ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors—a professor and an undergraduate teaching assistant—analyze the results of a study of students who had taken an undergraduate seminar in digital writing in 2015–2017. The study examines how students’ digital reading and writing practices impacted their emerging definitions of “authorship” and whether digitally mediated practices in the undergraduate classroom helped students move from being primarily digital readers to identifying as digital writers with enhanced rhetorical sensitivity. Although most students entered the seminar seeing themselves as explicitly outside the category of “author,” many came to expand their definitions of authorship—both general and personal. Students forged definitions of authorship that included collaboration with others to compose nontraditional products (digital texts), and, at the same time, they often embraced traditional “individual genius” authorship paradigms. The authors of this chapter argue that students’ adherence to these two contradictory epistemologies is a sign of their intellectual engagement with the concepts of authorship and with implications of the world of digital texts that they inhabit.
