Writing Hypertext

In 1865, Lewis Carroll's Alice pondered, "What is the use of a book without pictures?"  By the beginning of the twenty-first century, similarly inquisitive readers might well ask, "What is the use of a text without links?"  A text with links is a hypertext.  This section of EN 205-D: "Nonfiction Writing" will give students the opportunity to experience hypertext as both readers and creators.  As anyone who has surfed the World Wide Web knows, hypertext is changing how we read.  And as we prepare to enter the twenty-first century, hypertext has the potential to change how we conceive of the very information and ideas we wish to communicate and present to our audience.   Hypertext allows writing to be nonlinear:  a web of ideas, words, images, and multiple voices to convey information, tell stories, and create imaginative, intellectual spaces.  Writers have already turned to hypertext to write poems, create commercial websites, publish scholarly articles, and complete graduate school theses.  Writing hypertextually may well a new level of creative literacy for successful college students.

In EN 205-D students will develop and integrate three sets of skills to produce texts for this new electronic medium:  technical skills involving computer programming and information technology; artistic skills focusing on graphics, color, and arrangement; and writing skills reinvigorating traditional concerns of rhetoric and discourse.  Students will read about hypertext theory and practice, as well as analyze sample s of nonfiction hypertext and hypertext fiction.  The course will focus, however, on creating a portfolio of several hypertext projects with special attention given to the relationship between text and image, conference, rhetoric, design, and creativity.

Students need not be proficient computer users to enroll in the course.  Students will learn HTML and other programming during the course.  Familiarity with word processing is recommended.  Course work includes several short, analytical papers, a reader-response journal, and a portfolio of hypertext projects.

Prerequisite:  Completion of the all-college Foundation Requirement in expository writing and permission of the instructor.