I almost hand-wrote this in HTML, but this handy WordPress UI does such a good job of visualizing what my text will look like as I read it, i thought, “why bother?”

In all seriousness, though, the coding vs writing tension still resonates with me because I see code languages as writing languages, but I now, nearly 15 years after this debate was in full swing, wonder if that’s enough. Yes, people write with them, but how much of the learning to write with them is the equivalent of learning proper grammar so the machine will properly interpret your code, for instance? If what we’re teaching is communication and “critical thinking,” does knowing the proper syntax for HTML contribute to that directly? Probably as much as grammar does to English, which is to say a lot, but in ways that are imperceptible to the reader unless it’s wrong, and modern FYC tends to only cover grammar when absolutely necessary. So the question I’m left with is, why would we do that so much for markup languages like HTML, for instance?

I think the answer lies in the fact that significantly fewer students come to FYC knowing HTML than English, as it represents a weakness in their functional literacy in the 21st century which, we keep telling ourselves, will ultimately draw up lines of power between those who can “code” and those who can’t (like us). Ergo, teaching coding and web markup can be seen as part of our charge to prepare students for writing in their lives henceforth.

If I seem super cynical on this point, it’s probably because I want to keep myself invested in the argument by questioning myself. I particularly sympathize with the Mauriello, Pagnucci, and Winner piece and it’s lamentation of class time lost to technical instruction in search of expanding the domain of composition, and the need to create research networks to work on the problem. When I teach my Minecraft narrative remediation assignment, I routinely lose 2-3 class periods overall to technical problems, either with firewall, backup, or networking issues, and I have to constantly remind myself that it’s in service of the students’ enhanced literacy that views language, narrative, and code together and not separated, not just for their good but for the (STEM) disciplines they will go into. At a time when people are worried for the future of the humanities in the face of STEM dominance and corporatization of the University (and if you’re not than you should be), I think teaching with digital composition mediums, particularly game design, is one of the better defensive moves composition can make to not only a) show relevance of humanities to STEM but b) keep humanities values, like critical thinking, argumentation, ethics, emotion, and logic, alive in STEM, which is what we really want, at the end of the day. Instead of retreating back to text-and-text writing, purposeful integration of technology into humanities will achieve integration of humanities into tech via the students that join the STEM workforces. In that paradigm, we are “contributing” on par with technical instruction. If we treat our own field as a “service” that provides “value added” to STEM fields by teaching writing divorced from “weird” composition mediums, there will be nothing to stop administration from fully transforming humanities professors and adjuncts into contingent labor, replaceable with the drop of a hat.