Reading, Writing, and Teaching Creative Hypertext: A Genre-Based Pedagogy

The present essay contributes a genre-based pedagogy, until now only hinted at by hypertext theorists and not imported into the domain of hypertext by genre theorists. While I focus on creative hypertexts—autobiographies and popular genres like soap operas and road trip stories—a genre-based pedagogy can also be used to guide students through the production of informational, academic, community or club Web sites, personal home pages, and whatever blurred or evolving genres students are inspired by and see fit to explore.

I advance a genre-based pedagogy for teaching the reading and writing of creative hypertext to enable teachers of hypertext to start from what they know and to provide them and their students with concrete terms and models. Such a pedagogy, especially if informed by recent scholarship on genre's flexible and rhetorical nature, requires students to make various choices not only about form but about compositional concerns: tone, diction, prose style, character development, plot, setting, visual design, and hypertext navigation strategies. (Source: from actual paper)