Change.

The main idea I took from this week's readings is that people hate change. As a general rule, the older and more established a person is, the more he or she hates change. But they don't say that; they go to great lengths to prove why their resistance to change is not because they are set in their ways, but because their ways are better.

Baron's article really exemplified this; he noted several examples in which people denounced new technology because they found it to be pointless, or maybe because they found it threatening (Thoreau needed to sell his pencils, so he wrote that the telegraph was dumb).

Trimbur would do well to embrace the changing style of rhetoric that is more reader-friendly; I unfortunately found his prose unnecessarily dense and hard to follow.

Finally, Stroupe took the bull by the horns to tell people like Trimbur what is happening in a lengthy article they can appreciate (although with much more reader-friendly prose). Stroupe had to do this to convince all of the aging academics out there that change is good, that the internet is changing rhetoric and the rhetorical power of combined words and images, and that all those aging academics would do well to take the hint (nobody wants to read dense scholarly prose anymore, if they ever did in the first place).

Anyway, I know there is much more to these articles, but since everything we are reading is converging into the theme "writing is still quality if there are pictures involved, and the two combined are probably better than text alone," the real issue here seems to be convincing the world of higher education to embrace this and teach students to capitalize on it.

Comics and Stuff

"It's considered normal in this society for children to combine words and pictures, so long as they grow out of it. Traditional thinking has long held that truly great works of art and literature are only possible when the two are kept at arm's length. Words and pictures together are considered, at best, a diversion for the masses, at worst a product of commercialism."

Meanwhile, television is wildly popular.

Do academics really enjoy reading dense prose? Probably not. I know I don't.

McCloud demonstrates the complex language of comics by painstakingly illustrating the tactics that can be employed to alter the message. He also says that people can relate to comics because the people in them are ambiguously drawn, which means that it is not for lack of artistic skill that comic art often lacks detail. I'm sold. I hold the graphic novel to a higher standard.

Maus I has been the nominal graphic novel of my education. I've read in in literature class in high school and again in college. I didn't think it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, maybe because of the story itself. I probably would have enjoyed reading Calvin & Hobbes as a graphic novel much more (I own every Calvin & Hobbes book ever published). I know that Maus I tells a historically essential story in a way that can be grasped and even embraced by many, but maybe we should back off and look at some other graphic novels in our classes before people forget that there are other graphic novels.

I know that McCloud never uses the term "graphic novel;" he proudly uses the word "comic." The term "graphic novel" seems to serve to legitimize comics for naysayers, people who believe in only "refined art"—words with no pictures, and pictures with no words.

One of my roommates is a Drawing major. Words appear throughout her art. She draws a simple object a puts a quote underneath it. For instance, a drawing of a donut is captioned, "What a blessing." It gets deeper, too—right now she is working on a project of a human moving from a crouch to a stand and growing wings, and one of the phrases in the piece is "Embrace repression."

Because there are words, I connect more with the art. Maybe it's because I'm an English major, but I find a composition much more engaging if there are words.

It amazes me that McCloud wrote his book in 1991, and 20 years later nothing has changed. Professor Lisa Eckert is a strong supporter of the graphic novel, but when she surveyed teachers to find out what they thought about graphic novels, many of them didn't even know what a graphic novel was (or they thought it meant a novel with R-rated content). It's funny that as a society that thinks we are so advanced, we are also so stuck in the ruts that polarize images and words that we cannot see a reunion of the two as academically advanced.

"I do feel a certain vague longing for that time over 50 centuries ago—when to tell was to show—and to show was to tell."

What happened?

Reading, Reading the Visual, Hyper-Reading, and the lack thereof.

When I was in elementary school, I was an avid reader. My favorite activity was reading; I did it all the time. Often, I would become so absorbed in a book that I became completely oblivious to what was happening around me; I would not hear when my mom asked me a question; I would have no idea what the conversation going on in the room was about, because I was so focused on my book. My mom would have to tell me "Ten more minutes and then you have to go to bed," and ten minutes later I would say, "I'm almost done with this chapter, then I'll go to bed."

I wish I could focus on reading in the same way now. Jacobs' metaphor that reading for the fascination of it is like traveling to Narnia made a lot of sense to me. I still like to read, but 1) I have too much required reading during school to read for pleasure (except for the newspaper) and 2) I get easily distracted while I am reading, my mind wanders, and I find that I can only read a couple pages before I look up and my eyes glaze over, and then I have to go back and re-read the last page. In one of the comments on Jacobs' article, a man says when his childhood fascination with reading went away, he could only replace it with reading on the internet, with its multitude of hyperlinks and never-ending possibilities. Sosnoski would probably like that, as he advocates hyper-reading for reasons other than the fact it saves paper (not one of his points, but valid).

All of these ideas relate to Hill, whose article I found quite interesting. In school, we are given rules for writing papers. Use only 12 point, Times New Roman font, always double space, etc. When I studied in Argentina, one of my teachers had a huge aversion to Times New Roman, so she required that we use Arial, an interesting argument for the importance of aesthetics in writing.

It is easy to imagine why people would shoot down Hill's article as irrelevant, because it advocates changing the paradigm of what should be considered literature, and what rhetoric, and what art, and whether there should be a distinction between the three. The more I learn, the more I think that we cannot just study the "classics" in literature and graduate with the ability to make a difference in the world. This class, Digital Rhetorics and Multimodal Writing, is a huge slap in the face. You thought that Shakespeare was the epitome of literature? Nobody cares, they're too busy watching YouTube.

On page 126, Hill states, "pedagogical efforts should be aimed toward helping students deal with combinations of picture, word, and symbol," and adds that images "are essential for expressing, and therefore for knowing, things that cannot be expressed in any other form."

As a future English teacher, I find this overwhelming. There is only so much that can be taught in one class, as Hill points out on 147, and how to prioritize is going to be a struggle. How can I tell my students to type in 12-point Times New Roman while teaching them that the aesthetic appearance of a text is equally as important as its content? I would be crushing their opportunity for artistic expression, crushing their personality.

Rhetoric fascinates me, because it disregards confines in favor of sending an effective message. How to bring this into the classroom seems to be evolving, as people begin to get comfortable enough to shift their paradigms.

Rhetoric: you know.

On page 6 of "What is Rhetoric?" Covino and Jolliffe write, "all utterances are texts, and all texts have the potential to change auditors." They expand this thought to say that all texts have "potential activity," both intentional and unintentional, which all relates to the concept of "kairos," a kind of climate of rhetoric.

Reading this made me think back to the first day of class, and Doug pulling up random things on the computer, and me thinking "is this a writing class?"

The point is that the internet and every electronic device that can connect to the internet have changed everything. MySpace was bad enough, but now Twitter is extremely popular with older professionals (I say this because I still refuse to get a Twitter account). These days, it is admirable to summarize your most epic epiphanies in very few words, and honestly it's the only way anybody is going to read about them in the first place.

So basically, I have to resign to the fact that a Twitter post is a legitimate form of rhetoric, and is in fact a genius way of communication in the kairos of the digital world.

My roommate's dad is a pastor, and she has a modern translation of the Bible called "The Message//Remix: The Bible in Contemporary Language." Take, for example, Hosea 9.1:

"Don't waste your life in wild orgies, Israel.

Don't party away your life with the heathen.

You walk away from your God at the drop of a hat

and like a whore sell yourself promiscuously

at every sex-and-religion party on the street.

All that party food won't fill you up.

You'll end up hungrier than ever."

The times are changing, we must keep up. What's next, Biblical books summarized in Twitter posts?

I may have digressed a bit, but if "rhetoric is the art of knowledge-making" (C&J 8), it's hard to drop knowledge on the "digital generation" in old-school Biblical prose. So I think this class is very relevant, and also a legit writing class, because all of us writers want people to read our stuff and know what we're talking about.

Both Grant-Davie and C&J discuss Bitzer's 3 elements of a rhetorical situation (exigence, audience, rhetorical constraints). I like Grant-Davie's specification that both the rhetor and the audience are "real or imagined" and "dynamic and interdependent," so while a rhetor might write something with a particular exigence, that doesn't mean that everybody who reads it will read it with the same exigence in mind. In the digital world today, it is so easy to read things out of context you basically have to write them for people who have no idea what your context is.

This blog is for WRIT 371, but who knows what audience it will reach?