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Writing in Electronic Environments: An Old Course for a New Major

Reflecting the digital turn in composition studies, multimedia writing courses have become commonplace in many writing programs. Yet these technology-rich courses take on new significance when located within a writing major, especially as a required course. This article explores the development of a writing major through the lens of a required writing course titled “Writing in Electronic Environments.” Specifically, we examine the course as an opportunity to make its practices and core concepts more central to the rhetorical approach of the major, and writing program, as a whole.

A core course, “WRT 235 Writing in Electronic Environments” explores a series of electronic environments for writing: print, message, research/information, and web. By focusing on “environments,” we open up traditional ways of considering multimedia writing, encouraging students to participate in what Johnson-Eilola calls the “datacloud.” Dataclouds—symbolic multiplicities—foreground the complex movements of writers’ work with information in electronic environments. Thinking through our Writing and Rhetoric major, we use the concept of environment to complicate genre-based and traditional approaches to composing.

Drawing out the theoretical implications of the course we’ve designed, this article considers how the focus on environment in WRT 235 illuminates other core courses in our major, particularly “WRT 360 Composing Processes and Canons of Rhetoric” and “WRT 495 Capstone in Electronic Portfolios.” Among many other questions, we ask how majors can think about writing environments in the history of rhetoric? How can majors foreground their engagement with the datacloud in a portfolio?