"Yes"Perhaps you have given up trying to convince your students about the shrewd opportunism--if not wisdom--of conforming to academic standards and expectations. You may have become demoralized by reading through too many recycled papers disfigured by error, and exhausted by trying to untangle students' convoluted, cliched distortions of texts you love. Discussing, instead, "the myriad visual elements of contemporary American experience" sounds like a lot more fun. If so, don't confuse your students even more by also assigning companion texts like Diana Hacker's A Writer's Reference, another Bedford publication. In it, students will be told to avoid the "misuse of abbreviations" such as "&" (295-6) and, to be "on the safe side," not to split infinitives (106-7). If they ignore these injunctions, which ones should they follow?However, you might be admirably, but in somewhat misguided fashion, concerned about providing formal opportunities for your students to experiment with various alternatives and thereby extend their range of expression by developing rhetorical flexibility. This is a slippery slope. If today's text for discussion, let alone emulation, is this unreadable mess about Seeing & Writing from Bedford Books, tomorrow it might be MTV, or something more sinister. There are real opportunity costs. A ten-week term having conversations with students about orange crate labels and Marilyn Manson's album covers is a ten-week term not practising the skills of coherent exposition and persuasive argument with a good textbook like Good Reasons by Lester Faigley and Jack Selzer (Allyn and Bacon, 2000). Their 28-page chapter on "Effective Visual Design" is worth more than the McQuades' whole book. Moreover, if composition instruction is reduced to Seeing & Writing, many of our colleagues in Media Studies, Popular Culture, Film Studies, Art, and even the softer, "informatics," branches of Computer Science, will be quite happy to relieve us of this responsibility, and the campus resources (FTE and credit hour accounting) that accompany required, lower-division, general education courses. ("Computer science?" you may ask incredulously. Yes. Consider Edward Tufte's various books on visualizing information and his Yale department, Computer Science.) There is nothing in Seeing & Writing that suggests that a course assigning it must be taught in an English, or even a Humanities, department. Let us not renounce our own hard-won professional expertise as writing instructors so easily. Let us build on it, confident in the value to students of learning how to write clear, correct, artfully organized and rhetorically sensitive prose. As the title words of Dale Dougherty (publisher of Web Review) say, "Don't Forget to Write. Graphics May Get Attention but Good Writing Rewards It." Wait. I'm reconsidering. Maybe I wouldn't accept it, after all, so, "No." Get me back to the Re-view. Get me back to the very beginning.
by Ellen Strenski, University of California, Irvine |