Throughout the chapter the authors have a dialogue – intermixed with quotations from other sources – about the "new essay." They make the following arguments about the new essay:
- It is "a place where multiple ways of knowing our combined, collage – like: a site where alternatives are at least as valuable as single – voiced, hierarchically – argued, master narratives" (90).
- "The new essay seems to have its own logic: intuitive, associative, emergent, dialogic, multiple – one grounded in working together and in re/presenting that working together. At the same time, it offers in an aesthetic that gives writers permission to expose and explore the disconnects as they develop the plot of a given piece – and permission to dramatize those disconnects, this process, in the concrete formatting choices they have made (e.g., multiple fonts, shifting margins, etc.)" (90).
- "The texts usually have multiple authors, they're hyperlinked to other sites, they invite readers to contribute, and so on. Their tacit theory seems to be that the ethos of the net is a 'collaborative' one, probably understood" (91)
- "Still, some of the traces and conventions of the old essay...-especially those that emphasize 'a lowering of high forms through mixture with conversational modes, and the heightening of low forms through the inclusion of elevated intellectual content' (Prince, 736) – are what we hope for in the new essay" (93-4).
- "Differences in media will produce different kinds of writing and different reading processes" (94).
- Collaboration "heightens the sense of connection among collaborators: the individual disintegrates as the group integrates, and you begin to see, in small, the large constructivist vision of interconnection" (95). "The resistance to collaboration [in America] seems linked to intervention. The jazz quartet plays: it doesn't compose. We expect the self to compose. We want the grades we earn ourselves. If this is right, then the project would be to help co-authors see themselves – as – self. Not just see: invent" (97). "[W]hat is written grows out of the collective intelligence, and it reflects the dynamic exchange between individual knowledge and shared knowledge" (99).
- “Re-thinking text as multi-pathed and multi-voiced leads us to alternative strategies for finding coherence, or even redefining coherence' (Baston)...[C]oherence isn't universal, but situated, varying according to the choices and sophistication of the writer...The coherence any reader will create in a piece is, as Phelps suggests, set in motion by an author, but it is re-created by the reader; thus, it is a joint creation. It will vary according to the genre of the text, the authorship, the readership. It is, in a word, rhetorical" (100-1).
- "The computer plays an important role when it comes to the organization of knowledge in the conceptual artifact we create" (103). "The role of the computer and fostering new essay is central" (105). "We have to exploit (for fulfill? master? indwell?) The technology, not just use it" (112).
- "Association you can get in print classic, actually, whereas multi-linear is supposed [to] be in hypertext. Though as with you and I have traded notes, we learned that we read hypertextually – from the dipping into chapters in an edited collection to the locating the source in a reference to reading the last chapter first in a mystery. Hypertextual reading isn't all that new. Our awareness of it, our deliberately structuring text to produce this kind of role: those are" (106). "So it's not like such texts are strange to read. They are strange to write" (109).
- "Without an assessment that's congruent with the pedagogy, we only pay lip service to new pedagogy...We require students to work together, then we ask them to parse out what they did (because we don't trust them, and they don't trust each other), and then we ask each student to submit his or her own document. We assign collaboration: we assess individuation. And students know it; no wonder they don't want to collaborate. So maxim/principle one: the assessment has to fit the pedagogy. Maxim/principle two: the pedagogy has to fit the textuality" (110)
“It seems to me that in the new essay (call it what you will) we are arguing for a hybrid textuality that crosses genres in two ways. First, it includes poetic and rhetoric, privileging neither, invoking each that they might together express what cannot be represented without the other. Such an essay mixes the conventions governing narrative, exposition, and pattern, in its effort to invite multiple readings: aesthetic ones as well as the efferent. Second, we see a link between online and off; such linkage isn't required, but fruitful...The crossing of these media invites...playfulness, eloquence, and self – dramatization. Such crossings, then, and invite another authorial identity" (114).