"Writing is headed into *more* of everything (alphabetic text, multi-media texts, hypertexts). Some scholars are saying that e-mail has led to a revival of the personal letter (as opposed to telephone), and I know that my students spend hours on e-mail. And you should have heard them groan when I told them that for their final projects, their groups needed to turn in at least 20 single-spaced pages not counting the front matter & back matter---yet I'm now looking at projects of 40 pages and more. Yes, they are interspersed with graphics, but if we added up the alphabetic text, we'd find that they have written more text. Indeed, more of everything." 

"Composition is both invention and compilation, creation and appropriation, both of ideas and of the very selves those ideas are meant to represent. To be sure, online and web-related writing environments appear to be taking writing exactly where it has been headed already. MOOs are almost completely linguistic environments, and they afford the opportunity--the necessity--to literally create oneself in language, i.e., through writing." --- Lance Massey 

"I'm not sure what the writing was that we might have lost. I think the danger is not that we'll lose anything in writing on computers but that we'll gain too much and that that gain will lay the groundwork for much more profound and material losses later. When the ideology of traditional writing attached to paper has been sufficiently debunked, then the economic arguments in favor of moving students entirely or largely out of the classroom and creating much larger classes over computer networks with equipment paid for by students themselves may become overwhelming." --- Sigfried Gold 

"Teaching on-line writing or hypertext writing or web authoring (etc.) gives students more skills with which to improve their lives than the "college essay" does. In this way I not only call it writing, but call it creating their world through writing." --- Rick Stock 

"Writing (no matter how it was done in any era) has always been more than the mere inscription of words upon the page. There are still the questions of audience and intent, questions which must be considered not only with regard to textual elements but also with regard to non-textual elements (pictures, graphics, etc.) If anything, those questions are even more important in the electronic arena." --- Walt Huntsman 

"As a verb, electronic or screen writing is still the act of writing. As a noun, it is digital, it is data as much as it is art, currency, or knowledge. As data, its value is derived from the extent of its immersion in and reconfiguration by global communication flows. To me, then, writing is still writing, but it is not so much a distinct form of communication as it is a pattern we trace in the pool of our general communication." --- Carey Campbell 

Using my students' comments, I argue both for the necessity--and inherent dangers--in broadly defining the subject(s) of our field.