Making a Hypertext (Without a Computer!)
An in-class writing prompt
What you'll need:
- A whole mess of notecards. (A good ballpark number would be to multiply each person doing the exercise by six.)
- A short piece of writing. Doesn't really matter what kind. Something to kick everything off, preferably a narrative, a story of some kind works well, something with a person, maybe even a setting. We'll call this the "Starter Piece."
- For every student, underline a word, sentence, or phrase in the Starter Piece. That is to say, every student should have the same Starter Piece, but no student should have the same thing underlined in their Starter Piece
- Ask the students to freewrite on a notecard, using whatever is underlined in their version of the Starter Piece as inspiration. Think of the underlined portion as the "link" to another portion of the text. They can continue the narrative of the Starter Piece if they Like, or let their creativity send them in another direction.
- When they've finished with the notecard, ask them to underline one sentence, phrase, or word on the notecard. Then all the students trade cards.
- Ask the students to begin writing on a new notecard. For inspiration, they should look at whatever is underlined in the notecard just given to them. Again, they should think of this as a "link" to another portion of the text.
- Continue this process for as many cycles as you want. (If you realty want to put something on the web, it would be smart to number each note card to indicate where the links are going.)
- Discussion: The idea here is to get students thinking about the connections we make in our heads while reading narratives. Did they have a story in mind? Did they try to shape the story to fit their ideas? Or were they totally tabula rosa?
- If you're really ambitious. Collect all the notecards and shuffle them thoroughly. Then pass them back out to the students. Ask them to put their cards in the sequence that makes the most narrative sense. See what happens.
