The Print-Linked Format
Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum is what’s called a print-linked publication, meaning it is part printed text and part CD-ROM. Unlike other book/CD-ROM combinations, the material on the CD-ROM isn’t supplementary or secondary to the printed text; rather, it contains roughly half of the essays listed in the table of contents. As the editors of Coming of Age explain, they felt that pushing the traditional forms of publication was appropriate for a book that urges compositionists to push the traditional boundaries of the writing curriculum. They offer some other good reasons for the format, perhaps chiefly, that including many of the essays from the anthology on the CD-ROM enabled them to publish more material at a cheaper price.
While admiring the editors for their innovation and recognizing some benefits in the print-linked structure, readers may find the format inconvenient and disappointing. In the preface, the editors explain that the decision about which essays to put in print and which to digitize was based upon the nature of the essays. They write that “the theoretical framework for the argument of Coming of Age is presented in the solid, stable medium of print. And the generative course descriptions and program recommendations are presented in the volatile, interactive electronic medium.”
However, the division of the essays between printed text and CD-ROM makes the two parts of the text seem less like equal parts of the same unit, than (despite the editors' comments) primary and secondary material. The essays printed in the book seem to achieve an unwarranted precedence over the digitized essays. The reasons for this are twofold. The first is a cultural bias which still grants more value to the printed word than to digital information, but the second reason is a material issue. While the printed essays can be read anywhere one finds the book (bookstore, car, or library), the digital essays can only be accessed from a computer with a CD-ROM drive. Additionally, the editors seems to replicate the cultural bias towards printed material by publishing the "core" courses in print while putting the "elective" courses on the CD-ROM. The labels "core" and "elective" suggest a hierarchy that the media (printed text and CD-ROM) seems to replicate. If the editors wanted to truly present the digitalized essays as equal to the printed essays, a better choice might have been to print the courses designated as "elective" in the book and publish some of the "core" courses on the CD-ROM.
Perhaps one of the best advantages to using the CD-ROM format is that it enables linked text. However, only a few authors take advantage of the hypertextual medium and provide links from the text of their essays to relevant sites on the web or other essays. Beverly Wall’s essay “Political Rhetoric and the Media” is a good example in that it links her text and course directly to the Intercollegiate Electronic Democracy Project (IEDP), a “grassroots teaching and learning collaborative for faculty interested in public writing, political debate and argumentation, and the civic traditions of rhetoric.” Similarly, Deepika Bahri's essay “What We Teach When We Teach the Postcolonial” links to websites containing postcolonial material that would contribute to the instructor’s and students’ study of postcolonial writing, such as Postcolonial Studies at Emory, Contemporary Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature in English at Brown University, and Postcolonial and Colonial Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Despite the drawbacks of the format, if the choice were between publishing half of the essays on CD-ROM or cutting the number of essays included on the text, the print-linked format was the best choice, because each essay in this text is valuable to composition studies, and the collection makes for a tremendous resource.
| introduction | CD-ROM | organization | contributors | 1 | 2 & 3 | 4 |