abstract

background

theory

praxis

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multilinearity
visual rhetoric
theory in practice

references

One possible application of hypertext theory to academic writing would involve the development of multiple perspectives on the issue at hand in the essay. Bolter (1998) suggests that "a hypertextual 'essay' might be one in which the writer (or writers in collaboration) lays out a set of possible points of view without attempting to adjudicate among them. It might lead to a set of conflicting conclusions (depending on the reading order) with no attempt to indicate the relative merit of each. How does one teach students to write or to read such an essay?"(p.7). While Bolter's concern with the instructional side of academic hypertext authorship is a valid one, his suggestion that a hypertext essay would be multi-perspectival, or would yield mutually exclusive conclusions strikes me as simultaneously too straightforward and too extreme.

This view is too straightforward because it seems very close to a comparison-contrast essay in which the comparison is stripped out and the contrasts are neither announced nor presented alongside one another. I often see a print version of this model in my freshman composition classes. In a five-page essay with two sources, two pages are dedicated to Writer A's ideas and two pages are dedicated to Writer B. While the stronger papers using this framework do attempt an adjudication, the weaker ones rest with a bare presentation of two sets of ideas that may or may not be in conflict. Since I see both the former and latter variety of print essay as relatively weak because neither really develops the author's project, I do not see how such an approach would amount to a effective academic hypertext - though it might be both interesting and pedagogically instructive if one aims to help students see issues from different perspectives.

At the same time, Bolter goes too far in suggesting that the author of a hypertext essay might do well to create the material for two (or more) completely different conclusions. On one hand, this suggestion treats academic writing as a sort of exercise or game. Rather than locate one's place in the scholarly terrain on an issue and write from that place, Bolter's idea invites the author to develop a variety of positions on the issue and use hypertext to organize them in such a way that different readers will conclude different things about the author's view.

theory in practice | attention to audience | moments of critique
productive messiness

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