Possible Critiques of this Pedagogical Approach

DS: One critique of the way we designed this class that you might anticipate from another writing instructor or from an administrator is, "This is a writing class. What are you doing talking about visual communication? What are you doing talking about photographs? What are you doing talking about color schemes, and design issues, and typography, and the advantages of sans serif fonts?" And things like that. While we would probably have slightly different answers to that question, I think both George and I really saw all of these things as an extension of rhetoric and as an extension of the fundamental goal of communicating with an audience.

And looking around, what you see is that writing increasingly occurs in contexts where it's not operating by itself. It's operating in conjunction, it's co-operating with other media components. It's co-operating with photographs and it's taking place in an environment that's intensely designed, where people have made choices about color and arrangement. And the writing means something different because it's in this context, and because these photographs, and other design and media elements are also present. In some cases, the other media is communicating the bulk of the message. In some cases, the photograph or the digital video clip is communicating more effectively and is handling more of the communicative function than the writing itself.

So we begin from a rhetorical base, from a rhetorical perspective that says, "I'm a communicator and I want to communicate a message to a particular audience for a particular reason and I have certain goals, a purpose, for communicating this message. I want them to do something. I want them to consider certain perspectives. I want them to reflect on certain things." So, we saw this as totally consistent with the mission of a traditional writing course.

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