to do: Split page into constituents.
- Project description and criteria (this page)
- pages with background reading, examples, and discussion (titled What are hypertext essays or something like that)
- page defining (print) essay?

readings and examples

readings Brent, Rhetorics Bernstein, Gardens Bernstein, Patterns example essays Myka, Cosmic Convergence Rewriting Expressivism Memories, Haley Hurd

The Project

Compose an original, multi-page hypertext, written for hypertext, and written for this course. This can be existing material adapted, or new material, written for the assignment and for hypertext. 6 – 10 - 15 pages with contextual links and nav links. We will walk through how to plan this essay on cards/map. Can change colors and use tables in pages – or stay with one layout. Can be collage, webbed, strictly non-linear. Can be mix of text and image.

This may be an essay (formal, informal, academic, other); short nonfiction; technical document, biography, autobiography, journalistic article... whatever opens itself into an essay-ish form.

• You may include images, but don't violate copyright.
• You may link to other pages on the Web, of course.
• Keep your text in control by setting a limit on the number of nodes/pages you will use.

I'd like you to avoid centering on poetry, drama, and narrative. These have special considerations. While your hypertext may include these elements, stay on an essay track. However, you can adapt/link into/build on other projects you've undertaken for this course - as well as other courses.

The Essay

See Definitions of essay for a sense of what's possible.

Don't limit sense of essay to creative non-fiction. Essay is a large, loose genre. Might be personal essay - essay about self - but don't restrict yourself to that. Essay can be an essay directed at anything: film, texts, politics. Essays are about the world: an exploration using hypertext to do the exploring on something in the world: book, profession, political or gender issue.... The end here is to see how writing works when you write from the ground up in hypertext, including problems and how you address them.

Essays can be a collection of profiles, or one multipage profile, or profile of self (little autobio), etc. Essays can be academic articles, extended considerations on an academic topic, written from your role and position as a scholar. Essays on portfolio grading, on teaching, on teachers, on students, on social software... Essays can make a (more or less formal) argument, or proceed more associatively.

But when essays go online we can go further. It is arguable that coherence or unity is not possible (or desirable?) in a hypertext essay, but aim for some sense of coherence or unity: something that holds the essay together, makes it feel a whole. Brent writes of "centres of gravity, sites of attraction" that give his hypertext essay a cohesiveness.

Planning and Drafting

Part of the challenge in creating a hypertext essay is planning it as you draft it. You have many more design decisions to make that you do in the traditional print form. You can use all the text and web elements we've worked with. At the same time, you'll need to make navigation decisions.

• use pieces of paper, notecards, or big stickies to help you plan
• storyboard the essay: lay it out and image how you want readers to move through it. See Site design on paper from ENGL 3160, and Hammerich, chap 3.
• don't be afraid to imitate and adapt some of the essay sites you have seen online.
• at the same time, don't be afraid to go somewhere new.

A preface

As with the repurposing site, include a preface to help us read and understand your essay. You could wrap this memo into the essay itself, or link to it: whatever you find effective. As usual, don't try to compose the preface until the essay is more or less complete. Review Troffer and others as you draft your preface. This prefaces should be substantive, detailed, illustrated with examples. Address these matters

• purpose
• text/writing/composition decisions: what did you find different about writing a hypertext as opposed to a traditional text? what did you find pretty much the same?
• how we should read your essay
• how else we might read your essay
• difficulties in writing and design - and how you addressed them.

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