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Friday, February 13, 2009
Online Learning: Writing Ain’t the Same Anymore - Trent Batson, Campus Technology
Is the essay a native electronic text? No. Can rhetorical elements of the essay be better taught in a form that is native? Probably. The defacto claim that the essay is the ordinal rhetorical form in higher education, particularly as taught by people from English departments or writing programs (as opposed to “writing in the disciplines” faculty), has been questioned for at least 40 years. Do English or writing folks structure an argument the same way as, for example, social scientists or biologists? Based on research from the 1970s, we know the answer is “no,” and so we have reason to question how generalizable the English department version of the written argument is. But now a much larger challenge faces the sacred essay: Since most writing in our culture is done as some form of online learning hybrid orality, say in e-mail or texting or blogs or wikis, and since these electronic forms of writing now do the business of the world, why do we still mostly teach the essay, a form made popular in the 16th century? And designed as a print artifact?
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