Composing on the Internet

Since I have not yet begun teaching, and have never formally taught in the past, it is difficult to summarize my views on a field I have not really thought about until a few days ago. However, many of the points raised in Yancey’s paper seem very important, particularly her discussion of how students learn writing in a variety of ways on their own which they are discouraged from using in an academic setting, and how different mediums create different sorts of writers.

Students learn to write in a variety of places, namely the internet, but the style of writing developed there is not encouraged in class. I don’t think this itself is a bad thing, since academic writing should probably be more structured than, say, a blog post. Instead of trying to use blogs or other new forms of communication to connect to students, perhaps more important is creating the motivation for writing in the first place. In class a student is required to write a paper, while on the internet they choose to write a blog (or other sort of communication). I don’t think the method of writing is really the problem - getting the students interested in the topic seems more important. Simply turning a paper into a blog post doesn’t remove the nature of the assignment: it’s still an assignment.

This also connects to Yancey’s discussion of writers created by different mediums. Would a writer created by the medium of a blog really be more desirable than a writer created by the medium of the printed page, at least as far as academic writing is concerned? Again, I think this has less to do with the medium than the motivation, or the content of what is written. A huge variety of writing exists on the internet, just as a huge variety of writing exists on the printed page. Different arrangements of text and other opportunities are presented in different mediums, but without the proper motivation or content, they are each as vacant as the next.

If students who would rather spend their time on the internet writing blogs or posting on forums is the problem, turning writing assignments into blogs and forums is not the solution. A student is no more going to want to write a blog as an assignment than a paper as an assignment. Just because they like writing blogs on their own time doesn’t mean they want to write blogs for a class.

That all seems kind of negative... I did find Yancey’s discussion of remediation to be particularly interesting, and think that this sort of use of different technologies could be rewarding, since the focus there is on the actual content, and how it changes in different mediums.