#7.

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. "Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key." College Composition and Communication. 56.2 (2004): 297-328. Print.

George, Diana. "From Analysis to Design: Visual Communication in the Teaching of Writing." College Composition and Communication 54.1 (Sept. 2002): 11-39

Selfe, Cynthia L. "The Movement of Air, The Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing." College Composition and Communication. 60.4 (2009): 616-663. Print.

Hesse, Doug. "Response to Cynthia L. Selfe's 'The Movement of Air, The Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing.'" College Composition and Communication. 61.3 (2010): 602-605. Print.

Selfe, Cynthia L. "Response to Doug Hesse" College Composition and Communication. 61.3 (2010): 606-611. Print.

To begin, while I thought the content of Yancey’s article, “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key”, was interesting, I had a hard time reading it due to her the choices she made while making. The text looked jumbled to me, with bold quotes and questions and footnotes along the right side of the text rather than the bottom. I wasn’t sure, at first, if she was following the tradition of pulling out key quotes from her text for more attention—I quickly realized that she was remediating the footnote. A key thing that I took away from Yancey (other than that I, as a reader, have trouble negotiating texts when too many things are happening because I’m not sure what I should be reading and in which order—thank you, #Slatin) was her notion of composition. She writes, “we already inhabit a model of communication practices incorporating multiple genres related to each other, those multiple genres remediated across time and space, linked one to the next circulating across and around rhetorical situations both inside and outside school. This is composition—and this is the content of composition” (308). Since starting this class in August, I’ve had the question of where our classrooms end, and, in Yancey’s view, it seems as though they don’t. Our students are always learning new writing genres on their own, outside of school—it is only our direct consciousness over their process that ends when they leave our physical (or online) classrooms.

George’s article followed the tradition I previously mentioned of pulling out key quotes/crucial information for more attention. I actually read George before Yancey because the link on our course schedule isn’t working and I googled to find Yancey’s article—this order of reading probably has affected my interpretation. Anyway, George’s overall argument was that “the terms of debate typical in discussions of visual literacy and the teaching of writing have limited the kinds of assignments we might imagine for composition” (11). I agree with this, especially after thinking about the traditional alphabetic forms of assessment (mentioned in Yancey’s article) that we grow up with. Being a student that tests poorly, I violently agree with the notion that being assessed in a strictly alphabetic way in both classrooms and standardized tests is both limiting and stunting. George argues, “our students have a much richer imagination for what we might accomplish with the visual than our journals have yet to address” (12). She also delves into Lauer’s question of “what do we call it?” and Kirschenbaum’s question of defining our field.

The Selfe-Hesse-Selfe discussion was also pretty interesting in the sense that George discussed visual arguments—that is, arguments that “make a claim or assertion and attempt to sway an audience by offering reasons to accept that claim… primarily through the visual” (30)—Selfe delves into aural composition, arguing that “the relationship between aurality and writing has limited our understanding of composing as a multimodal rhetorical activity and has therefore deprived our students of a way to make meaning” (616). I agree with Selfe—students are not only in a culture obsessed with the visual, but also with the aural. She explains her goal in looking at aural scholarship, writing, “I hope to encourage teachers to develop an increasingly thoughtful understanding of a whole range of modalities and semiotic resources in their assignments and then to provide students the opportunities of developing expertise with all available means of persuasion and expression, so that they can function as literate citizens in a world where communications cross geopolitical, cultural, and linguistic borders and are enriched rather than diminished by semiotic dimensionality” (618). I see this notion of molding citizens in certain ways to be very Foucaultian. I feel the main thing that I learned from reading the Selfe-Hesse-Selfe discussion was a better sense of how to define what we do, which is a question Hesse posed. He asked, “Is our field “rhetoric/composing” or is it “writing/composing?” Selfe answered in her 2010 article, writing, “[rhetoric/composing] suggests an openness to multiple modalities of rhetorical expression…a literacy education focused solely on writing will produce citizens with an overly narrow and exclusionary understanding of the world and the variety of audiences who will read and respond to their work” (606).

After synthesizing and negotiating the readings, I guess I can say that my biggest take away is this: multimodality is an equalizer and a way to prepare students for the culture they participate within. As intimidating as I sometimes find multimodal projects, I can’t disagree with this. Multimodal projects and scholarship ask students to synthesize information in a way that plays to their strengths.