding by students in the electronic classroom.

<12> Confrontation is much less threatening in InterChange than in face to face speech, but its effects, if more subtle, are still present. Faigley ventured that if a class were to read an InterChange transcript out loud, dramatizing their parts, they would probably start shouting at each other (personal conversation). Partly because of its disembodied text, InterChange accommodates more friction than oral discourse and encourages more emotional honesty and disclosure (Bump 1990), but it also makes intentions more difficult to read and invites a shirking of ethical responsibility for written messages. In one sense student voices are given freer rein in InterChange, but the singularity of their voices are modulated by the polyphony, the shifting accents, and the temporal discontinuity of utterances in the discussion. Though InterChange is a form of simultaneous discussion, each participant occupies a different moment in the discussion's unfolding. Students who read and write slowly lag behind the front line, while others ride the wave crest. (This is one reason why reading InterChange transcripts is a disorienting experience.) Participants may be responding in a brief moment of time to several different thematic strands; they may address a question in an elegantly formal manner one moment, then turn around and respond in vernacular street fashion to the comment of another, mixing humor, irony, and serious argumentation in short order. And they read the message screen, interpret, and respond in the sort of back and forth alternation many instructors advocate students do with their own writing and material from sources. This mixing of voice and role in complex textual layering demonstrates that the modernist ideal of one authentic authorial voice as the controller of a single and singular written product gets deconstructed in the fragmentation of much InterChange discourse. InterChange discourse verges, therefore, on the Bakhtinian carnivalesque in which traditional power relations are, for a limited time, overturned and ironized. But like the weak deconstruction of carnival, a reversal that serves more to preserve the traditional structure rather than to truly threaten it, InterChange may at times be viewed as momentary steam-ventings within an unchanged paradigm. Thus, no matter how different InterChange is from traditional class discussion, if connections between it and the dominant paradigm of conventions of writing and thinking are lacking, carnival it will remain, leaving paradigmatic structures intact and constituting a ghetto if its own.

<13> The temptation is strong to let InterChange discussion occupy its own relatively hermetic zone. InterChange is a powerfully seductive medium for discussion, but it is difficult to integrate into other course activities. As a teacher, I have used it productively to engage students with each other on issues germane to the course and its readings, yet I have struggled to integrate it into the formal writing structures of the course or to promote a sense of continuity over a series of InterChange discussions. In my course, attractive transcripts of the sessions were printed and made available to the students, who were assigned to read them. I referred to and quoted from InterChange discussions in subsequent ones and in face to face discussion; in the Spring semester, I required students to quote from InterChange sessions in their StorySpace projects. But this has not been sufficient to alter the marginal status of InterChange discourse, nor has it transformed most of the "real" writing practices of the course.

<14> This gap between the perceived reality of some kinds of writing vs. the unreality of interactive electronic discourse has particular pedagogical repercussions. Without some careful accounting of the rhetoric of electronic discourse and framing of it for classroom use, I fear that more of my students will share this perception of electronic writing. While the kinds of thinking and writing that students do in the electronic classroom are different in beneficial ways from more restricted writing forms, the technology itself does not automatically make connections between print and electronic literacy. Failing to do so can result in the alienation some of my students experienced and a debilitating gap between the electronic classroom and the world outside it. Ironically, not many years ago, electronic classrooms did not feature the networked technology that is creating these crucial differences. Computers were looked upon as simply more efficient writing tools for print media, "turbo-charged typewriters," as Myron Tuman put it (5), or they were platforms for one student-one computer tutorials.

<15> The networked classroom has provided the means for implementing social constructionist rhetoric in which students take responsibility for their roles in the formation and reformation of the interpretive community of the class, but the process itself is far from automatic. To help further define the problem, I turn to John Slatin's discussion of InterChange in his article "Is There a Class in this Text? Creating Knowledge in the Electronic Classroom." Here Slatin applies to the electronic classroom (an upper division twentieth century American Poetry course) Shoshana Zuboff's ideas of how computers have transformed workers' relationships to knowledge and each other. Briefly put, the transformation occurs because the use of computers requires an organization to "cast its vital information" into text; that is, what was orally transmitted and tacitly understood before the use of computers has to be rendered explicit through a process of "textualization" (28). According to Slatin, "the transformation of traditionally ephemeral classroom talk into text by means of interactive written discourse" has dramatic effects (32). Primarily, it leads to " an understanding which did not exist prior to the interactions and which persists after them, both of the course materials and of the participants' relation to the materials and to each other" (31). Thus, the participants gain "meta-knowledge," an awareness that they are active participants and intercessors in an "ongoing conversation" and knowledge of "what is going on in the class and of how the class is operating" (32). This meta-knowledge or knowledge of how the class creates knowledge through its own processes is necessary for the process to work.

<16> The metaphor of the conversation, as discussed by Kenneth Bruffee and Richard Rorty [Note 2], is a positive figure for the social construction of knowledge, and Slatin uses it to good advantage as a means of getting students to regard poems, critics' remarks about poems, poets' other writings, and the students' own writing as part of a process of creating knowledge about poetry, and therefore, poetry itself. In this sense, the class becomes a reader response oriented "interpretive community" that actively constructs its object. The conversation metaphor invites students to regard their interpretive work as collaborative and valuable at the same that it links their work to writing they have been taught to invest with authority, to consider "real." Clearly the virtual space of the electronic classroom helps to center student texts visually alongside these more traditionally valorized texts. However, Slatin seems to underestimate the role of the instructor in the creation and sustenance of the community and its conversation. Following Zuboff, Slatin explicitly credits the electronic classroom for the transformation:

The electronic classroom forces a new set of relations between instructors and students, among students, and between all members of the group and the body of the material, whose meaning, it now becomes apparent, we are all there to construct. (33-34) [my emphasis]

<17> There is no doubt that the electronic classroom greatly facilitates the implementation of the collaborative conversation metaphor, but it is not completely responsible for this transformation. In other words, the networked classroom with a flexible software system such as DIWE may be necessary to the "textualization" of formerly oral processes, but it is not sufficient to the transformation that results. Slatin deemphasizes his own role in establishing the metaphor and in fostering the kind of recursive thinking that helps to sustain it. Here is an excerpt from the "headnote" with which Slatin started an InterChange session early in the term he discusses. Up until the section I quote, he has praised the last InterChange discussion and summarized the problems and questions the class had addressed. His first comments are quite positive, but in the following excerpt he offers some critique leading up to a statement of the goals of the current InterChange.

John Slatin:

. . . I think we lost track to a certain extent of the "conversation" in which Eliot was involved, the conversation with other poets living and dead, the conversation with readers.

I'd like to think about that conversation today as we begin our discussion of Stevens. Let's start with a poem- I'll leave it up to you to decide which one- and try to get a handle on the way Stevens is defining the poetic conversation. (35)

<18> Slatin describes the instructor's role on InterChange as essentially that of "active participant and facilitator" (42). His description is worth quoting, because I believe that his role has a stronger influence on the direction of the InterChange and its connection to other work in the course than his analysis suggests:

The instructor sets the main agenda for the course with the design of the syllabus, and maintains a measure of control with read-only class assignment files posted each day. Further, he sets the agenda for each individual session and links it to the larger course objectives in his initial InterChange messages. Subsequent messages provide information, synthesize student comments, or refocus the discussion. (42)

<19> Slatin points out that his students take up and develop their own topics within the course agenda; anyone who has taught with InterChange knows that no instructor can really control the centrifugal forces of written interactive discussion. Nevertheless, Slatin's strong narrative frame, his vision for the course and the role of InterChange discussion in the overall agenda, serve to guide his methods of facilitation and to stoke the conversational fires.

<20> The students' active participation in the process of constructing the 20th century American poets is made possible by the electronic classroom, but they become involved in that process because Slatin has a clear idea of where he wants them to go and how. The recursiveness that can provide continuity to volumes of InterChange discussion was reinforced in the class' writing projects. Students were to make hypertextual links between the course texts, documentary material they found on each poet and posted in the Mail utility, and their InterChange transcripts. So without the usual desultory research paper assignment, Slatin was able to get his students to integrate research, class discussion, and the poems into their composing process. Naturally, in this scenario, the students might tend to view InterChange discourse as "real" writing. And the research seems to follow up on questions they already have or at which they arrive through InterChange discussion, rather than having to come up with a question in order to do research.

<21> While hypertext projects may appear to be the inevitable answer to the problem of integrating InterChange discourse into student writing, I am not advocating a general conversion to hypertext. Many composition courses, for example, would be hard pressed to justify a total shift. No, print technology and forms will endure even in the electronic classroom, but there is no reason why they should not undergo some badly needed overhauls. For example, the classic research paper is often an unmitigated flop in many classes. Because of the conversation metaphor and the electronic practice of social constructionism in Slatin's class, each student participates in an ongoing representation of the whole class' state of knowledge and understanding of the poetry under scrutiny. The research is part of that process, not an assignment without an audience, and becomes textualized along with class discussion. Thus the shared texts of the class become knowledge, both social and individual, through the links the students make between those texts.

<22> This narrative linkage between the interpretive community of the class and other discourse communities tells a story that can cause students to consider their work in InterChange as real writing. But in order to effect this linkage, students must return to InterChange transcripts as texts in their own right. This can be accomplished through weekly writing assignments in which students analyze different aspects of the InterChange discussion and post their analyses in Mail, addressed to the class. These can include analysis of the rhetoric, argumentation, and themes developed and displayed in the InterChange session. Other students would read some of these pieces and respond to them in Mail. The purpose of this is to encourage meta-knowledge- "the knowledge participants have of . . . how the class is operating" (Slatin 32). Through this process, students can reflect on how the class constructs itself as an interpretive community and develop a sense of responsibility for their roles in the process. The scene of InterChange, re-collected in tranquility by the student and composed in the asynchronous zone of the Mail bulletin board, is an example of the act of linking the work done in InterChange with other communication structures in the classroom. A further step can be taken from the work in Mail to the more formal demands of essay composition, creating a process of transforming InterChange discourse into linear argumentation. If this results in students writing essays about the rhetoric of InterChange, so be it.

<23> Margaret Downs-Gamble, in a Computers and Writing Conference presentation, asserted that effective participation in the networked classroom depends on whether students can alter unproductive rhetorical styles- for example, addressing assertions to the general class- and develop what she calls negotiational or mentoring rhetoric, characterized by "query-assertions" that invite interactive responses from others. The ability to alter one's rhetorical style depends on analytical practices that can classify those styles and appraise their rhetorical results in terms of their effectiveness. Surprisingly, several of her students were able to recognize themselves in anonymous descriptions of their styles and subsequently alter them. While such analysis is time-consuming, the future may bring software programs capable of doing much of the research.[Note 3] The weekly InterChange analysis assignments I mentioned could include some aspects of this analysis. In so doing, students and instructors alike could become more aware of their electronic rhetoric and make productive changes in it.

<24> There are other ways of bringing electronic discourse out of the ghetto and into the contact with writing outside of the classroom. Student participation in and analysis of Internet news groups shows great potential for altering the traditional schema of real vs. unreal writing. If students are to regard these discourses as writing, they will have to analyze the rhetorical situations and strategies they find there and consider them as sources for their own work. It isn't likely that they will do this unless such work is integrated into the course structure, formal writing, and evaluation. Considering the many different forms electronic discourse can take, this brings us back to the need for an instructor to create, articulate, and reinforce a strong narrative that helps to make these disparate forms cohere and which enables students to both perceive and reform the making of knowledge in the classroom.

Works Cited
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