Everything Rhetorical and the Rhetoric of Everything

Rhetoric, Composition, Politics, Society, Culture, Etc.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Context for Final Project


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.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Story Board


Set up a wiki page with scholarly conversation about integrating new media instruction into composition classrooms:

Discuss:
·      access
·      technology
·      software
·      teacher resistance
·      using visual design capabilities to teach students to start seeing texts (Bernhardt, Wysocki) and designing the assignments they are already producing instead of just writing them
·      How this small shift toward document design represents an available step towards teaching new media because many of the same principles students learn by designing for print apply to designing in other modes and for digital media

Create the video:

Teaching new media with old texts: enabling student designers

Establishing Shot: Me working at my IMac

Turn to camera, Open with greeting and reference to the need for simple and accessible ways to make the assignments teachers already use sync with principles of new media and our digital environment. Discuss how nearly all texts are composed digitally, but teachers and students still treat computers like type-writers when computers allow for texts to be designed rather than simply typed.

With minimal effort, we can help students learn to think rhetorically about the materiality of their texts.

What a text looks like affects its rhetoric just as much as what it says, and the standard school paper doesn’t say good things. (Discuss interfaces-Wysocki) Interfaces like genres, or like texts themselves establish relationships and subjectivities, the school paper interface establishes students as perpetually erring trainees whose work is prepared for correction, and teachers as correctors and evaluators. How can we begin to change that?

Discuss: most designing done through high-powered desktop publishing programs like Adobe InDesign or Quark, but few students have access to these expensive large programs. Wordprocessing programs like Microsoft Word, however, have come a long way since the days when they were essentially digital typewriters. I’m going to show how Word’s publishing view feature can be used to design any standard assignment.

Video adjustments to MLA formatted school paper, going through the following subjects:

Typography—type as image, rhetoric of type, principles of choosing typefaces
Layout—Focal point, hierarchy, emphasis (size, weight, style, color, indent, outdent), whitespace, grids, margins, chunking, line-length, etc.
Adding Visuals
Visuals that explain type, 
Visuals explained by type,
Visuals that work with type to create something more than the sum of their parts.
Does size matter?
Thinking in Spreads/Making a magazine.