Sarah J. Sloane: "The Haunting Story of J: Genealogy as a Critical Category in Understanding How a Writer Composes" (3)
In this article, Sarah J. Sloane presents her case study of J., an undergraduate writer in a freshman composition course, whom she follows through his writing process. Sloane asserts that a writer's past experiences, or "medial hauntings," affect the entire writing process, from his or her choice of topics to the "writing community he [or she] chooses to join" (50). By examining drafts of each of J.'s essays and by conducting interviews with him throughout the semester, Sloane notes that J.'s initial apprehension about writing with computers (that is, using the computer as a writing instrument) is embedded in his personal background, such as his parents' views on computers, and in his prior experiences with writing, in which he used the pen-and-paper method in his writing process. The understanding of the effects of these prior experiences and apparition knowledge on the undergraduate writer goes a long way in understanding the student's thought and writing processes.
While Sloane gives fancy names to all these prior experiences, it seems to me that the answer is simpler--we, as humans, are creatures of habit. We do not like to be taken out of our comfort zones. Therefore, we resort to what we know and what we're comfortable with, both in the writing process and in life in general. Of course, there are always exceptions to this generalization, those people who enjoy living life on the edge (often on the edge of a cliff, plummeting to the depths below, held only by a big rubber band). And in 1986-87, when this study took place, computers in the writing classroom were like those cliffs of the bungee jumpers. Looking out over the edge into the abyss of technology could be quite scary. J.'s apprehension towards computer-aided writing is probably less common today, over a decade later, and yet, only more exposure has changed our views of computers and writing. In many of our English and writing classrooms, we still teach the basic writing process, using the much-feared five-paragraph essay form, and yet we do not teach hypertextual writing, though the Web provides an obvious outlet for such alternative writing styles. Even as I write this review, I'm typing it in Microsoft Word, from which I will probably cut-and-paste into a webpage editor when the time comes. My apparitional knowledge of writing is based on the traditional writing process, in which the logical argument flows linearly from introduction to conclusion. My concern is that we will continue to rely solely on traditional teachings of writing at the introductory level, neglecting the opportunity to integrate hypertextual writing into the writing curriculum, despite the growing trend towards technology and writing.
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