A Writer's Studio Event:
A Conversation with Anne Wysocki
Rebekah Shultz Colby and Richard Colby

Richard Colby: My first question has to do with your writing process. So much of your writing is about framing good questions. Do you consciously set out to do so when you start to or is it just something that happens?
Anne: In high school, Anne explained that she had trouble with writing. She didnt enjoy the process of writing probably because no one had helped her develop her process, so she would agonize over it, writing everything the night before (of course). However, in a college philosophy class, she wrote a paper that shaped her writing process in a more productive way. When she first wrote the philosophy paper, Anne got it handed back with the words This is not yet an argument. Fortunately, she was allowed to rewrite it, and through this revision, she learned what worked in her writing. She asked one question and made everything move to that point.

I have another question about process. Given the diversity of your experience both writing and designing for academic institutions, the public and private sector, and your own artistic endeavors, how is your process similar or different? In what ways do you bring these potentially dissimilar processes into your classrooms?
The rhetoric program at Berkeley actually helped her talk about her technical writing and her computer interface design for Apple as specific decisions made to implement a specific purpose for a specific audience. Knowing why she made a certain design decision over another and how the purpose of the design shaped these decisions was helpful in talking about her design and explaining it to her clients and co-workers. Brining up Gunter Kress, she also said that if she went counter to the prevailing genre and did something more innovative, it was important for her to make design decisions that her audience would still understand.

What do you hope the freshman writing class will look like both physically and pedagogically in 10 years given the influence of the visual and audio into current culture, Kress and the New London Groups Multiliteracies, and an interest in writing as a process of design?
The comp classroom, Anne hopes, will look a lot more like a studio, as in an architectural studio. For instance, just as architects design bus stops for lower income people, writing students could design mulimodal texts in the same way. Different audiences (or clients) could come in to discuss the project and the whole project would become a continual process embedded in the history and the local context and needs of the community.

My wife and I happened to be over by the career center when we started to read the Internships and what was expected. So many different opportunities, from psychology to child literacy expected students to be able to produce web pages, print resources, and promotional materials. Given our focus on writing in multiple genres and media, it was comforting to hear that past the university, these rhetorical situations expected a variety of approaches.
However, we recently conducted a faculty survey about writing on this campus, and we gained some useful insight about faculty expectations across campus. Some faculty responded in very traditional ways, one stating that he/she understood why students liked these more creative projects, but that he/she though it was more important that students learn the expository essay. Yet, another professor though it important that students learn description and integration of visuals into their texts.

My question is, both as teachers and as a program, how can we best respond to these sometimes conflicting expectations about what we teach in our writing classrooms.
Anne argued that there was no reason to split multimodalities and academic writing when in actuality the overarching principle underlying both of them is to be savvy about making choices. In other words, in mechanical engineering and psychology, there is a different format expected for each of them. So, students show learn how to assess and figure out these differences. They should learn how to research the different texts and discourses of place to find these differences.

It seems so much of what was the computers and writing community has been swallowed up by technical and professional writing positions and programs. I am also keenly aware of how so many technology decisions have been offloaded to centralized IT offices within universities. What do you think is the current state and future of computers and writing specialists?
She admitted that she didnt really know the future of computers and composition, but that the future of computers and composition will undoubtedly be decided by local IT contexts in each university. However, in the future of computers and composition, she wants a broader sense of composing a wider spread of digital artists along with rhet-comp. As a field, rhet-comp does understand the conditions in which people learn to be confident communicators, and often this confidence means having a certain amount of technological savvy as well. So, there continues to be a need for smart administrators who can envision programs in which rhet-comp specialists have a certain amount of control over what and how they design as well as how they teach this design. Administrators also should be able to envision programs that foster collaboration between different departments so that faculty from different departments can work together to bring aspects of design to students in the most innovative and productive ways.

There has been continued interest in considering video and computer games effect on literacy and learning, with earlier work looking at narrative and play, Gees 36 Learning Principles, and even the upcoming special issue of Computers and Composition. How do you see computer games impacting the writing student, and what do you think their role might be inside the classroom?
She laughed and said that there were 8000 answers because there are so many different games and each game is unique. She also hopes that more educators go into game design, at least if they are the fun kind. However, she also realizes that developing good educational gameware like this takes massive amounts of time and technological access and savvy. She also acknowledged another problem in developing software: software often takes so long to develop that, by the time it actually gets developed and put on the market, the software is almost obsolete. However, with good game design, she also sees the potential of games within composition a confluence of technical writing and artistry. She also sees a kind of potential for sensuous engagement which breaks down the often maintained academic binary between communication and expression. Computer games have the potential to bring it all together and create complex texts that fully engage players on multiple levels. Unfortunately, in the academy, there is still the tendency to think of texts as stable when they are not and, in fact, are changing rapidly. This is not the 1950s. Finally, she laughed and said she wondered what the Wii would do to our notions of embodiment within a text.

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