Reading, Writing, and Teaching Creative Hypertext: A Genre-Based Pedagogy

As English studies continues to take a technological turn, teachers need pedagogies for reading and writing hypertext. Many of our students are on the Web as readers, but our discipline is, for the most part, still trying to figure out ways to encourage innovative and sophisticated verbal and visual means of writing on the Web. Historian of rhetoric Kathleen E. Welch (1999: 4-9) argues that our students are "living their lives in the hegemony of the television screen and speaker and the computer screen and speaker"; therefore we need a "Next Rhetoric" to engage with them and to stimulate their active participation in public discourse through electronic means. Hypertext writer and teacher Michael Joyce (1998: 170) agrees: "Where we are is in multimedia and what we are seeing is television," but hypertext, and writing back to the Web, is a necessary act of civic participation for "teachers, writers, artists, [and] learners." Welch and Joyce provocatively alert us to the pressing need for pedagogies of "electric rhetoric" and hypertext writing, but they do not develop these pedagogies in a full manner. Those who have not taught either the reading or the writing of hypertext will likely want clearer guidance before meeting their students in on-line and screen environments, and a surprising number of students will still need clear road maps as they make the transition from consumers to producers of screen culture.

Recent publications about teaching hypertext and on-line discourse express views similar to those of Welch and Joyce, although most of these publications go farther in terms of providing specific teaching practices (Galin and Latchaw 1998; DeWitt and Strasma 1999; Howard et al. 1999; Gruber 2000; Troffer 2000). This scholarship takes care to map out possibilities for teaching hypertext without designating any roads off-limits. The present essay contributes a genre-based pedagogy, until now only hinted at by hypertext theorists and not imported into the domain of hypertext by genre theorists. While I focus on creative hypertexts—autobiographies and popular genres like soap operas and road trip stories—a genre-based pedagogy can also be used to guide students through the production of informational, academic, community or club Web sites, personal home pages, and whatever blurred or evolving genres students are inspired by and see fit to explore.

I advance a genre-based pedagogy for teaching the reading and writing of creative hypertext to enable teachers of hypertext to start from what they know and to provide them and their students with concrete terms and models. Such a pedagogy, especially if informed by recent scholarship on genre's flexible and rhetorical nature, requires students to make various choices not only about form but about compositional concerns: tone, diction, prose style, character development, plot, setting, visual design, and hypertext navigation strategies. Genres are useful guideposts for students working in unfamiliar territory like hypertext (Bazerman 1997), and the conventional aspects of many genres—which are always open to revision and, in the case of hypertext, "remediation" (Bolter 2001)—have empowered rather than hindered most of the students I have asked to write creative hypertexts.

To clarify how this genre-based pedagogy blends two pedagogical strands in English studies, I first summarize hypertext pedagogies since the mid-1990s. I focus in particular on the way that the relevance of genres for reading and writing hypertext has been raised but avoided by scholars who have focused instead on structure and arrangement, as if these compositional choices were easily separated from genre choices. Then I summarize scholarship in genre studies that can be usefully employed by teachers of hypertext; I also argue that scholars working in this terrain have yet to explore how their work might inform and advance theoretical and pedagogical ideas about hypertext.

The mingling of these lines of thinking and teaching has been productive in the upper-level creative nonfiction and writing workshop classes that I have taught since 1997, particularly for assignments in hypertext autobiography and popular...