The Web as a Culture with Rhetoric

This text, which was written in 1993, is a call to writing teachers that the presence of a new, electronic environment that students are writing in is is changing the way people think about rhetoric and writing. The authors, Hawisher and Moran, argue that this means a new electronic pedagogy must created that accounts for the changes in style, grammar, and language.

Based on the time period that this was written, when emailing was starting to become more popular, I think that the authors had the right idea. Online communication was proving to be a revolutionary channel for language, and thus a revolutionary change for rhetoric. Seventeen years later we see the effects of this shift to the online community, however this article can serve as a reminder as to why these changes have occurred.

Those reasons, Hawisher and Moran argue, are rooted in a variety of differences between paper-mail and electronic mail. Now people have to pay attention to issues of length, structure, and most importantly “subject” of the electronic communication. They argue that online communication is rapid, thoughtless, and colloquial, whereas the paper writer is analytical, reflective, and slow to use language. Hawisher and Moran explain that this new technology that inherently affects language should be incorporated by writing teachers, especially because” E-mail, in dissolving boundaries of time and space, breaks down some of the barriers that have long been established between students and professors” (1993, p. 635). They further argue “we believe that on-line communication has the potential to bring in voices from the margin and might, therefore, be more egalitarian than face-to-face class discussion” (1993, p. 635).

While the article doesn’t specifically mention L2 communication, it does mention how students will be empowered and how language usage will change. I believe this premise is along the same lines as Kaplan’s argument that different cultures cultivate different types of rhetoric, and rhetorical patterns are seen within a given cultures. The online community is a new culture that will repeatedly create and reinvent new rhetoric as it grows and expands. I think that this is an excellent, rhetorically neutral environment for students of all languages to come together and negotiate what culture, language, and rhetoric mean to them.

LuMing Mao might call this marriage of online communication and second language learning “togetherness in difference” (2005). A somewhat common culture lies in the electronic environment, which serves as a point for L2 students to start learning language, culture, and rhetoric from each other.

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Hawisher, G. E. and Moran, C. (October 1993). “Electronic mail and the writing instructor. College English, 55(6), 627-643.

Kaplan, R. “Cultural thought patterns in inter-cultural education.” Language Learning, 16(1), 1-20.

Mao, L. (February 2005). “Rhetorical borderlands: Chinese American rhetoric in the making.” College Composition and Communication, 56(3), 426-469.