| Randy M. Brooks, Ph.D. Director of the Writing Major Millikin University |
Tenth Annual Computers & Writing
Conference |
We live in revolutionary times, where the computer has become the central tool for all areas of personal, social, political, and professional life. Yet we still teach computer writing based on old fashioned models of manuscript production. More often than not, our instructional use of computers is limited to a single word processing program, with the end result being a printed manuscript that could have been produced on a typewriter more than eighty years ago. Computer writing instruction rarely uses the full potential of the computer as a new media for seeking and presenting information.
In this hypertext, I consider the role of quick-access to information in our society and the computer information skills students will need in their daily lives. Then I revisit the emphasis on manuscript conventions and a single prototypical essay which continues to dominate Freshman composition pedagogy. Attempts to integrate computers into this traditional curriculum merely "speed up" the process approaches which have also dominated the courses in Freshman composition, ignoring conventions and opportunities for new forms of modular writing which have been evolving on the web and computer screen. I conclude with a brief description of the modularity of writing for the computer screen and call for the teaching of hypermedia in our Freshman composition courses.
Consider the following examples of information access and presentation in our daily lives.
- The local supermarket laser scanner/computer cash register gives you a printout of items purchased, instantly updates the grocer's inventory, and checks your credit card limit in less time than it used to take to check out.
- The pastor goes to the hospital to visit parishioners, and she touches her church's name on the computer touch screen. The computer immediately shows a list of patients from her church, and a map of their room numbers is available at another touch of the screen.
- At the courthouse, the judge is searching the networked electronic legal case database for precedents to the trial which he has briefly recessed. In five minutes, he finds forty-three related cases which he narrows to three very similar cases by using the Boolean search capabilities of the on-line computer program.
- In the factory, computers monitor the delivery of parts to work stations where workers follow highlighted instructions on the computer screen through each step of assembly. When someone thinks of a better approach, all workstation instructions are updated immediately bringing about greater productivity. There are no yellowed instruction manuals laying around. Just in time inventory requires a constant flow of reliable information to all sectors of the factory.
We live in the dawn of the infoage--a time in which power, wealth, management, government, knowledge, security, productivity, and entertainment are all defined by access and use of information. But we also live in the age of information overload-we are glutted with too much information every day. There are too many books to read, too many news stories, too many research studies, too many databases to search, and too many records to keep. In the Info-glut-age, success depends on the ability to search and find important information via the computer, and the ability to restructure or massage that information for re-presentation via the computer.
We need to teach our students much more than typewriting manuscript production conventions which can be easily simulated and enhanced on the computer. We need to teach our students to ride the ever-changing waves of information flow-to be surfers through the information glut. We need to teach our students how to explore the web of information and how to make use of all the types of information available including quotes, text, sound bytes, video clips, charts, graphs, and graphics. We need to teach them how to harvest relevant information from the multiplicity of available sources.
We also need to teach our students how to integrate this great diversity of information. How do you use tables within a document? How many examples are enough? How do you document new sources of information, such as CDs, network discussions, and other free-flowing bits of data? How do you create new illustrations and make new insights by combining this gathered information?
But most important of all, we need to begin teaching our students how to design information for presentation to others via the computer screen. We are certainly not a paperless society now, but we are rapidly moving toward more use of the computer as a main source of information display. Writing skills of the next century will have to include an understanding of the computer screen as an information presentation device.
Why don't writing teachers instruct students how to design and present information on the computer screen? The main reason for most institutions, I believe, is that the teaching of writing is based on an old fashioned model of publishing. The writer creates a manuscript which is evaluated and corrected by an editor who sends it to the printer to be typeset for publication. Writing teachers identify with the role of editor, judging and correcting the student's manuscript, but they know very little about publication design. Writing teachers know how to prepare a manuscript so that an editor can scribble between the lines, insert additions between sentences, and improve transitions between paragraphs.
Manuscript conventions are derived from methods of turning the authors' text into a printed page: double spaced lines, two spaces between sentences, paragraph indents, underline words to be changed into italic type, and so forth. But most writing teachers do not understand old fashioned traditions of publishing, because publishing was a specialized industry with its own priesthood of graphic designers and typesetters who could talk the language of picas, point size, leading, typefaces and white space on the printed page.
The resistance to teaching new approaches for the computer screen is also more deeply rooted in assumptions about the nature of formal discourse. The essay is still viewed as the archtype for the vast majority of writing instruction, and therefore, high quality writing continues to be judged by criteria derived from the essay such as unity, organization, paragraphing, and the use of transitions to guide the reader completely through the manuscript from introduction to conclusion. The modules of a discourse may vary in the number of sections or paragraphs, but the underlying assumption of a complete discourse assumes a linearity of text processing.
Technical or business writing curriculum has demonstrated a significant shift away from these assumptions, and Writing Across the Curriculum programs continue to expand our notions about "complete discourse." Professional writing encourages shorter paragraphs and sentences, more headings, table of contents, and other methods of fragmenting the text to assist reader processing. But most Freshman composition courses continue to emphasize manuscripts based on the essay as prototypical form.
The modules of this prototypical essay include:
Optional modules include footnotes, end notes, and tables or graphs in research or business reports.
The underlying assumption of these modules is that the reader is going to read the essay from start to finish, so the basic process of navigation is to process each module when you get to it. The scrolling interface of most word processing programs reinforces this assumption that readers begin and continue through the entire discourse.
Research on writing processes, such as Linda Flowers' cognitive model based on protocol analysis reveals that writers do not follow such an orderly method of production. Writing processes are recursive, with the writer moving from global to local production concerns quickly, or jumping to different sections of the text under development to continually revise and edit the emerging text. The scrolling text on the computer screen makes it difficult for the writer to conceive of the text as a whole and limits the focus of revision activities to the visible screen or short term memory constraints of the individual. Split screens may help the writer jump between two sections of text-such as the ongoing essay and the footnotes-but larger global concerns of focus and unity may be easily lost. Some word processing programs provide outline views which include only the first line of each paragraph which allows for a quick glance at the larger structures of the discourse, but it the writer has not placed key terms or paragraph topics in the first line these outline views may not be very useful. Anyway, until the student prints out a copy of the text in progress, it will be difficult to consider global text elements.
How can we expect writing teachers to understand the new approaches to publishing on the computer? Instead, most writing teachers have chosen to treat the computer as a fancy typewriter, an improved means of creating manuscripts (with spell checkers, electronic dictionaries, on-line thesaurus, and grammar checkers all readily available). Meanwhile, our students are processing thousands of photographs on the television in ten minutes of MTV while enjoying the beat of rap at the same time. But we do not have to surrender to the entertainment industry's scandalous photographs and sensational information. Some of our intellectually hungry students are exploring the web of information available on the networks, quickly jumping from one question or curiosity to the next late into the night. We watch the thirty second video news clips while browsing through a new CD on the history of the Vietnam war, complete with animated maps, radio broadcasts, prize winning photographs, and four hundred editorials. Our students may suspect that writing will not be the same in the future because their sources of information at work and during leisure reading simply do not correspond with manuscript production required in our schools.
I am not advocating that we no longer teach essay and report writing, but rather that we expand our writing instruction to include interactive hypermedia. We need to start teaching how to write (and design) for the computer screen as a media of presentation. To add this instruction to our current writing curriculum, we need to understand unique characteristics of the computer screen as a media for presenting information.
The computer screen is modular by its nature. By modular, I mean that each screen becomes a separate unit of presentation. The amount of information which can be viewed at one time is limited to the size and shape of the computer screen. Students need to learn how to design their presentations, so that each computer screen is a complete module of information. Each screen needs to be labeled to provide ongoing context to the reader, and each screen needs to provide cues to further information. To borrow terms from technical communication, each screen needs to maintain orientation and provide a means of navigation to more information.
But what holds the discourse together? Is there a unity which is still essential to an interactive hypermedia form of writing? Yes, but instead of unity and transitions, the goals are orientation and navigation. The readers need to know what the document is and where they are within it. Opening screens often describe the on-line document and how to interact with it, and each screen needs to maintain a balance between orientation and navigation. This balance is achieved by extensive use of headings and ongoing access to navigation-being able to go back to higher level screens or to activate a map of the user's interaction at any time.
The modularity of on-line publications changes the nature of writing. People do not read novels on the computer screen, and most people are unwilling to scroll through several long paragraphs of text on the computer screen. Instead of pages of words, they expect screens with multimedia elements. Instead of an introduction, a hypermedia document will have an opening screen (or a series of animated screens including sound bytes) to orient the reader to the purpose of the publication. Instead of transitions between paragraphs, the hypermedia document will have a menu of topic choices or an index which is hot-linked to related screens. At any time within the document, additional layers of information may be available-signaled by asterisks, or bolding of certain terms, or by the placement of "more info" buttons on the computer screen.
Next time you are searching for information on the computer screen, take a moment to notice the modular structure of the writing. Computer information is designed for quick access and simple presentation of only the information you sought. If you look up a word in your electronic dictionary, you will not have to scan through several screens or scroll through long lists of similarly spelled words. You will simply find the entry for that word, and that is all that will be presented on the screen. We need to teach our students to write for such computer presentation--helping their readers quickly find needed information, then presenting only that information within the module of the computer screen.
Consider the example of newspaper archive research. The old method of finding a newspaper article is to look up the subject in an index, then locate the roll of microfiche for that newspaper, then scroll through the entire roll of film to find the issue needed, then search around for the actual article. With a CD version, the index is on the computer screen and it is hot linked to the articles so that when you find an item you want to see you click on it (for Mac and Window users) and the CD ROM locates the article and displays it on the screen. Scrolling forces you to go through every section of the scroll in order to find the item wanted. The CD version, based on hypertext strategies allows you to skip all unwanted items. Much of the writing of the future is going to employ such hypermedia both as research and reporting found information.
The main new obstacle to modular computer presentation is the renewed convention of scrolling text. Scrolling text dates back to ancient times, before the chunking of writing into paragraphs, pages, chapters, and books. The scroll begins and continues to the end with no easy stopping points. Scrolling limits the reader's view to the few lines of text available at any moment-losing the context of previous text and making it difficult to anticipate upcoming topics. Scrolling presents an arbitrary chunk of the whole text. Scrolling is a temporary fix to the limitation of the computer screen to represent only part of a typewritten page. For manuscript writers, it allows a partial view of a work in progress, but it is not an effective means of presenting information to readers.
Let me close with another example of what happens when information is presented on the screen without a modular design. The research director of a major pharmaceutical company tells me that all Federal Drug Administration patent applications are now submitted on computer disks, with additions made via e-mail. This has saved the company a great deal of money and speeds up the review process. However, the reviewers complain about how difficult it is to read through such long documents on the computer screen. They also have a hard time finding specific items, although the find command may be useful if the key word does not occur too frequently in the text. Scrolling may work for manuscript production, but computer presentation of information requires additional screen design. When faced with pages of scrolling text, the reviewers began printing out copies for easier reading and editing.
The computer screen can be an excellent means of presentation, but only if the writing is designed as modular screens for continuous orientation and navigation. It's time we went beyond word processing programs in our computer writing classes?
Although advanced writing classes in technical communication, education, literary studies and some of the sciences are including more hypermedia writing, should we broaden first year writing instruction to include such discourse? I argue that it is essential that we do. Students will immediately relish the opportunity to include new types of evidence in their reports--photographs, digitized sounds, interviews, and animation. They will also quickly transfer their fragmented video experiences into constructed hypermedia. They will enter into the future of discourse which is more collaborative and interactive instead of assertive declarations. Hypermedia texts allow the readers to enter into the co-creation process, instead of forcing someone to swallow an entire essay whole. We should invite our first year students into the poly-logue of hypermedia writing.