The Next Wave: Making Rhetoric Visible (Visual Rhetoric?)

Most writing textbooks  attend to rhetorical considerations, especially audience and purpose.  Few, however, consider the medium as part of the rhetorical situation, choosing instead to relegate it to a separate chapter on design, often as an add-on, something to be considered only after a piece has been composed, thereby forcing the writer to force his or her work (square pegs?) to fit the requirements of specific forms (round holes?).  Perhaps, by beginning with what students already know, and relating it (rhetorically) to what they need to know, we can ensure that both form and content work together to successfully achieve the writer's goals—regardless of the technologies he or she may be faced with in the future.

We can teach our students to hand-code HTML or to use a WYSIWYG Web editor, we can teach them to create or manipulate graphics, and we can teach them about intellectual property and design issues.  We can teach them to structure their arguments to suit their purposes and the needs of their audiences, and we can teach them to determine how their choices impact their readers—and we can do all of this without students ever composing an original sentence in print (perhaps).  But one sticking point, of course, is that we must justify what it is we do in the classroom—to our students, our colleagues, and the world at large.  Obviously our students must still learn to work with traditional forms; how do we convince our students, their parents, and our colleagues that learning to hand-code HTML will help them with, for instance, a timed essay exam in history or philosophy? And how do we justify teaching students to create graphics in a writing class, or to "author" videos or use real-time voice chat?  One easy answer (perhaps) is that composition is not a "service course."  That is, our job is not to prepare students to write timed essays for standardized tests or essay exams.

In my third-year pre-tenure review portfolio, I included printouts of student Web projects.  My colleagues asked to see more "traditional" work—essays with hand-written comments.  And, of course, my students are expected to pass the Regents' Test, a timed essay writing for which instruction in the five-paragraph essay format would better prepare them.  But our students have been born into a world where communication is—and for them always has been—multimediated, hypertextual, digitized, electronic, and interactive. They are already sharing files, communicating with peers, and conducting research (such as it is) online. Traditional linear essay writing is, for them, an academic exercise, one they cannot relate to the real world of communication of ideas.  Anne Ruggles Gere notes:  "As we consider our own roles of social agency we can insist more firmly on the democracy of writing and the need to enact pedagogies that permit connections and communication with the communities outside classroom walls" (289).  While Gere was not directly addressing technology in the writing classroom, nonetheless, I would extend her comments to argue that we should turn on the television, turn on Instant Messengers and hyperlinks, and, perhaps by so doing, turn on our students' ability to make those connections and to communicate both in and out of academia. But how do we do this in an era of ever-more increased attention to assessment? What we are left with, then, is the nagging question,

"Yes, but can they write?"

To the end Works Cited