Click Here to Organize

Editor's Note: Chrissine Cairns, currently a lecturer at the University of Miami, served as guest editor for this installment of "From the Classroom." She chose technology-enhanced pedagogy as its focus, and she selected and began the editing process for Marcia Dickson's and Helen Rothschild Ewald's essays. Cairns undertook these editorial tasks as part of a course in text editing, a requirement for the M.A. in composition and communication at Central Michigan University.

My colleague Scott Lloyd DeWitt has long claimed in casual conversation that the very act of creating a hypertext link will spark in students a type of metadiscourse about texts that they usually avoid. Scott reports that students return to their hypertexts again and again, "reading for depth, meaning, and ideas, while continuing to develop their topics" (DeWitt 1999: 147). Even so, I used to contend, like many other writing instructors, that I had precious little time to cultivate in students a sense of what makes a good traditional text, much less teach them about hypertext. When I finally began to introduce them to hypertext literature, however, I discovered something surprising: the act of constructing hypertext fiction provides students with insights into organizing traditional essays that they might not otherwise have.

The occasion for introducing hypertext came in a junior-level writing course called "The Internet and the Book." The central questions were simple: Was the book dying? Would the Internet replace it? Aware that few of my students were familiar with electronic literature, I designed reading and writing assignments that created a knowledge base for them, gave them experience in creating hypertexts, and asked them to come to a conclusion about the potential usefulness and/or the aesthetic value of electronic literature. The texts for the course included Janet Murray's (1997) Hamlet on the Holodeck, Sven Birkerts's (1994) The Gutenberg Elegies, Mark Bernstein's (1997) hypertext essay "Chasing Our Tales/Tails," and a selection of literary hypertexts from the Internet.

The topic generated enthusiasm for the most part. Studying and writing hypertexts seemed creative to my students in ways that traditional assignments in composition courses did not. Taking their cue from the Internet, my students wanted to devise hypertexts that incorporated graphics, animation, and various fonts. I wanted them to concentrate on text, however, so I imposed limits. They were required to compose a nonlinear hypertext story, essay, or encyclopedic text that depended on text and text alone. Creativity had to be demonstrated in their words and in the text's organization.

Without exception, the students chose to create stories, thinking that it would be easier and much more fun to put together a simple tale than an essay. But they soon discovered that creating nonlinear fiction was no easy task. When they attempted to divide their stories into lexias, the hypertext version of printed pages, they created links that Emily Golson (1999: 157) would classify as "intersecting links." These links allow information to flow linearly from one point to another and function as page-turners (fig. 1). Through them the story progresses precisely as a print text would progress.

But truly nonlinear texts require what Golson (1999: 159) calls "interacting links," which force readers to decipher or construct meaning by making their own connections between lexias (fig. 2). These links connect only tangentially with the first lexia. Readers must piece together the aspects of the narrative; figure out who Stephanie, Janet, Tony, and Basil might be; and determine what they have in common in the story. Like many modern and postmodern texts, hypertexts with interacting links do not conform to the traditional narrative progressions of what my students regard as "good" stories. Indeed, some of the most complex hypertexts avoid ending altogether, such as Michael Joyce's (1987) Afternoon, whose readers finally just stop reading.

Unlike Joyce, however, my students were not interested in creating an endless hypertext. In fact, they viewed the hypertext narrative as part game, part joke, and part mystery, so they perceived endings...