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last.updated 12.2.07

 


Digital & Visual Rhetoric

Purpose

Digital writing technologies–for better or for worse–are changing the ways that we communite with each other. In many instances they are making the boundaries between oral, visual, and verbal communication more visible and raising questions about what writing is. As we define digital and visual rhetoric, we will explore the scope of their application for the composition classroom.

Before Class

  • Read Selber "Rhetorical Literacy" [BB]
  • Read DeVoss & Porter "Why Napster Matters to Writing" [Computers and Composition 23.2]
  • Read Buchanan "Rhetoric, Humanism, and Design" [BB]
  • Read Wysocki "with eyes that think..." [BB]


FreeWrite

We are going to return to the freewrite from the first day of class: What is rhetoric? And should there be a connection between rhetoric and the composition classroom?

Questions and Discussion (by Leslie Norris)

  • Buchanan explains that “the discipline of design…empowers individuals to explore the diverse qualities of personal experience and to shape the common qualities of community experience” (233). DeVoss and Porter argue that “people do not make new works out of nothing,” but “borrow and intertextually stitch and massage fragments into new works,” (193). Reflecting on Buchanan’s statements, the statements made by DeVoss and Porter, or other readings for this week, how should educators define plagiarism?
  • Because the Internet “was originally created and has been paid for by U.S. citizens’ tax dollars (DeVoss and Porter 191),” to what extent should works delivered via the Web be protected by copyright and/or fair use laws?
  • Please clarify Lunsford’s concept of “alternative forms of agency and ways of owning” that shifts “from owning to owning up; from rights and entitlements to responsibilities [. . .] and answerability; from a sense of the self as radically individual to the self as always in relation” (qtd. in DeVoss and Porter 199).
  • Considering the potential rhetorical value of design, what steps should educators take in the classroom to enable and encourage students to integrate visual design elements with their printed texts?
  • How might, or to what extent should, educators address the fifth cannon “delivery” in the writing classroom?
  • What methods would you employ to explain to students how to apply rhetorical concepts to the analysis of visual works?
  • If you could design an assignment for students that integrated visual design, what would be the elements and requirements of that assignment?
  • Reflecting on Selber, what should composition teachers do—if anything—to prepare their students to demonstrate a response to our service-oriented culture as well as addresses rhetorical scholarship?