Hesse argues that we shouldn’t get rid of essayistic literacy and focus only on network literacy. Instead, we should incorporate both. First, he argues that we misunderstand literacy. Often, we understand essay as “a generic term for all works of prose nonfiction short enough to be read in a single setting” (35). He defines easy as “render[ing] the shape of thinking, not of thought. Form in an essay is not dictated by conventions of deductive logic or formal convention but rather by the author’s attempt to create a satisfying and finished verbal artifact out of the materials at hand” (37). He emphasizes specifically the essays form and content is driven by “the [single] author’s experience and consciousness in pursuit of an idea” and that essays work toward a finished product (the finished product works toward closure). Also, essayists work on drawing associations and connections, but they do so with more than just juxtaposition; “it falls on the essayist to explain why he or she had referred to those texts, to narrate the relation of those writings to one another or to the essayist’s experience or to the ideas being developed” (41). Network literacy, on the other hand, is “reading and writing not continuous and ‘self-contained’ linear texts but rather distributed, context-embedded, spatial texts” whose writers make connections by simply showing and juxtaposing rather than explaining or analyzing. Hesse argues that essayist literacy is still important because they require “intellectual work” and offers potential interpretations or conclusions. He does not believe that network literacy does this; it offers connections with no explanation require and doesn’t require one to work toward any time of suggested closure.
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