In 1986, Stephen A. Bernhardt published an article in College Composition and Communication titled “Seeing the Text” calling for composition teachers to recognize the visual nature of texts and to begin to teach students to consider the rhetoric of visual design in the texts they produce. Since then, an ever growing number of researchers have urged the incorporation of visual rhetoric and multimodal composition into classrooms (Clark, Hill, Lanham, Selfe). Ignoring for the moment arguments over the need to teach students to create and edit video or audio texts, or web-sites, wikis, and blogs, it is becoming increasingly clear that Bernhardt’s vision of a future “[i]nfluenced especially by the growth of electronic media, strategies of rhetorical organization will move increasingly toward visual patterns presented on screens and interpreted through visual as well as verbal syntax,” has been realized(103–5). Indeed, it is hard to argue with Charles A. Hill when he notes that “it would be difficult to deny the importance of electronic and other visual media in today’s society” (107). Today a large percentage, if not most, texts produced outside of our classrooms require the use of at least some visual rhetoric, and, in fact, texts have always been visual (Elkins 91, Mitchell 5–6).
Bernhardt and others (Trimbur, Wysocki “Opening New Media,” “What Should Be” ) have long urged us to recognize the materiality of texts. Hill asserts that it is “missguided” to think “that we could ever draw a distinct line between the visual and the verbal, or that concentrating on one can or should require ignoring the other” (109). Despite that all texts communicate visually as well as symbolically through language, many composition classrooms still require students to produce texts that ignore visual design. Bernhardt’s 1986 criticism that “[i]nstead of helping students learn to analyze a situation and determine an appropriate form, given a certain audience and purpose, many writing assignments merely exercise the same sort of writing week after week, introducing only topical variation” is as true now as it was 25 years ago. Students need to be able to think rhetorically about design, but the texts they are asked to write in composition course which, as Hill notes, may be “the only real exposure to rhetorical theory and principles that [students] will have” mostly ignore visual rhetoric. Some composition textbooks still, if they include visual rhetoric at all, only treat the visual as something to be analyzed and then written about in purely alphabetic texts (Ramage, Bean, & Johnson; Kennedy, Kennedy, & Muth).
This is a case where our pedagogy may be completely and unnecessarily out of synch with the needs of our students. Perhaps Hill says it best when he argues:
What many people fail to understand is that visual elements are powerful and essential features of almost any writtin text. Even when all of the propositional content is expressed in verbal form, the design of the page or the screen on which the text resides, the relative location and proximity of textual elements, and even the font used can not only enhance readability, but be part of the message that is conveyed. Overall, the visual aspects of writing can have as much to do with the effectiveness of one’s message as choosing an appropriate tone or sentence structure. (122)
The material nature of all texts and the effects of visual elements on rhetoric are an important part of composition. While much work in new media has focused on digital texts, video, and audio (see Selfe), the need to include visual rhetoric in our classes goes beyond arguments over the nead to incorporate new assignments that ask students to compose videos, webpages, audio texts, etc. Scholars like Bernhardt, Hill, and Wysocki have demonstrated the need to pay attention to the visual rhetoric and material nature of the texts our students already produce.
As Wysocki argues, the “results of digitality ought to encourage us to consider not only the potentialities of material choices for digital texts but for any text we make, and that we ought to use the range of choices digital technologies seem to give us” (“Opening New Media” 10). Some of those digital technologies are the ones students now use to compose nearly every text they produce. Our students are using computers to write, so why are they limited to creating texts that might as well have been written on a typewriter? Hill notes that “general-education writing courses pay almost no attention to issue of page design. By specifying a particular format and font…in their assignments, instructors control issues of design, and therefore prentend that these issues don’t matter” (122). Rather than ignoring design and the visual, material reality of texts, our students need us to help them learn to make effective design choices when composing includig the incorporation of visual elements.
Hill correctly notes that “by leaving design elements a nonissue in our courses, we leave students unprepared to analyze visual elements as readers and to use them effectively as writers” (122). He goes on to note that this situation is not only unacceptable but also unnecessary, noting “[n]ow that digital technologies have given all writers the ability to easily manipulate design elements in their tets, it is past time for teachers of writing to begin to pay serious attention to the communicative and rhetorical aspects of page and screen design” (122–3). It is with the intent of helping us and our students begin to give this “serious attention” to visual rhetoric that I prepared the following video tutorial. While many attemtps to include new media in the classroom are met with constaints on access to technology and ignorance regarding software, incorporating visual rhetoric into the classroom can be done with only some instruction in visual rhetoric and design, the assignments students already complete, and a little training with the software most of us already use to create our texts. The following tutorial demonstrates how to turn the wordprocessing software Microsoft Word, available on nearly every computer in every computer lab on every campus and most home computers, into a powerful design tool. This should provide a helpful tool for both teachers and students as we begin to pay more attention to the visual rhetoric of design and the interfaces (Wysocki “What should be”) of the texts students already produce.
