- Technology: “Every writing technology nears visible traces of earlier writing technologies in its design and in how writers use it; typically, it also believes traces of the assumptions bound to earlier technologies and to historical world views that may no longer apply. In the introduction of many writing instruments, in the ways we use those instruments, in the assumptions we make about readers and writings, in the genres that evolve, even in the particular textual innovations (the table of contents, the appendix, the home page) that we subsequently realize, we are always mirroring, echoing, or resisting the technologies that came before…Why shape a computer screen as square? Why put a computer on a desk at all?” (63).
- Composer: “a rhetorical understanding of genealogy grants us rhetoricians new perspective on how the local memories of a single computer user cohere with the ‘erudite knowledge’ of his immediate academic discourse community to create a idiosyncratic composing style, as style haunted by that user’s past experiences with family, school, computer and writing, as well as by his self-concept as a writer and his received evaluations of his writing. A rhetorical analysis that emphasizes the important of medial hauntings nudges us to look more deeply at how memory inheres discursive choices made by a composer at a computer – and his choice to compose at a computer at all” (52).
With this, Sloane argues that “writing is an iterative process not only in a single user’s cycling though different stages of invention, writing, and revision; writing is also an intellectual and emotional activity of splicing together prior selves, understandings, and experiences” (52).