Teaching Rhetorical Literacy In A Visual Age: A Review of Picturing Texts
Lester Faigley, Diana George, Anna Palchik, and Cynthia Selfe
NY: Norton, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-97912-1 $46.88 pp. 640
Review by Paul Michael Rogers
If composition is "concerned with the way written texts come to be and the way they are used in the home, school, workplace, and public worlds we all inhabit" (Lunsford 80) then Picturing Texts is a composition textbook for today. Much more than a repackaged rhetoric and reader, Picturing Texts responds structurally and substantively to the way visual texts have come to surround us, and provides students and teachers with rhetorical tools to enter the arena of what Gunther Kress has called "multimodal composition" (Kress). As Lester Faigley, Diana George, Anna Palchik, and Cynthia Selfe suggest, "Personal computers, digital cameras, and camcorders have given us the capability of producing texts with images, audio, and video that would have required teams of designers and technicians just a few years ago" (8). Picturing Texts combines these new – and exciting – possibilities with the practical literate aims of composition instruction, against a backdrop of growing interest in New Literacy Studies, visual literacy, and a new emphasis on graphical ways of thinking and representation in various domains of academic discourse (Lankshear and Knobel). Together these practical and theoretical factors make Picturing Texts an important and timely resource for composition instructors today.
Rhetorical Knowledge Critical Thinking: Reading, and Writing Processes Knowledge of Conventions A Final Word
UC Santa Barbara
While popular culture is an important subject in Picturing Texts – a common feature of many contemporary composition readers – the emphasis the authors place on composing visual texts invites a different response than the typical pop-culture based reader. Rather than just evaluating, analyzing, and critiquing visual arguments, Picturing Texts uniquely emphasizes the possibility of students’ taking control of the tools of design and persuasion for themselves. As Cheryl Ball writes in the preface to the very helpful instructor’s guide, "Picturing Texts offers three strategies to help students expand their notions of composing verbal and visual texts – writing about visuals, writing with visuals, and writing that is visual" (vii). As a composition instructor it is this rhetorical agency in composing all sorts of texts, as well as honoring the literate practices students bring with them to the classroom I appreciate most about Picturing Texts.
At first glance Picturing Texts is striking for its over 250 high resolution images which serve as subjects for analysis, and "models of effective communication and what students themselves can do" (xiv). Yet, it is the instructionally-oriented rhetorical content as well as 40+ readings focusing on "the visual in the context of composition" which are, if not at the center of Picturing Texts, foregrounded off to the side – just as the yellow text of the title runs boldly down the side of the cover. The readings come from a wide spectrum of authorial views, including Poet Laureate Billy Collins' imagistic and humorous poem "Litany," (187); Bruce Grierson's (Founder of Ad Busters) examination of changes in advertising strategies entitled "Shock's Next Wave" (134-41); cultural critic bell hooks' discussion of ‘visual politics’ called "In our Glory: Photography and Black Life" (175-83); and Scott McCloud's "Through the Door: Digital Production" (68-76), a cartoon essay on the role of computers in design. The diverse readings provide open doors into more detailed and complex thinking about the many facets and impacts of texts on our lives in the information age. Together the readings, images, and rhetorical features of each text invite the reader, as the authors explain in the Preface, to participate through active composition in our "information saturated society" (xii).
As is common to almost all composition reader/rhetorics, Picturing Texts includes numerous writing assignments, as well as invitations to respond with visual texts. Following each reading the authors also provide questions which encourage critical reading and analysis to respond to verbal and visual texts with visual texts, familiar essay style writing prompts, web links to related resources, as well as ideas for multimedia projects and digital design, for example, designing brands, menus, and photo ads. Furthermore, many of the visual texts make great prompts in themselves for writing or in class discussion, such as the juxtaposition of the soldiers raising the U.S. flag at Iwo Jima and the firefighters raising the U.S. flag at Ground Zero following September 11th (99), or Edward Hopper's 1942 classic painting of American noir, Nighthawks (116).
I approached Picturing Texts with an eye toward being sure it would help me fulfill my teaching goals by using the framework of The WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition. This touchstone document serves as a guideline for many writing programs and lends itself to the local formulation of goals for individual composition courses. The Statement is divided into four categories: Rhetorical Knowledge; Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing; Processes; and Knowledge of Conventions. Picturing Texts addresses these dimensions of composition courses remarkably well, while pushing at the boundaries of traditional composition with a broad perspective on texts, reading, and writing.
The WPA Outcomes Statement suggests that
By the end of the first year composition, students should be able to focus on a purpose, respond to the needs of different audiences, respond appropriately, and use conventions of format and structure appropriate to different kinds of rhetorical situations, adopt appropriate voice, tone, and level of formality, understand how genres shape reading and writing, and write in several genres.
In this category Picturing Texts far exceeded my expectations and adequately addresses the outcomes suggested by the WPA. Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 explicitly focus on issues of audience, genre, and purpose as they relate to inventing arguments and texts. Not only this, but the first chapter introduces balance, classification, comparison contrast, description, emphasis, metaphor, narration, pattern, point of view, proportion, and unity as tools available to the student in composition. This rhetorical component of the text is integrated throughout and culminates in the last chapter of the book, "Designing Texts." This chapter reinforces and clarifies previous discussions related to audience, purpose, genre, medium, organization, readability, images, graphics, charts and layout within a composition framework. Picturing Texts also includes elements usually left out of composition courses, such as thinking rhetorically about type, typefaces, fonts, line spacing, justification, color, layout, and headings. This rhetorical approach to composing texts that focus on visual design and delivery of text is indeed the great strength of Picturing Texts.
The WPA Outcomes Statement proposes that
By the end of first year composition students should: use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating; understand a writing assignment as a series of tasks, including finding, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate primary and secondary sources; integrate their own ideas with those of others; understand the relationships among language, knowledge, and power.
Throughout Picturing Texts the authors supply not only the scaffolding necessary to make these outcomes attainable in a first-year composition course, but by including so many provocative images, they provide immediate stimulus for students' critical thinking and class discussion. And, by including the visual within the domain of what we read, the authors are asking students to take a more critical eye toward the world around them. For example, in Chapter 6, entitled "Picturing Arguments," students are invited to look at Turnabout Map of North and South America upside down (designed by Jesse Levine), and investigate the political relationships and activities that a traditional view of the world – with the United States in the center of the map – instantiate, as well as the effect of seeing the map "as an argument for one way of seeing the world" (403). Picturing Text forces us to question traditional ways of seeing the world just as Levine's map does.
In the processes category The WPA Outcomes Statement suggests thatStudents should be aware that it usually takes multiple drafts to create and complete a successful text; develop flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proofreading; understand writing as an open process that permits writers to use later invention and rethinking to revise their work; understand the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes; learn to critique their own and others’ works; learn to balance the advantages of relying on others with the responsibility of doing their part; use a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences.
When it comes to the teaching and learning of writing process, Picturing Texts outdoes most composition textbooks while powerfully addressing the aims of the WPA outcomes, if in nothing else by the sheer variety of technologies the authors employ in their suggested assignment prompts. Moreover, the majority of the prompts explicitly describe multiple specific audiences and scaffold work and projects in stages. Assignments include business cards, scrapbooks, Web design, photography, sketching, digital photo editing, visual narratives, as well as reflective, interpretive, analytical, and critical essays. Of course, the teacher's knowledge and access to software, hardware, and time will play a large role in how many processes and strategies can be effectively made available to students.
Picturing Texts does lack the more traditional content related to academic writing such as an emphasis on revision, conventions, and the specific genre conventions of the typical first year composition course, and it certainly would need to be healthily supplemented in order to guide the conversation toward traditional activities of essay writing such as editing, using invention strategies, following APA or MLA style conventions, and developing appropriate structures for the intended thesis. However, as disciplines integrate visual arguments into their discourse conventions, Picturing Texts will be more conventional in academic discourse practices.
The final section of The WPA Outcomes Statement proposes thatby the end of first year composition, students should: Learn common formats for different kinds of texts; develop knowledge of genre conventions ranging from structure and paragraphing to tone and mechanics; practice appropriate means of documenting their work; control such surface features as syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
For the authors of Picturing Texts, "genre" represents an important way of thinking about all kinds of texts. Perhaps no other composition textbook I have examined is as consistent. The authors present genre as "A term common in the arts, [that] refers to a specific type of category of production" (510). In Chapter 7 the authors show how a student begins in one genre, the article, but chooses a brochure to better reach her audience, and how revisions within that genre then further help her to accomplish her rhetorical purpose. Teachers, however, will need to make the link to academic genres, the purpose for which they are used, and how to respond to conventions, such as structure, form, tone, mechanics, documentation and other features of writing that fall within the purview of these genres.
Picturing Texts is beautifully presented, and its focus on images and the visual text is not a gimmick covering for a lack of substance; rather, Picturing Texts sets a high standard for the visually-oriented composition texts which are sure to follow. As multimodal communication becomes more recognized within business, media, and the academy, a first-hand investigation of rhetorical literacy, and the ways in which the world is symbolically constructed around us will be essential. Picturing Texts makes visible many of the choices and practices available to students in response to this world of visual arguments and texts. Faigley, George, Palchik, and Selfe have advanced the teaching of composition by offering ways of thinking effectively and communicating strategically, while presenting more options and means of persuasion to students.
Works Cited
Ball, Cheryl. Instructor’s Guide Picturing Texts. NY: Norton, 2004.
Council of Writing Program Administrators. "WPA Outcomes Statement." 30 March 2003. Fall/Winter 1999. http://www.wpacouncil.org/positions/outcomes.html.
Lankshear, Colin and Michele Knobel. New Literacies. Philadelphia: Open UP, 2003.
Lunsford, Andrea. "Rhetoric and Composition." Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures. Ed. Joseph Gibaldi. NY: MLA, 1992.
Kress, Gunther. Literacy in the New Media Age. London: Routledge, 2003.