As a writing center practitioner and digital media scholar, I’ve observed with great interest the increasing entanglement of digital technologies in students’ writing processes. I’ve assisted students who struggle to get their words down on paper by setting up voice-to-text tools, allowing them to compose a first draft verbally. I’ve learned about mind-mapping programs like Miro that students use to organize their ideas multimodally. I’ve seen students gain confidence by using Grammarly to correct their writing as they work.
While these technologies can be a significant boon for writers, they also introduce new challenges:
- a student using a free version of a note-taking program suddenly loses access to their class notes when the trial period ends;
- a frantic student needs last-minute help converting a Canva file into a PowerPoint presentation;
- a Muslim student depicts herself as a white blonde girl in her animated literacy narrative video because the free software she used includes limited default characters.
These instances and others like them illustrate how proprietary digital technologies both afford and constrain students’ writing practices and helping students understand the impact of these technologies is crucial to contemporary writing center work.
Though writing centers are devoted to providing students with writing support, the field has long acknowledged other dimensions of writing center work beyond the written page (Grimm, 1996). In a communications landscape increasingly mediated by digital technologies and platforms, digital literacies have become a significant branch of the multiliteracies (Grimm, 2009; Hitt, 2012) that writing centers must address. As Megan Boeshart, Kim Fahle Peck, and Lisa Nicole Tyson argued in their IWCA 2023 presentation, writing center tutors function as “unofficial tech support” for many students, positioning tutors as critical sponsors of digital platform literacy. Essentially, Boeshart et al. argue that students don’t just come to the writing center for help with grammar or revision but also for support in learning how to use various technologies to compose and submit their course assignments. Furthering their argument, I contend that by focusing on digital technologies and platforms in sessions, tutors provide more holistic support for students learning to work with and through various writing technologies.
However, as digital media scholars argue, many contemporary composing and communications technologies—particularly algorithmically-driven technologies like generative AI—cannot be fully understood by average users. Jenna Burrell (2016) refers to the occluded aspects of these platforms as “opacity,” meaning the public is prevented from fully understanding these technologies due to the scale of machine learning operations and individual corporations’ maintenance of trade secrecy. The proprietary nature of these technologies can provide further obstacles to writers’ digital literacies as they may lack access to certain platforms or be beholden to the platforms they do have access to. For example, let’s say a student spends her first two years at a community college that provides licenses to Google Cloud and then transfers to a university that uses Microsoft 365. When she works on her first essay assignment at the new school, she could face multiple challenges. She not only has to tackle the writing task—understanding the prompt, brainstorming an argument, drafting and revising the essay, and submitting it for feedback—but also encounters additional platform-based obstacles. She must learn how to compose and format her essay in Microsoft Word, make an appointment with her professor via Outlook Calendar, provide peer review feedback to her classmates through Track Changes, and submit the final essay via SharePoint. Each step adds cognitive labor for the student, highlighting how writing is inherently connected to the technologies and media in which it is composed and distributed.
Beyond the added cognitive load of navigating various platforms, digital opacity challenges writers’ understanding of platforms’ impact on their composing practices. While one might argue that a student having to use Microsoft Word as opposed to Google Docs to write an essay only offers negligible friction for the student’s experience, these differences can have much larger impacts. For example, if a student is accustomed to Zotero generating their citations, they may struggle switching to a different tool or platform that does not support Zotero integration. These differences can also impact students’ voices through various norming practices. My colleague Antonio Hamilton (2023), for example, has argued that generative AI platforms like ChatGPT privilege Standard Edited American English, further marginalizing writers and speakers of other dialects, such as Black Vernacular English. A student employing Grammarly may think it is correcting objective errors in their writing, not realizing the tool is actually making stylistic suggestions that eliminate their unique voice.
How can writing centers confront these challenges to writers’ digital literacy development? Many writing center practices that help students confront the occluded genres of academic writing remain applicable in supporting students’ development of critical digital literacies.
One crucial approach is emphasizing metacognition. While a writer may need to use one particular platform to complete one particular assignment for one particular class, discussing metacognitive aspects of the composing process helps writers to see continuity across their experiences with different platforms, different assignments, and different classes. This approach emphasizes the transferability of valuable skills developed in earlier writing contexts that students can build on. For example, say a student must create a short video essay. A tutor can help the student reflect on their experience expressing their ideas visually for an infographic assignment, then discuss how to translate those skills to composing a multimodal video essay. By reflecting on how digital platforms have shaped their work in past assignments, students can better understand how new platforms may influence their current work.
In addition to engaging in meta-conversation around a writer’s project and process, tutors might be able to best assist writers by offering space for experimentation and interrogation of opaque composing technologies. For example, if a writer is considering using a generative AI platform for a writing project, the tutor and writer can experiment with ChatGPT and assess the generated output against the assignment prompt or the instructor’s rubric. By critically assessing AI-generated text alongside a tutor, writers can better understand how their voice is shaped by these tools; they can compare the AI-generated text to their own writing style and make informed decisions about which elements to keep, modify, or reject.
The most important principle for tutors in helping writers to foster digital literacy is to focus on writer agency. While I’ve described how proprietary technologies may impact a writer’s voice without them realizing it, a writing center tutor can emphasize points in the composing process where the writer can enact agency, reminding them what choices they do have in working with digital tools and platforms and what they can control in each composing context. For example, while a student may use Claude to help them draft an introductory paragraph to their research essay, the student ultimately decides what they want to include, reject, revise, and/or finalize in their work. The writer has the final word, and writing center tutors can help students develop more confidence in their ability to have the final say.
While we can approach writing tasks in new and efficient ways using communications technologies, their proprietary nature challenges our understanding of how they shape our writing practices. Further, the proliferation of these technologies has—in some practitioners’ minds—threatened the existence of writing centers by replacing flesh and blood tutors with an “army of writing bots” providing writers with quick and easy shortcuts to end-products. Nevertheless, writing center tutors are well-positioned to help writers better understand their role as “humans in the loop” (Knowles, 2024) of these processes, offering critical insights and fostering deeper engagement with the writing process and the technologies that shape it.
References:
Boeshart, M., Fahle Peck, K., & Tyson, L. N. (2023, October 11-14). Platform literacy as essential for tutor development in the increasingly multimodal writing center [Conference presentation]. IWCA 2023 Conference, Baltimore, MD, United States.
Burrell, J. (2016). How the machine ‘thinks’: Understanding opacity in machine learning algorithms. Big Data & Society, 3(1), 1-12. doi: 10.1177/2053951715622512
Grimm, N. M. (1996). Rearticulating the work of the writing center. College Composition and Communication, 47(4), 523-548. https://www.jstor.org/stable/358600
Grimm, N. M. (2009). New conceptual frameworks for writing center work. Writing Center Journal, 29(2), 11-27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43460755
Hamilton, A. (2023, October 11-14). Oh snap, the collapse of the multiverse: How automated writing technologies institute an acceptance of writing standardization [Conference presentation]. IWCA 2023 Conference, Baltimore, MD, United States.
Hitt, A. (2012). Access for all: The role of dis/ability in multiliteracy centers. Praxis, 9(2), n.p. https://www.praxisuwc.com/hitt-92
Knowles, A.M. (2024). Machine-in-the-loop writing: Optimizing the rhetorical load. Computers and Composition, 71, 102826. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2024.102826
