Chapter 1: What/Where Is Writing?

Rethinking and Redefining Writing

An example of the (sub)field's long-term involvement in rethinking and redefining writing is seen in Pamela Takayoshi's 1996 article "The Shape of Electronic Writing: Evaluating and Assessing Computer-Assisted Writing Processes and Products," which quoted from John Ruszkiewicz's 1988 article, "Word and Image: The Next Revolution." Ruszkiewicz described a future for writing instruction when the term writing became "inadequate to describe what we do in the future when we sit down to compose" (p.10). Takayoshi focused on what she described as the erasure of the writing process—multiple drafts occurring in one computer-assisted document.

Borrowing from Patricia Sullivan (1991), Takayoshi further described electronic writing as a "seamless flow of prose" (p. 254). For her, given this "seamlessness," students needed to become actively conscious of the writing process as embedded within a document-in-progress. She suggested that students demarcate their process accordingly when it was no longer marked by distinct drafts because doing so could help them become "active literate individuals" (p. 256). By offering ways students could be mindful composers in the face of new technological innovations, Takayoshi highlighted the (sub)field's consistent emphasis on people over technologies.

Takayoshi (1996) also addressed challenges posed to assessment created by electronic writing. Ultimately, her point was that utilizing print-based notions of response to and assessment of student work could overlook three key features of electronic writing: "fluidity of computer-assisted writing, visual rhetoric, and hypertexts" (p. 255). She predicted that assessments of the future would need to take page design into consideration and teachers would need to think about how to respond to and assess visual rhetoric without "falling back into a current-traditional emphasis on surface features of text" (p. 250). She professed that the 8.5 x 11 inch paper with Times 12-point font would not be able to live on as the (only) correct version of an academic text. She further acknowledged that the possibility of creating hypertext in a computer-assisted writing classroom would present a challenge for traditional assessment:

Features of text meant to be read online, such as the organization of a text's elements and the ease with which the text allows readers to make logical links, will require assessment standards unneeded for traditional hard copy texts. (p. 253)

Takayoshi (1996) was prescient. Since The History Book, scholarship in the (sub)field, including such work as Heidi A. McKee and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss's (2013) Digital Writing Assessment, Meredith W. Zoetewey and Julie Staggers' (2003) "Beyond Current-traditional Design: Assessing Rhetoric in New Media" (2003), Madeleine Sorapure's (2005) "Between Modes: Assessing Student New Media Compositions," and Kathleen Blake Yancey's (2004) "Made Not Only in Words," has grappled with the issue of how best to assess multimodal texts.

Despite these forward thinking visions of what writing would become and how it could be assessed, during the 1990s, the "writing" in computers and writing most often still referred to a print-based activity. The act of word-processing, along with the ability to cut and paste, brought new life and energy to the process-based models of writing that the larger field of writing studies had been emphasizing. MOOs (MUD [Multi-user domain], Object Oriented) effectively exemplified the continued prevalence of print even in online spaces. Popular as an experimental, but powerful, writing space in the mid-1990s, MOOs, according to Leslie D. Harris (1996), reinforced, "the joy of speaking/writing: contributing to a public discourse, achieving recognition through those contributions, and receiving the virtual equivalent of applause through the supportive feedback of others." Harris saw MOOs as having the potential to counteract some of the negative baggage students so often associated with writing because they could experience the satisfaction of immediate feedback to their ideas. Because of this possibility, he described MOOs as "incubators of powerful ideas" created through the act of text composition written both in front of and for others. Joel A. English furthered this idea in his 1998 Kairos article on metacognition and MOOs in which he proposed that online writing conferences combine attributes of learning, such as analysis and metacognition, in a way that had never been done before. Specifically, he reported using MOOs to perform peer and instructor writing conferences that left student writers with a log of the interaction from which they could continue to learn after the synchronous meeting was complete. Face-to-face conferences and workshops provided no such transcript. Additionally, for English, the conversational nature of the synchronous writing environment provided immediately reflective writing on writing related issues—what English characterized as "reflection-on-action"—a unique affordance of the MOO:

The metacognition that takes place during computer-mediated conversation surpasses reflective writing and journaling in that it is interactively instructive and exists in a controllable, multi-media environment; and it has an advantage over traditional writing conferences in that it exists in a text-based environment, stressing the importance of strategic, transactional writing. And finally, the transcripts that are created during the conversations provide interactive texts that are used for reflection indefinitely afterwards.

In this way, English illustrated the (sub)field's concern with the use of new computer technologies to accomplish existing writing tasks.

One long-standing concern of the (sub)field can be described by the "old wine in new bottles" adage. That is, simply transporting a print-based composing practice to an electronic environment does not a new pedagogy make, nor does it mean that such an approach should automatically be celebrated. This was an especially relevant concern during this period of print-based technologies. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) was a popular object of analysis for computers and writing teacher-scholars in the 1990s. CMC frequently involved asynchronous and synchronous forms of electronic communication such as discussion boards and was used with varied pedagogical approaches and with mixed results in the last half of the 1990s. Douglas Eyman (1996) described CMC as privileging the social-epistemic rhetoric proposed by James Berlin (1987) by stimulating interactivity and encouraging a multiplicity of viewpoints. Sibylle Gruber (1995) studied its use in a graduate composition studies course, and her results provided a counter-balance to the then popular belief that computer-mediated discourse aids in creating a decentralized classroom with increased student participation. Looking at her results through a Freirean lens, Gruber pointed to the strong potential for discord and tension to result when communication is conducted electronically; however, she concluded that if one uses CMC with an explicit, liberatory pedagogy, then "the increased tensions and anxieties do not necessarily translate into insurmountable problems" (p. 77). Gruber was one of the first to warn against letting the technology facilitate the learning (a caution we discuss further in Chapter 2). She called for developing a strong pedagogical approach supported by technologies. A year later, Avigail Oren (1996) made a similar argument about MOOs in her Kairos webtext, "MOOing Is More than Writing." Oren pointed out that the pedagogical characteristics often attributed to MOOs—active learning, group communication, information literacy—are not "newborn from the technology's features." Attention to MOOs, however, waned as the 1990s progressed.

Writing centers were among the first pedagogical spaces to embrace the movement to electronic writing and online learning, particularly in the form of online writing labs, or OWLs. In 1995, Computers and Composition dedicated a special issue to OWLs, and the first issue of Kairos in 1996 had the same theme. In keeping with some of the previous scholarship that touted the potentially liberatory effects of online learning and computer-based writing, J. Paul Johnson (1996) argued for the subversive potential of OWLs, which he believed could call into question the "ideology of print" and also create "a writing space in which textual transactions renegotiate literate behavior." Early books on OWLs and networked writing centers, particularly Eric Hobson's (1998) Wiring the Writing Center and James A. Inman and Donna N. Sewell's Taking Flight with OWLs (2000), made similar arguments. Mike Palmquist charted the trajectory of this scholarship in his 2003 article for the 20th anniversary special issue of Computers and Composition, "A Brief History of Computer Support for Writing Centers and Writing-across-the-Curriculum Programs," which we discuss further in Chapter 2.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, several key terms of writing studies were "remixed," so to speak, in order to account for the "electronic" realm. In order to describe the work of OWLs, for instance, J. Paul Johnson (1996) used terms like "cybertutors" and "papertext." The former referred to writing center tutors who assistance students online. The latter referred to the more traditional notion of print-based student papers but also intended to get at the ideological construct of writer and text as stable and cohesive. Pamela Takayoshi (1996) utilized the terms "electronic writing" and "computer-assisted" writing processes and composition instruction in "The Shape of Electronic Writing: Evaluating and Assessing Computer-Assisted Writing Processes and Products." In this same article, she also described the emergence of "visual rhetoric." Rhetoric became "HyperRhetoric" in Gary Heba's 1997 Computers and Composition article. Alan Rea and Doug White gave us a set of "hyperheuristics" in 1999. At the turn of the new millennium, Barry Maid (2000) published and presented on aspects of gaining tenure for "technorhetoricians"—a term he attributed to Eric Crump (p. 1). And James E. Porter introduced the term "internetworked writing" in his 1998 book, Rhetorical Ethics and Internetworked Writing. He defined "internetworked writing" as "computer-based electronic writing that makes synchronous or asynchronous links to remote participants or databases" (p. 2). This term is distinct from the better known term networked writing, and the more general concept of computer-mediated communication (CMC) "in that it involves writing for and on the internet," so it includes things like electronic groups, discussion boards, emails, and synchronous conferencing (p. 2). This term marked one of the first instances of direct acknowledgement of the decidedly more social and public shift of writing, along with an awareness of how this shift brings challenges to the writing classroom and its instructors.

Beyond neologizing terms to help audiences see applications of concepts to electronic technologies, teacher-scholars in the (sub)field recognized a need to reconsider the notion of audience. In a somewhat prophetic take on audience, Robert R. Johnson's 1997 article "Audience Involved: Toward a Participatory Model of Writing" seized the moment of technological change to argue for a reformulation of audience, which historically had been either "invoked" or "addressed" in composition theory (Ede & Lunsford, 1984), to include the idea of "audience involved":

[A] refashioned model of writing [...] has implications for writing processes, notions of community, and even agency. [. . .] Missing from most discussions of collaborative writing is audience as an actual living, breathing figure in the discourse production. (pp. 362–363)

As a technical writer, Johnson's focus was on texts that the audience (i.e., end-user) actually used, thereby making them involved. But it is easy to see the parallel here to the rapidly growing audience of internet readers who would eventually become participatory readers, helping to shape online discourse through feedback via comments sections, whiteboards, shared reading (through sites like Diigo and Scribd), social media, and so on, as well as webtext and website creators themselves.

Collaborative Writing

Opportunities for physically dispersed audiences to be users and creators likewise compelled reconsiderations of and approaches to collaborative writing. A 1999 collaboratively written essay on "textuality, collaboration, and the new essay" by Myka Vielstimmig (the combined pen name for Michael Spooner and Kathleen Blake Yancey) suggested a clear connection between online spaces and collaborative writing:

The emerging e-journals in composition and rhetoric, the experiments in form within established print journals, even stand-alone websites offer work in progress—it seems a majority of these efforts conceive of the online publication as a place of interaction. The texts usually have multiple authors, they're hyperlinked to other sites, they invite readers to contribute, and so on. Their tacit theory seems to be that the ethos of the net is a collaborative one. (p. 91)

The author(s) stressed that emerging forms of collaborative writing are increasingly prevalent with new the internet—and are not simple to compose. Even those of us who frequently engage in collaborative work, as we did in writing this history, find it to be "like taking on a new identity; issues you hadn't foreseen arise. It's easier not to sail to the new land" (p. 95). Regardless of whether it is "easier not to sail to the new land," Vielstimmig argued it was irresponsible not to do so with networked digital technologies.

This claim echoed the idea of Andrea Lunsford and Susan West several years earlier (1996) when they wrote:

The ubiquitous media coverage of the complex issues swirling around the question of who owns language—for that is what this debate is finally about—demands a response from our profession, as those most concerned with shaping and perpetuating notions about what it means to read, write, and speak. In particular, compositionists have a compelling interest in how laws governing ownership of language should be adjusted (if at all) to accommodate both new technologies and postmodern challenges to established ideas about "authorship." (p. 383)

These challenges to the conception of singular authorship became central to scholarship in the 1990s and 2000s. Scholarship explored questions such as

• Who owns hypertext writing and other forms of online, public discourse that are often the result of collaboration and/or easier-than-ever "borrowing"?
• In what ways do notions of intellectual property, and copyright more specifically, intersect with this work?

In a collaboratively written webtext, Andrea Lunsford, Rebecca Rickly, Michael Salvo, and Susan West directly addressed these kinds of concerns. Their frequently cited article from Kairos's premiere issue in 1996 called into question the notion of the singular author as sole proprietor of a text. The authors' claim that all texts are social was made more visible by electronic writing in general and hypertext in particular:

To be more specific, hypertext makes the always implicit intertextuality of any scholarly discourse explicit. To me, this explicitness seems also valuable because, to put it bluntly, it 'outs' academic discourse, demonstrating it to be deeply collaborative, deeply multivoiced. (Lunsford et al.)

While it might not be accurate to characterize Lunsford's description of hypertext as utopian, she did express high hopes for the changes hypertext might help bring about in terms of understanding the collaborative nature of scholarly discourse and textual ownership and authorship.

Alongside questions of authorship, concerns about plagiarism were also looked at anew in the 1990s. In his 1998 edited collection Cyberreader, for instance, Victor Vitanza addressed "techno-culture," with his inclusion of a controversial piece by the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), "a group of unnamed performance thinkers" (p. 339) who, for some teacher-scholars, seemed to encourage plagiarism. Vitanza recounted receiving criticism from instructors who thought the piece should not have been included in the collection because it could encourage students to plagiarize. The CAE described techno-culture as "recombinant" and argued that plagiarism is "productive," even "necessary" in some situations:

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea. (pp. 339–340)

This defense of techno-culture's recombining and remixing of materials was the cyberactivist version of "we stand on the shoulders of giants" and represented a radical rethinking of the way some teacher-scholars in computers and writing, and writing studies more broadly, had previously thought about plagiarism as something to be avoided and persecuted. It also paved the way for the scholarship on "patchwriting" and intellectual property that emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s (e.g., Amore et al., 1998; Gurak & Johnson-Eilola, 1998; Howard, 1999, 2000; Logie, 1998; Walker, 1998), as "techno-culture's" influence began to influence thinking in the parent field of writing studies. It is perhaps no accident, then, that the CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication) Intellectual Property Caucus (a group of teacher-scholars who create action plans; develop lobbying strategies; mentor junior scholars and graduate students; produce documents for political, professional, and pedagogical use; and, before its disbandment, advise the CCCC Committee on Intellectual Property of desired organizational actions regarding intellectual property) has historically been comprised primarily of computers and writing teacher-scholars.

In his Kairos webtext "Hypertext in the Computer-Facilitated Classroom," Douglas Eyman (1996) illustrated this more nuanced and complex approach to source use and collaboration by addressing the social aspect of web-based writing. He showed ways in which the interactive qualities of hypertext are dialogic and argued that hypertext creation by students called to mind Bakhtinian notions of heteroglossia and appropriation. Eyman also made the case for student construction of hypertext as a means of illuminating the concept of audience:

If the aim of composition is written communication, then the presence of a "real" audience (Walter Ong notwithstanding) is a boon to the writing teacher—students who receive feedback on their work from people who do not even go to their school (indeed may not even reside in the same country as they do), tend to work harder to convey their ideas clearly.

This attention to production as well as consumption forecasted a theme that emerged with even greater force in the 2000s with discussion of Web 2.0.

Hypertext Writing

In the mid-90s and into the 2000s, hypertext became central to how the (sub)field of computers and writing thought about the the affordances of electronic writing in contrast to traditional, alphabetic text. Scholars, tracing their work as far back as the Alexandria library and Jorge Luis Borges, noted that nonlinear, multiform texts predate hypertext; however, they still marveled at hypertext's postmodern possibilities, as well as its potential contributions to progressive pedagogies. In 1995, Michael Joyce, in Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy, and Poetics, argued that with hypertext, traditional notions of text were subverted and reading became enacted design, embodied "action rather than a thing" (p. 11). He postulated that hypertext blurred the distinction between readers and writers (p. 19), claiming, "readers' choices constitute the current state of the hypertext and, in effect, its form" (p. 21), and advanced two uses of hypertext. The first was exploratory, a delivery or presentation technology allowing people to transform and represent existing information to meet their needs (p. 41). The second was constructive, an invention tool allowing people to create information to meet their needs, requiring "visual representations of the knowledge they develop" (p. 42). For Joyce, the former came from the latter (p. 44). He professed hypertext to be so exciting because basic writers could use hypertext "to empower themselves in transforming knowledge to their own ends" and because, for him, hypertext reflected how the mind works (pp. 50, 56–57). Though these empowering ends were arguably never realized, this blurring of the roles of reader and writer would be taken up again in the (sub)field's discussions of Web 2.0/the Semantic Web.

Two years later, in 1997, George Landow advanced similar ideas, though from a more theoretical perspective, signaling the (sub)field's gesture to theorize hypertext. Through a study of popular hypertext systems of the time (e.g., Storyspace, Intermedia), he argued that "[a]n experience of reading hypertext or reading with hypertext greatly clarifies many of the most significant ideas of critical theory," particularly those associated with Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, where "ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity" are replaced with ideas of "multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks" (p. 2). Like Joyce, he expressed excitement at the possibility of hypertext to lead to an "increasing democratization or dissemination of power" (p. 277), a desired goal for much of the (sub)field's work in studying changing possibilities for and forms of writing.

Excitement about such possibilities disputably reached a peak with Joyce's and Landow's books, however, as the (sub)field came to realize hypertext's limitations. Johndan Johnson-Eilola's work arguably signaled the beginning of the fall of the (sub)field's focus on—or at least hope in the revolutionary possibilities of—hypertext. In Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing, Johndan Johnson-Eilola (1997), through a study of hypertext, argued that the (sub)field must "rearticulate" its definition of writing—that is, redraw its borders to become more interdisciplinary and less hierarchical, to prevent marginalization as a discipline, and "to gain cultural relevancy" (p. 6). In particular, he claimed that most views of hypertext were, at the time of his writing, nostalgic: they represented what we had hoped would develop from print technology. In other words, people imagined the future from an imagined technological past (p. 176). He warned against the potential downfalls of hypertext as a technology, particularly that it could seem like an innovative, progressive tool but that it ultimately upholds Post-Fordist logics toward increased technical efficiency. Johnson-Eilola affirmed that hypertext "frequently enacts functional literacy (how to read) and cultural literacy (what to read) but normally falls short of critical literacy (social critique)"; he asked for the latter to be engaged more directly in both scholarship and pedagogy, for reading and writing to be more overtly political, considering their conditions of production, consumption, and distribution (pp. 239, 241). In making this call, he concomitantly called for a change in the subject (or at least the framing) of the (sub)field's scholarship. He joined with Amy C. Kimme-Hea in 2003 to reinforce the limits and problems of previous claims regarding hypertext. Together they identified three tropes in this previous scholarship: "hypertext as kinship, hypertext as battlefield, and hypertext as rhizome" (p. 415), concluding that "[t]he best hypertext still has to offer us is its complexity and openness" (p. 423), as "a heuristic for thinking through our relationships to technology, literacy, and one another" (p. 420).

While interest in hypertext may have waned, the turn of the 21st century brought continued attention to what counts as "writing." Alan Rea and Doug White (1999) treated multimedia and multimodal forms—fonts, colors, images, sounds, and so forth—as "new forms of writing" and made the case that not teaching students this "'new' writing style" left them ill-prepared to effectively communicate. The idea that writing for the web was a central communication practice—a "viable technology of literacy," as Rea and White described it (p. 423)—meant that digital composing needed to be considered the province of writing instructors. A striking absence in this article, however, was the lack of debate over HTML as a form of writing. Rea and White seemed to take it as natural that computer programming is a form of writing. They did show awareness, however, that not everyone embraces their definitions of writing and warned, "Instructors should be aware that asking students to write Web pages is asking them to go against much of their academic training" (p. 422). This debate over the role of computer programming in the writing classroom and the question of its treatment as writing persisted through the 2010s, as teacher-scholars such as Kristin L. Arola (2010) and Karl Stolley (2012) explored and advocated for the value of coding as a means for composers to have agency over web authoring programs and social media with preformatted templates.

Along with questions of what writing looks like and what "counts" as writing, scholarship in major journals at the turn of the century increasingly asked questions about pedagogical practices and the efficacy of these emergent practices. For example, web-based portfolios, or "eportfolios," emerged as an important teaching tool and object of analysis, both for students and teachers. In "Developing a University-Wide Electronic Portfolio System for Teacher Education," Laurie Mullen, William I. Bauer, and W. Webster Newbold (2001) studied the philosophical, logistical, and infrastructural considerations of eportfolios for preservice teachers. They primarily focused on eportfolios as a tool of assessment designed to meet the needs of "the learning and competency objectives of the teacher education program," paying less attention to potential metacognitive or self-reflective benefits for writers.

An Expanded Notion of Literacy

An expanded understanding of literacy and what it meant for teaching was also a big part of the early 2000s scholarship. In his 2001 Computers and Composition article "Part 1: Thinking Out of the Pro-Verbal Box," Sean D. Williams took up the task of rethinking what being literate means. Williams analyzed three of the most prominent journals in writing studies and argued that the field had perpetuated a "verbal bias" and risked ignoring the important work of visual rhetoric:

To be literate in the twenty-first century means possessing the skills necessary to effectively construct and comfortably navigate multiplicity, to manipulate and critique information, representations, knowledge, and arguments in multiple media from a wide range of sources, and to use multiple expressive technologies including those offered by print, visual, and digital tools. (p. 22)

Williams's contention signals that while writing remained a central concern for computers and writing, the emphasis on print alone was being challenged in multiple ways. Williams was an early voice advocating for increased attention to visual modes and multimedia technologies. Anne Wysocki's early work (e.g., 1998, 2001, 2002) made a similar case and argued that too often composers create and perpetuate false binaries between visual and verbal, between design and information, between word and image. Words, Wysocki (2001) explained, were "always visual elements" and "most often material" (p. 232). She affirmed that these artificial dichotomies do not get at “how strategies of visual composition contribute to the relationships we develop with what we offer each other on the screen" (p. 232). Wysocki is notable in this context for the ways in which the form of her scholarship sought to mirror its content, perhaps most notably in her award-winning 2002 Kairos webtext "A Bookling Monument."

Echoing the work of Williams (2001) and Wysocki (1998, 2001, 2002), teacher-scholars in the video below discuss the relationship of graphics and visual elements to writing, particularly in the context of thinking about digital literacy and the kinds of composing practices for which teacher-scholars want to prepare students in their writing classes.

This attention to visual forms of communication and visual rhetoric led some teacher-scholars to support an expanded notion of literacy. Wysocki, together with Johndan Johnson-Eilola (1999) in their chapter in Hawisher and Selfe's Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st-Century Technologies, explicitly engaged the question of the consequences of such an expansion. In particular, they expressed concern at extending literacy to designate what students need to achieve with new technologies (and with non-verbal modes) because doing so reproduced a problematic (and for them untrue) notion of literacy: literacy skills are basic, neutral, contextless, and a panacea for the problems of the poor and oppressed (pp. 352–355). Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola expressed fear that such an extension of literacy widened the set of skills against which people were measured to be "literate" and, in doing so, increased the gap between the literate and illiterate, positioning oppressed, poor, or marginalized people as at fault if they did not achieve these skills (pp. 355, 360). At the same time, Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola noted opportunities for a new understanding of literacy made possible by new networked technologies. In particular, they proposed that online venues where intertextuality was spatially realized through actual movement from text to text, along with "the ability to move in the new-technology spaces of information," enabled composers to make "instantaneous connections between informational objects that allow us to see them all at once," resulting in a view of the self that helps composers play a more active part in constructing themselves (pp. 363, 365–366). This tension between concern at overextending the reach of literacy and recognizing opportunities for new extensions of literacy characterized much of the scholarship of the late 1990s and 2000s.

In the early and mid 2000s, focus on how to describe texts incorporating still image, video, sound, and/or animation, whether in print or digital form, intensified. To describe such writing, the New London Group (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000) used the term multimodal, affirming that multimodal literacies change with changing technologies (p. 6). New London Group member Gunther Kress's discussions of multimodality (Kress, 2003, 2005; Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996, 2001) were particularly influential in the computers and writing community, with Hawisher and Selfe focusing a 2005 special issue of Computers and Composition on the influence of his work. In their 2001 special issue of Enculturation on visual rhetoric, David Blakesley and Collin Brooke affirmed,

As students and teachers adapt to these new technologies and venues for reading and writing, it will be important to understand the ways that words and images function rhetorically and together in the various forms of media and literature that grab our attention and so delicately direct the intention."

They, along with the contributing authors to their special issue, stressed that the visual cannot be understood in the same way as the verbal.

Contributors to Nancy Allen's edited volume Working with Words and Images: New Steps in an Old Dance (2002) agreed that the visual cannot be understood only through a verbal lens. They likewise argued that using words and images effectively together, as they saw media of the time to demand, required a better understanding of how words and images work and relate. In her introductory chapter to the volume, Allen herself called for approaching words and images "as collaborative means for understanding our world," not positioning them as "in a perpetual debate" or as opposing forces (pp. 10, 3). The collection offered perspectives from professional writing in particular. For instance, James Kalmbach's (2002) chapter contended that because teacher-scholars had not sufficiently studied the process by which words become images—that is, how they move from being transparent to being opaque—they lack understanding of the process by which writers come to see and use words as not transparent (e.g., use typographic emphasis) and, thus, incorrectly propagate what he called the "ransom note fallacy," the belief that novice writers clutter texts with multiple different fonts, type sizes, and formatting. Kalmbach contended that novice writers, in fact, use almost no formatting at all (pp. 43–47). Contributor Ronald Fortune (2002) summarized a view espoused by many contributors to the collection: "writing instructors do not already possess and therefore must develop the knowledge about visual communication and its relationship to verbal communication" that teaching writing requires (p. 102).

Two other edited collections published in 2002 echoed similar ideas about the role of the visual within expanded notions of literacy. Contributors to Kristie S. Fleckenstein, Linda T. Calendrillo, and Demetrice A. Worley's (2002) edited volume Language and Image in the Reading-Writing Classroom: Teaching Vision affirmed that reading and writing instruction must address the connection between words and images, particularly in and with new technologies. Similarly, contributors to Ilana Snyder's (2002) edited volume Silicon Literacies: Communication, Innovation and Education in the Electronic Age called for a broader, multimodal understanding of writing, semiotic systems, literacy, and communication in general. In her opening chapter, Snyder (2002) asserted,

reading and writing, considered traditionally as print-based and logocentric, are only part of what people have to learn to be literate. [. . .] In a electronically mediated world, being literate has to do with understanding how the different modalities are combined in complex ways to create meaning" (p. 3).

In this way, she echoed Williams's call (2001) for broadening the definition of literacy beyond just the alphabetic to include the visual.

New Terms and Venues

Distance education was also gaining traction at the turn of the millennium, which raised concerns regarding how to offer peer feedback, assess online writing, and clarify instruction. While the first article to address online distance education appeared in Computers and Composition in 1993 (Susser), the journal published a themed issue on the topic in 2001 (Peterson and Savenye) with twelve articles dedicated to the topic. Patricia Webb Peterson’s (2001) article addressed two challenges or "blocks to learning" when it comes to online writing instruction: 1) students not getting enough written feedback or assessment and/or not understanding the tone of the feedback/assessment and 2) students not understanding the assignment (p. 367). The special issue as a whole attempted to overcome looking at the pros and cons of online distance education in dichotomous terms and rather sought to pay attention to the presence of this form of education in the (sub)field and how best to respond. As Stuart Blythe (2001) pointed out, distance education was not going away. Teacher-scholars were better off, Peterson (2001) argued, playing a role in decisions about online learning otherwise made by corporate forces "rather than by academic standards" (p. 361). Terry Tannacito (2001), in her Kairos article "Teaching Professional Writing Online with Electronic Peer Response," defended online learning as a pedagogical practice that had "great potential to improve writing"—especially in the form of online peer response. In Chapter 2 we address the specific technologies that made distance education possible.

In the mid-to-late 2000s, the (sub)field continued to expand its definition of writing. Jim Porter (2003) chronicled shifts felt by and engaged with in the (sub)field as a whole with his "Why Technology Matters to Writing: A Cyberwriter's Tale" in Computers and Composition. In this article, Porter shared a personal narrative of his own "development as a writer over time—from handwriting to typewriting to cyberwriting" (p. 375)—to showcase the different types of writing (and technologies used to produce them) the (sub)field had studied.

Johndan Johnson-Eilola (2005) cast the work of computers and writing even more widely, as in symbols, not just writing. In Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work, he advanced that "symbols are now a class of material objects, conceptual objects, with market value, social force, and dimension," offering the material and the symbolic as indistinguishable in the world, which, for him, meant new patterns of working and living (p. 4). To support this argument, he studied the "datacloud," which he defined as "a shifting and only slightly contingently structured information space" that information workers, like computers and writing professionals, inhabit (p. 4). In the datacloud, Johnson-Eilola argued, traditional notions of agency, production, and creativity were challenged. He professed that agency was no longer found in linear, ordered models of interaction, but rather in assembling bits and pieces from multiple channels (pp. 9–10). As a result, Johnson-Eilola affirmed, "[i]n a postmodernist era, creativity is about movement, connection, and selection rather than a mythical genius ability to pull inspiration from within" (p. 110) and "[c]reativity is no longer the production of original texts, but the ability to gather, filter, rearrange, and construct new texts" (p. 134). Not unlike the Critical Art Ensemble, he argued "traditional originality" was of decreasing value; rather, rearranging, abstracting, connecting, and transforming information was of increasing merit—and characteristic of what, following Robert Reich, he called symbolic-analytic work, which he saw as the work of not only the (sub)field but also larger society (p. 30). In this way, he challenged a valuation—or even the possibility—of writing as unique and solely owned, a position he further expounded upon in his Computers and Composition article "Plagiarism, Originality, Assemblage" with Stuart Selber (2007).

Johnson-Eilola was not the only scholar to recognize the overlap between the work of computers and writing and larger society. Addressing a need to define multimodality in connection to industry-specific terminology like multimedia, Claire Lauer, in her 2009 Computers and Composition article "Contending with Terms: 'Multimodal' and 'Multimedia' in the Academic and Public Spheres," analyzed use of the terms multimodal and multimedia in academic and industry publications. She concluded that multimodal was the term preferred by computers and writing practitioners (and writing studies more generally), while multimedia was the term preferred by the non-academic public and industry. Important for our purposes in this history is that Lauer explicitly connected the use of these terms directly to changing forms of writing and writing technologies:

Both multimedia and multimodal arose in response to the technological advancement that was occurring—in the late 60's and early 90's for multimedia and late 90's for multimodal—but while multimedia emerged out of industry, multimodal arose out of the academic scholarship of the New London Group. As a result, the use of multimedia in industry remains dominant, while the use of multimodal within composition scholarship has grown. (p. 237)

Lauer traced these preferences in terminology to what was valued and emphasized in these different contexts: writing studies teacher-scholars valued process while industry valued product. She suggested, therefore, that discussions of writing for non-academic audiences would do well to use the term multimedia, though multimodal was ultimately the more theoretically accurate term (pp. 225, 238).

In working to describe such multimodal productions, computers and writing teacher-scholars have turned to the term design. In his 2014 College Composition and Communication article "What Can Design Thinking Offer Writing Studies?", James P. Purdy identified one of the five reasons writing studies teacher-scholars used the term design as to "conceptualize composing as multimodal" (p. 615). Purdy traced the use of the word design in writing studies scholarship in several prominent writing studies journals (College Composition and Communication, College English, Computers and Composition, Pedagogy, and Research in the Teaching of English) from their inception to the end of September 2011. He found that Computers and Composition published the most articles with design in the title (p. 614). Carrie S. Leverenz's 2014 Computers and Composition article "Design Thinking and the Wicked Problem of Teaching Writing" offered an example of computers and writing’s engagement with design. Like Purdy, she argued for computers and writing teacher-scholars to apply design thinking, an approach to solving "wicked" design problems that is used in architecture, art and design, business, and engineering, to teaching writing, particularly as a way to bridge extracurricular and in-school writing and to prepare students to produce multimodal texts (p. 2). Both likewise advocated collaborative projects and experimentation as means to enact design thinking (Leverenz, 2014, pp. 8–9; Purdy, 2014, pp. 629–631)—pedagogical ideas that have resonated with computers and writing teacher-scholars since The History Book.

Purdy's (2014) analysis suggested that design was a particularly useful term "for technology-related work in the field" (p. 614) and invocation of the term design reflected writing studies' increased attention to composing modalities and technologies. This finding perhaps illustrates the increasing centrality of concerns of the (sub)field of computers and writing to the field of writing studies at large in the late 2000s and early 2010s. That is, it was not only computers and writing specialists but writing studies teacher-scholars more broadly who were grappling with how to describe, account for, and theorize multimodal and multimedia texts. While scholars such as Jason Palmieri (2012) convincingly argued such concerns are not new to the discipline—which is likewise emphasized by invocation of design in mainstream scholarship in the field for decades (e.g., George, 2002; Kostelnick, 1989; Marback, 2009)—their visibility in the larger scholarship arguably is. Such gestures point to the (sub)field's continued interest in finding ways to describe multimodal texts—and the usefulness of this work for the larger discipline.

Kairos webtexts like Catherine DeLuca's (2015) "'Can we block these political thingys? I just want to get f*cking recipes:' Women, Rhetoric, and Politics on Pinterest" and William I. Wolff's (2015) "Baby, We Were Born to Tweet: Springsteen Fans, the Writing Practices of In Situ Tweeting, and the Research Possibilities for Twitter" illustrated—and enacted—this attention to design, both by arguing for the legitimacy of forms of writing in new digital spaces and by using webtext design to support these arguments. DeLuca (2015), for instance, constructed a webtext mirroring the Pinterest interface to argue that "the mundane rhetorical and civic engagements that occur on Pinterest are significant and representative of the public rhetorics that shape the everyday composing practices and experiences of digital citizens" ("Politics") and that "Pinterest is a space in which cyberfeminism can flourish in multiple forms" ("Cyberfeminism"). In order to navigate DeLuca's webtext, readers must experience the space of Pinterest.

Similarly, Wolff (2015) designed a webtext interface to argue for the rhetorical work and value of "the composing practices of members of the Springsteen community at or tweeting about one particular concert" ("Fans"). The structure of the webtext, which forestalls providing a thesis until the conclusion in favor of detailed discussion of his tweet coding process, endeavored to illustrate Wolff's position that "[g]rounded theory studies have the potential to continue to transform how scholars, teachers, students, and the general public understand the community-wide importance of composing, even especially in 140-character bursts" ("Conclusions," emphasis in original). Just as grounded theory asks researchers to wait to draw conclusions until after experiencing the data, Wolff's webtext asked readers to wait for his thesis until they experienced his data. DeLuca (2015) and Wolff (2015) helped readers see (quite literally) the ways in which writing in Pinterest and Twitter makes meaning.

Conclusion

Taken together, the scholarship we review in this chapter reveals that, since The History Book, the (sub)field's ongoing work on defining writing reflects conversations regarding both whether writing should (or can) be limited to the verbal or include other modalities (e.g., still image, video, animation), as well as how best to account for what writing does (and can do) in digital spaces. It also shows the rise and fall of belief in hypertext as a form of writing to realize the democratic and feminist goals of the (sub)field. More broadly, the trajectory of the (sub)field's publications shows adoption of a capacious definition of writing, including hypertext, videos, tweets, and other new forms as "legitimate" and rhetorical, even if excitement about the revolutionary possibilities of those new forms of writing has grown more cautious.

Alongside its shift from a focus on "electronic" writing to "digital" and "multimodal" writing, the (sub)field arguably also came to profess that new kinds of writing cannot magically solve old problems (e.g., inequality, lack of access). In a sense, then, as the (sub)field included more varied forms of writing in its research and teaching, it also took a more critical stance toward these forms of writing, seeking carefully to describe and analyze rather than just enthusiastically adopt, sometimes creating new terms (e.g., cyberwriter) when language did not already exist and sometimes borrowing and adapting language from other disciplines (e.g., design). In turn, the (sub)field offered more complex notions of authorship, textual ownership, and audience, recognizing ways in which multimodal, multimedia, and digital forms of writing blur the distinction between author and audience as well as who can own what regarding a text.