Authority: What Makes These Definitions of Hypertext Sound Authoritative?

• Soula Michaelides writes, “Rouet uses terms and then he expands this terms with definitions--semantic associations, expansions, etc., that sound like the way a person who is really into his subject would talk.”
• “Nelson does not sound as complexly as Rouet or Bolter. Yet as we're talk about him I understood what he meant. I think an authority should be clear. Nelson is clear. Especially when he says, 'pathways,'” Juan Cardona claims.
• “Here is why Bolter sounds like he knows what he is talking about. He says 'structures,' 'symbols,' and 'intrinsic' and 'extrinsic' a number of times. These words, along with 'verbal gestures' mean something. That is they sound important,” Nick Athineos says.

As a class we talk about students' responses to Rouet, Nelson, and Bolter. We decide that vocabulary is really important for an authority. That is, if you are writing on a subject you need to know the terms that other people use to talk about that subject. However, you also (as Nelson does) need to make that subject accessible. Authority then “is knowing your subject AND making that knowledge clearly understandable to your readers.”--Not a bad definition of authority in terms of rhetoric, right?

Yet the form of authority, the way authorities cloak themselves when they discuss hypertext, is not the only object of this lesson. The goal is to start to refine our class definition. Do these authorities help us do that? In what ways?

As the meeting time ends, I remind students that we will think about how we can expand our initial responses to the question of what is hypertext into fuller definitions; we will also think about how we can compare printed writing with hypertext writing. This last question enables us as a class to turn to questions of rhetoric--questions of persuasion and questions of what makes writing effective in hypertext documents and by comparison printed documents. We always seem to circle back to the question of audience:

• Who are we writing for?
• What is the context?
• How do we want them to respond?

Thus, this unit on technology has become not only a way to explore and expose students to computers, but it has also become a means whereby we can discuss the broader issues of rhetoric.

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