A very brief history of computers and composition

A Very Brief and Very Selective History of Computers and Composition

This is my version of a “history” of composition and rhetoric studies in general, and computers and composition in particular. My main goal in offering this is to provide some context for the work we’ll be doing this semester, especially for those of you who are new to the EMU MA program in Written Communication. Much of what I’m talking about here is based on what’s in the book Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979-1994: A History by Gail Hawisher, Paul LeBlanc, Charles Moran, Cynthia Selfe.

First, be sure to listen to this mp3 file while reviewing these notes (8.5MB). For most of you, simply clicking on this link should simply start playing this audio file.  I should also mentioned that I have recorded different parts of this presentation at different times, which is why the audio levels are a little different/off in places.  Sorry about that; if I have time, maybe I’ll make a brand-new intro the next time I teach this course.

Before Process and computers… (sort of)

• The “current traditional” paradigm of teaching, which is of course still in place in many respects. This means teaching focused on exposition, description, narrative, and argument (the “modes” or “EDNA”); teacher-centered; product oriented; emphasis on correctness. We think of this as being in the past, but we also all know people who still teach this way consciously or unconsciously. See “Three Reasons for Stopping X” available on eReserves.
  
• The Modern era of composition can be said to begin in the mid 1970’s with the “crisis” in literacy (e.g., the Newsweek article “Why Johnny Can’t Write.”) The response was Writing Projects all over the country, more attention to first year writing, and MA and PhD programs in composition and rhetoric.
• Computers became important in disciplines like English in the late 60’s/early 70’s with “scantron” tests replacing essay exams and writing, and with some very early writing software (on mainframe computers).
• Hugh Burns is generally credited as the person who did the first dissertation that had to do with computers and writing in 1977. His project was a computerized application that provided writing prompts based on Aristotle and Burke.

The Beginning of “Writing as a Process” and “Computers and Composition”

• (But the current-traditional past of writing instruction still exists simultaneously with the process movement).
• The concepts of “writing as a process” date back to the 1960’s and beyond, but it becomes an articulated and practiced paradigm in the late 70’s/early 80’s.
• Involves prewriting, emphasis on invention, revision, etc. See Hawisher et al, 24., “The Twelve Features of the New Paradigm of Writing.”
• In the early 80’s, composition and rhetoric begins to develop a clearer sense of itself as a “field” of study, complete with a history (Berlin’s Writing Instruction in Nineteenth Century American Colleges for example). There is an increasing “professionalization” of the field.
• About 1982-83, first Computers and Writing Conference held; first articles about computers in the teaching of writing published in journals like College Composition and Communication.
• “Computer Assisted Instruction” involving testing, drilling, skills development, etc., begin to fade from favor.
• With the development of the “micro” or “personal computer,” computers are beginning to be seen not only as a computational or database device, but also as a writing tool.
• Early personal computers have word processors that require users to enter various commands. WYSIWYG word processors come along with the Macintosh around 1984.
• In the early 1980’s, the early stages of networking computers (to each other and/or a printer) and hypertext software (Apple’s software, StorySpace).

Questioning Process, the Beginnings of Networks and the Internet

• The concept of “Writing as Process” is very much alive and well, though it is beginning to be questioned, especially by folks in English and Cultural studies particularly interested in critical theory. Hawisher et al put it like this:”The process movement of the late 1970’s and early-to-mid-1980’s began to be seen as inappropriately centered on the individual, autonomous writer, thus obscuring the social aspects of composing; and as inappropriate assuming a monolithic “student writer,” thus obscuring the complex assortment of differences among writers” (173).”No longer were compositionists just writers teaching writing. Composition classrooms were now places in which writers worked with language, theirs and others, toward two related ends: the construction within the classroom of a cultural democracy, and the preparation of young people who would help to bring into being the cultural democracy that we hoped America might become”
  (180).
• This has taken the form of concern of teaching in the “student centered” classroom, writing as a social process, writing in relation to issues like gender, race, and class, and the relationships between writing pedagogy and critical/rhetorical theory. Ethnographic and classroom-centered studies becoming more accepted and wide-spread.
• (Of course, even with all this, there are still plenty of teachers teaching “Three Reasons for Stopping X” sort of assignments.)
• Computer networks are becoming more the norm. Computer labs are routinely networked together, allowing “sharing” of equipment and communication between computers. The Internet is becoming more important too. There is a great deal of excitement around things like Telnet, Gophers, newsgroups, email, etc., and how it might be used in the teaching of writing.
• Several book-length works on computers and writing published in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, most of which are extremely enthusiastic about how computers can transform writing instruction. Also influential and published around this time are works on “cyberspace” (William Gibson), virtual reality, etc.
• The notion of writing as being “beyond” process and the interconnectivity made possible with computer networks fit together quite well, and “computers and writing” and “computer mediated communication” really starts to take off.

The 1990s-2000: Questioning Computers, Networked Writing, The World Wide Web

• Notions of the process of writing continue to evolve, with an ongoing interest in issues of literacy, writing as social process, etc. But even with all these changes in the last 20 or so years, many teachers are still teaching “Three Reasons for Stopping X.”
• By the mid-1990s, the more or less utopian view of computer mediated writing instruction “solving all the problems” comes under question. Simultaneously, computers have become common writing tools by this point—that is, at least in higher education settings, most writers use computers.
• Concerns raised about computers and the writing process include issues of race, class, gender, and access. Process is “inappropriately” centered on the individual author, and many post-process critics treated “writing as a process” folks poorly.  My example of free-writing.  Also, the role of critical studies in the study and practice of writing pedagogy is key here.
• The Internet and networked writing become “normal;” that is, students and teachers have email, communicate with each other online, “work and play” in computer environments like MOOs and electronic mailing lists.  William Gibson and his coining of the term “cyberspace.”
• The World Wide Web comes into being, initially as an easy way for European scientists to exchange scholarly works. The web makes hypertext possible with something called “Hypertext Markup Language” (HTML), a simple coding system.
• Around 1993, software called “browsers” make it easy for web readers to see graphics, clearer and colorful text. These early browsers are what becomes things like Internet Explorer and Netscape.
• In the early 1990s, many of my students found conducting research on the web to be frustrating and fruitless. By the mid to late 1990’s, many of my students (particularly my first year writing students) use nothing but the world wide web to conduct their research.
• 1996 brings the beginning of Kairos, an online journal devoted to issues having to do with composition and technology.
• In terms of scholarship in books, journals, and at conferences, exploring the relationship between computers and writing is becoming more the “norm.” The Computers and Writing Conference and journals like Computers and Composition are still going strong, the concept of using computers and the Internet to teach writing is common. Few college composition textbooks don’t discuss the Internet, many presenters at the CCCCs exchange emails and show web pages, etc.
• Mid 1990s “post-process” becomes more of the norm.  See Foster’s Networked Process on her summary of John Trimbur (10) and Thomas Kent’s 1999 collection Post-Process Theory (18)

The Present (sort of):

• The old is still new, EDNA and “Three Reasons for Stopping X” are still all around us.
• Debate about the discipline:  the differences between “rhetoricians”and “compositionalists;” the divide between “composition and rhetoric” and “Literature;” the growth of “free-standing “writing” departments.
• “Visual” rhetoric and multimedia becoming more and more important, perhaps at the expense of “writing.”
• Social media and multimedia having strong impacts on the very definition of writing.
• NCTE and accrediting agencies like NCATE have recognized the importance of basic technological/computer skills for learning and teaching writing.
• Current trends and worries include blogs, online teaching, electronic grading software, wikis, video, cell phones, social networking (like Facebook and Twitter), etc., but the technology changes so fast it’s hard to get a handle on the “history” of it all….