English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

Per one of the discussion questions, I got to thinking that maybe the real issue isn’t as specific as should we/and how do we incorporate more visual rhetoric into the composition class. At least not for me. As George asserts, it’s probably a bad idea to if your justification is merely holding student interest or making the class more “fun.” Don’t get me wrong, I believe these are great things to strive for, just not good enough for the sole base of a pedagogy. I think the real issue is how can we create assignments that better reflect the composing processes that students are all ready participating in and simultaneously help them better understand and interpret the arguments that surround their daily lives. I don’t feel the tired ol’ academic essay fits any of these requirements. The world does not come at them in the form of well-wrought and logically-based essays, it comes at them in a wash of visuals, text, emotion, and desire. They don’t sit down to make sense of/or contribute to this interplay by writing an essay, but many of them compose in multimedia environments on a daily basis (have you seen the loving visual rhetoric some teens put into their Myspace pages!).

The issue is: why try to start from scratch? Students are composing all the time and interacting with compositions all the time—just not the kind traditional composition classes have insisted they must value. And I’m not sure why these things—like the traditional essay—are so valued. I don’t know myself, so I certainly have never been able to explain it to them. Contrast this with the music video assignment my students just finished (we watched a sample one in class here a few weeks ago). Over half the class has bragged to me about how long it took to make (8-10 hours on the average), how they simply had to show their parents, or about the comments they’ve been getting about the video on Youtube or their Myspace pages. Six years of teaching and I’ve never heard this kind of feedback from my students. Is this because it was a heavily focused visual-rhetoric assignment? No. I think it’s because they got to make an argument in a form that seems to fit into the world as they know it and makes sense outside the confines of these lil ol university walls.