Olalekan Adepoju, Writing Consultant

The boom in digital technologies continues to challenge our basic understanding of writing and literacy practices. Which, for the most part, is a good thing. This is because these technologies provide genuine platforms for improvement to our information and literacy practices in terms of what is learned, how it is learned, where it is learned and when it is learned. In fact, these available digital devices enable students to learn at their own pace and develop skills needed in a modern society.

It is evident that, nowadays, technological tools are ubiquitous and widely accessible to all categories of people, thereby aiding teaching and learning. This has no doubt contributed to the disruption to literacy practices, especially writing, in that information  used to be conveyed mainly through two modes, namely alphabets and visual elements such as white space, margins and font size.  But this has now been extended to include multiple modes such as visual images, video, color, and sound among others. Social media has also helped a great deal to extend the impact of writing practices beyond pen/pencil and paper to creating a wide space and opportunity for writing to occur beyond the pages of a book.

These forms of writing, thus, necessitate that we, as writing center consultants, re-consider our tutoring strategies to achieve our objective of making a better writer instead of simply making a better text. One of the crucial reasons for rethinking writing in this digital age is because of its implication for knowledge transfer. The proliferation of digital technologies has accentuated the need for creative thinking in all aspects of our lives, and has also provided tools that can help us improve and transfer important skills for knowledge production.

Although writing center consultants’ familiarity with different modes of communication is generally important during tutoring sessions, it is nevertheless not necessary for the tutors to possess expertise in the use of technologies or a genre-specific knowledge of how these modes work in their entirety. However, discussing the thinking and production processes of the digital text constitutes an important aspect of the tutoring; this inevitably helps writers in transferring relevant skills and knowledge garnered through the production stages of the digital texts into other aspects of life.

In addition, since writers, wittingly or unwittingly, approach their writing practices using “all available means of communication” (Takayoshi and Selfe, 2007) at the disposal to express their intentions to the audience, tutoring sessions should also include an examination of the effectiveness of the rhetorical choices and moves made by the writer to achieve this goal.

Rethinking writing practices in this digital age also has an implication for collaboration between the writing center and the digital media centers. Such partnerships, it is believed, will foster efforts on helping students who are struggling with the production of their digital writing practices as well as open a line of communication and exchange of information on the progress and improvements of writers’ digital texts.

To conclude, I would echo Takayoshi and Selfe’s (2007) notion that, if the writing center is to foster the goal of making a better writer, who can both “create meaning in texts and interpret meaning from text within a dynamic and increasingly technological world”, we need to rethink our approaches in order to enable a tutoring session that accommodates the affordances of writing in the digital age.

Source

Takayoshi, Pamela and Cynthia L., Selfe. “Thinking about Multimodality.” Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers . Ed. Cynthia L., Selfe, Cresskill: Hampton P, 2007, pp 1-12.

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