Straight, No Chaser

Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition (2004)

I think we should call “new media texts” those that have been made by composers who are aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight the materiality: such composers design texts that help readers/consumers/viewers stay alert to how any text–like its composers and readers–doesn’t function independently of how it is made and in what contexts. Such composers design texts that make as overtly visible as possible the values they embody (15).

Under this definition, new media texts do not have to be digital; instead, any text that has been designed so that its materiality is not effaced can count as new media (15).

David John Damon. “By the end of the year, he had failed out of the university–primarily because he couldn’t produce a traditional essay organized according to the print-based literacy standards of linear propositional logic, Standard English, argumentative development, and standard spelling” (49).

By adding a focus on visual literacy to our existing focus on alphabetic literacy, we may not only learn to pay more serious attention to the ways in which students are now ordering and making sense of the world through the production and consumption of visual images, but we may also extend the usefulness of composition studies in a changing world (72).

USEFUL VOCABULARY (from Kress and van Leeuwan’s Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design)

Visual impact: The overall effect and appeal that a visual composition has on an audience.

Visual coherence: The extent to which visual elements of a composition are tied together with color, shape, image, lines of sight, theme, etc.

Visual salience: Importance or prominence of a visual element.

Visual organization: Pattern of arrangement that relates the elements of the visual essay to one another in a way that makes them easier for readers/viewers to comprehend (76).

If educators hope to prepare citizens who can “participate fully” in new forms of “public, community, and economic life”–in other words–we must teach them to design communications using “modes of representation much broader than language alone” (55).

Caesura–the stylistic device most absent in our curricula (123).

Jeff Rice’s assignment asking students to pick the date of their choice and research what was happening then in areas such as history, politics, literature, film, comics, music, art, business, or science, building a hypertext catalogue of the results (Rice, then, has unwittingly re-invented Maciunas’s famous “Biography Boxes”) (125).

Another writer see as one of the “limitation” of new media work that “much of the information found on the Web does not meet the standards of text in print” (page 120).