In 1982, Maxine Hairston noted a paradigm shift from a "current-traditional," product-centered approach to a "process-oriented" pedagogy in the field of writing instruction. One of the first breaks from the product-centered pedagogy was among writing instructors such as Peter Elbow, Ken McCrorie, Donald Murray, and Donald Stewart, who attempted various methods of helping students to open up or express themselves more freely. It was thought that by increasing fluidity and decreasing pressure of "punishment" for "bad" writing, students would feel better about themselves and their writing, and therefore produce more eloquent prose. Meditating before writing, listening to music or surrounding oneself with the beauty of nature while writing, "freewriting," journaling, and other forms of expression became commonplace activities in the college writing course. The goal was to produce an "honest" piece of writing that expressed the innermost thoughts of the writer. The roots of this "expressionist" movement can be traced to the 19th century Romantic notion of an "inner self" which needed to be expressed (Berlin 76). Thoughts and "snippets" from these freewritings and journal entries then became seeds which could be used to plant what would eventually grow into a piece of prose, usually in the form of a formal essay.

Another school of thought, which Faigley, Berlin, and others call the "cognitivists," was more interested in the processes that went on in the mind before and during the writing process. Researchers such as Linda Flower and John Hayes (a psychologist), Janet Emig, and Sondra Perl attempted to "scientifically" investigate the writing process. They observed students as they wrote, taking notes, tape-recording the students' "thoughts" as they wrote, and interviewing them before, during, and after the "act" of writing. From this school of thought developed an elaborate model of prewriting, writing, and revising, and the claim that there was indeed a definable "process" that more or less all writers go through when they compose. Critics of this school argued, though, that the research was conducted in artificial settings, and thus was skewed before it was even analyzed; that all people don't go through the same process; and that writing, rather than being a linear, step-by-step process, was instead a "discursive" process in that most writers revised as they wrote, invented and revised and discovered at various points along the way, and then wrote again while they revised. Many researchers, including Andrea Lunsford, Lisa Ede, Joseph Williams, as well as Flower, eventually endorsed a socio-cognitive hybrid model of the writing process (Berlin 186).

Other researchers, taking cues from philosophical and literary movements such as deconstruction, poststructuralism, marxism, and postmodernism, claim that writing is not an individual, "self-expressive" act at all, and certainly isn't a linear process, but, as Karen Burke Lefevre states, is a "social act." It is always and already a a social act before it even begins. Bruffee calls it "collaborative," Faigley calls it "social," Berlin calls it "social epistemic," but what ties all of these theorists together is the notion that there really is no "self" to express in the first place--everything we write (and therefore are) is a product of our environment, our social strata, the dominant ideology we live under, the political structure, etc. Even the language that we use, Bakhtin says, is already filled with prior meanings, since "the language we use is half someone else’s" (293). Fulkerson calls this approach a "rhetorical" view of the writing process, one which considers the reader more than the writer and dictates the content in light of the social context.

How does all this change our view of the writing process, what does it mean for the way we teach writing, and where do electronic writing environments fit into this picture? In reaction to what they see as the potential for computers to be used to perpetuate current-traditional teaching methods, Barker and Kemp tell us that we instead need a computer-supported "postmodern pedagogy" which emphasizes a "sensitive" approach to writing and helps students not only to write better, but to negotiate, grow more tolerant to opposing viewpoints, and to become active participants and makers of meaning in discourse communities. Lanham suggests that electronic communication technologies help students to learn more rapidly the discourse of their chosen profession, because instructors can ". . . introduce our students to the scholarly conversation sooner than we do now, and in more realistic and effective ways (22). Butler and Kinneavey compare this rehearsal to a "jam session" in which, just like musicians, unseasoned writers "jam" with more skilled writers and learn from them as they "play" (401). Cooper and Selfe claim that writing and learning in virtual environments helps students, especially those on the margins of society such as the poor and/or under-represented minorities, to "resist" the traditional authority and power structures that have kept them marginalized in the first place (389). And the more politically-oriented Faigley and Berlin would have students use writing as a way of overcoming the evils of capitalism, prejudice, and homophobia, and create what they see as a more harmonious, well-balanced society. As has been discussed in Sections III and IV, analysis of the gatsby-l listserv has shown that many of the claims of these researchers have proved, if not entirely accurate, at least feasible.

Writing instructors have long since realized the benefits of electronic word processors, such as cutting and pasting, ease of revision, and spelling and grammar aids. The ability of students to move an entire paragraph to a different section of an essay or to add a word or even several sentences without having to retype the entire document has enabled process theories of writing to manifest themselves in ways never dreamed possible only a few short years ago. Writing instructors and peer tutors can now suggest both global and local revisions without putting an undue burden on the student writer, and writers can now feel more confident in exploring various organizational strategies, while resting secure in the knowledge that multiple versions of drafts can be saved, and that any changes they make can be undone with a few mouse clicks if necessary. In a recent message to the Alliance for Computers and Writing listserv, Donna Reiss, an instructor from a community college in the southeast with extensive experience teaching in the computer-mediated classroom, shared her thoughts on some of the ways she has found the computer-mediated classroom enhances the writing process:

For the students enrolled in courses using computer-mediated communication devices such as the gatsby-l listserv, other factors appear to enhance their ability to understand, internalize, develop, and enhance the writing process, including

• the ability to recall, word-for-word, "conversations" with classmates and to scan through the text of those conversations for specific quotes or to follow threads on a particular topic, character, or word

• the opportunity to observe the "process" of writing as they browse through files containing student essays or watch ideas germinate and evolve in electronic discussion groups

• the ability to "rehearse" their writing, reading, and revising, which helps them prepare for similar activities which they will be asked to perform in their chosen profession (and its particular discourse community).

In order to demonstrate these effects, the "evolution" of two student essays, along with peer critiques of those essays, will be traced and analyzed. The first to be discussed will be "The Voracious Fitzgerald's Concomitant: Ambivilance" by Sir Edward, which changed significantly between his first rough draft and the final copy; the second will be "What is Read into The Great Gatsby?" by Irene, who relied less on guidance from student peer critiques and more on one-on-one intereaction with me before presenting a draft to the rest of the class.

SIR EDWARD

The first essay to be discussed is Sir Edward’s "The Voracious Fitzgerald's Concomitant: Ambivilance," which, as one might surmise by the title as well as the content and style of Sir Edward’s previous messages to the gatsby-l, served at once to dazzle, confound, and confuse his classmates. A gentle, soft-spoken cabinet maker in "real" life, Sir Edward took on the personna of a haughty, self-righteous intellectual with a vocabulary to match when he "spoke" in the virtual world. To his credit, in the three semesters since he began taking online courses with me, he had toned down his pomposity somewhat, and was getting better at modifying his discourse to meet the needs of his target audience, the members of gatsby-l, most of whom were first- or second-year community college students. Numerous rebukes and messages to the effect of "What the heck did you just say?" from his classmates, as well as gentle reminders from me, especially during his first semester when it seemed as if he had just stepped out of 17th century England or perhaps a Dungeons and Dragons MUD room, had taught him that if his rhetorical strategies were to be effective, and if any of his classmates were going to even bother to read his messages, he would have to write more clearly. Nonetheless, in his formal essay he still struggled with this tendency, which Balester refers to as "hyperfluency": This use of discourse "disrupts. It violates discourse conventions; it unintentionally parodies prestige lanugage; it casts a negative light on its producer; and it often violates the Ciceronian virtue of appropriateness" (Balester 82).

For example, one section of Sir Edward’s original rough draft, sent to gatsby-l for peer review on 2-29-96, reads as follows:

Not all of the students were so awestruck, however. Cassie, who had risen to the opportunity to "duel" with Sir Edward on various issues in the listserv discussion, sent an extremely detailed critique of his original rough draft, claiming that she was "up for the challenge." In her critique, Cassie begins by listing a brief outline of the contents of each paragraph of Sir Edward’s essay. She then goes into more detail, as in this section of her message:

IRENE

Irene was one of those students who had a very hard time with the concept of reader-response criticism. Since she was enrolled in the on-campus version of the course, I had a lot of personal interaction with her throughout the semester in addition to the online conversations. In the beginning of the course, she was frequently annoyed with me because, despite her repeated requests, I refused to tell the class "what the story meant." She had been so ingrained in the proscenium-based, passive learning model that she found it very difficult to express opinions on her own due to the fear of being "wrong." Ironically, her fight against a reader-response style of criticism eventually drew her toward it with such power that her final research paper was an examination of how various readers, depending on their own background and experience, approached and interpreted The Great Gatsby. It took a while for Irene to come around to this interest in reader-response criticism, though. In an e-mail dated 02-21-96, prompted by my request for a brief description of the students’ research paper topics, Irene expressed her intent to write a paper based on biographical criticism:

Irene was not the first student to approach me with this dilemma, though, and although I always offered students the option of switching courses, I always encouraged them to stay, and gave them a brief sales pitch on the benefits of learning computer skills in addition to the normal course objectives of learning to analyze fiction, poetry and drama; most students, as Irene did, opted to stay with the course, and almost without exception, thanked me for talking them into "sticking with it" at the end of the semester after they realized how much they learned. It wasn’t always easy, though as the following message attests:

When it came time to begin writing the research paper, Irene worked with me almost sentence-by-sentence during the initial stages of her rough draft, and through her America Online account she sent me several e-mails and "Instant Messages" (one-to-one private synchronous chat, a feature of America Online now also available through Netscape Navigator) in which she worked out the details of her "rough draft" before actually sending it to the group for comment.

After several office visits, phone calls, instant messages, and e-mails, Irene eventually began to narrow down her ideas for her paper; by this point she had abandoned the biographical criticism idea and had begun her move toward exploring reader-response theory. During one of her office visits, I had mentioned Stanley Fish’s article "Is There a Text in This Class?" but was unable to find the anthology it was printed in at the time of our conversation. I eventually found it just before I left on a two-week vacation/conference trip, but did not have an opportunity to pass it on to Irene before I left. In the following message, she begins to form the basis of what would become the thesis of her essay:

After a volley of several messages more back and forth, Irene sent me the following version of her rough draft:

Irene was also thinking about technical issues, such as how to print out a particular message from the web-based e-mail archives (I had copied all the messages from the gatsby-l listserv and posted them on web pages so the students could browse through them and search for ideas, review conversations, or search for quotations for their research papers). The practice of quoting one’s peers in an academic essay is a common activity for professionals in their respective discourse communities, and I encouraged--actually, required--the students to incorporate quotes from their classmates in their research papers for a number of reasons: 1) to give them practice in this "real-life" professional activity, 2) to help underscore the validity of their opinions, since I have often found that students, even at this level, can come up with some fresh and brilliant insights worthy of or at least equal to some of the insights published in academic journals by Ph.D. holding critics, and 3) to help students whose statements were quoted to realize that they, too, have a voice that is worth listening to.

Fortunately, Irene included the text of my response with her next message, since my comments to her were also deleted from my America Online sent mail folder:

CONCLUSION

As has been demonstrated by the above samples taken from the writing of Sir Edward and Irene, writing and learning about writing in a virtual environment can be just as effective, and possibly more effective, than writing and learning about writing in a traditional classroom setting. As opportunities for collaboration are increased due to the lack of time constraints and the accessibility to the written words of their classmates, students tend write more, share more, and learn more from each other by what Hawisher and Selfe refer to as "peer teaching" (387). And more importantly, especially for students such as Irene who require a greater degree of "handholding" than most, the virtual learning environment provides a "safety zone" where they can feel free to try out their ideas and communicate with their instructor with a frequency and intimacy that is not possible in a traditional setting.

It is no accident that writing instructors who recognize the importance of process theories of writing have flocked to networked computer labs and the internet. The ability to manifest process theories of writing in the electronic environment has energized and reinvigorated students and instructors alike. We must, of course, keep in mind Hawisher and Selfe’s observation that computers in themselves "do not automatically create ideal learning situations" (386). This study makes clear, however, that process-oriented pedagogy, combined with computer-assisted collaborative invention and revision can help students not only improve their final "product," but will help them to think about and internalize invention and revision strategies so they will not only produce an acceptable piece of writing, but also understand how they did it so they will be able to do it again in the future.

Section VI