The Undergraduate Writing Major

The perception of rhetoric as a field is still a very new concept.  Thus, its study as an academic major for universities is very immature, too.  Rhetoric and composition is still being defined and continues to establish an identity in education.  Conventionally, "writing" is the term used for high school and even undergraduate studies, while rhetoric usually refers to post-graduate courses.  But our new major is now introducing professional writing to students earlier.  So essentially, there are two main types of writing majors, liberal arts writing and professional/rhetorical writing.  Problems arise with creating a new major within English departments, though.  Especially with rhetoric, it is hard to legitimize the major if compositional studies is considered an afterthought.  Also, many perceive the major as nothing more than offering service courses.

So, tactics to craft and nurture the major beyond these concerns include: address common student concerns, provide a framework of how the writing major contributes to society, goals of students, potential careers a graduate might delve into, and an exposition of writing foundations.

Introduction chapter to New Media Design

Graphic design is the arrangement of textual and visual information for the purpose of communication.  Many elements in our surroundings have been created by graphic designers such as signs, print media, titles for television, websites, and much more.  Two major forms of media are old media and new media.  Old media consists of anything produced before the Internet such as print, film, and television.  Analog technologies and linear narratives are characteristics of this form.  New media includes anything produced by the Internet or anything digital.  A major advantage to new media is the use of interactivity, which allows the audience to play an active role.  A lot of the technologies rely on numbers and bits stored as information, which can be endlessly manipulated.  Thus, new media is always evolving and becoming a distinct part of communication, not just a reinvention of old media.  Digital media is much more versatile in that it can be easily changed without loss of quality, easily transferred to other places, and stored in a database for a long period of time.  New innovations in this form of communication has created new sub-industries and allowed graphic designers to expand into other areas.  Design is now needed virtually everywhere on the Internet, video games, music videos, film, and television, extending beyond just print mediums.

It’s absolutely true.  Graphic design as a profession is seeing a major increase in all types of communication fields.  It is a very relevant occupation, as almost every sort of outlet requires some sort of design.  This introduction chapter is an accurate summary of new media, however, it is just that.  It covers the broad aspects of technologies and only generalizes the industry of design in today’s climate, which is probably all it is intending to convey.  Old media technologies such as analog have certainly “lost” to digital, but the text fails to recognize the little (though, far and few between) advantages it does have.  Analog technologies, as opposed to digital files that have a finite amount of quality, do not have a cap to the quality of media, making it unlimited.  For example, those analog records have uncompressed frequencies that allows sound waves to be infinite, while digital music, even at its highest quality, has a stopping point for frequency (though we may not notice, but scientifically speaking, it cannot reproduce analog sound).  A similar argument can be made for film versus digital video where depth of field is an issue.  Otherwise, this chapter seems to cover all the major points of new media and the rise of graphic design.

"Seventh Sense" by Truss

Punctuation plays a major role in a writer’s life.  It determines how a text is read in that it is almost like traffic signals. Readers are told when to stop and go.  The analogy with manners is appropriate because even the root word of the term means “etiquette”.  It can alter a string of words and even the meaning.  Much confusion could have been avoided if proper punctuation were applied.  With the mediums of Internet and text messaging, it seems as if the rules have deteriorated and everyone has become and author with no sense of capitalization or commas.  Even movie titles and invested works sometimes do not get it right, which comments about the state of discourse we are in.

Truss’s article is both comical and honest.  The realization that sticklers for grammar and punctuation can be staunch is funnily truthful.  Many writers can feel like this because of the way textual rules are being thrown by the wayside nowadays.  However, it is what makes one a good writer perhaps, as long as there is the understanding to be able to let some things slide because the style of discourse surrounding us has changed.

"An Appetite For Coherence: Arousing and Fulfilling Desires" by Kristie S. Fleckenstein

Teaching students coherence in writing is a difficult task because it is also just as dependent on the reader’s perception as it is the author’s creation.  To judge the failure or success of a piece of work, writers have to step outside and perceive it as a reader.  In order for that, one must understand his or her own habits as a reader.  Thus, to be a good writer, you must be a good reader.  Second, transitions as linguistic cues must be used to signal a certain relationship to the reader.  Finally, students of coherence can follow professional writers and continually learn to become smoother in conveying ideas even when teachers are absent.

Coherence is perhaps is one of the most apparent, yet most difficult elements of writing to achieve.  An author can consider his own writing absolutely coherent, but be the work could be perceived as total drivel.  I agree that a writer must understand how readers process textual information and exhibit that in his or her creation.

"Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers" by Nancy Sommers

There is plenty of study on the actual process of writing, but not much emphasis has been put on the revision of it.  Most writing processes follow linear paths, advising authors to compose in stages.  Unlike speech, where revision is only an afterthought, it is a continual sequence of changes made to writing, even during composition.  The term “revision” is a general term used in the education system that attributes to specific activities of rewording.  Students often look for excessive repetition and stop revising when it seems as if no rules have been broken.  Experienced writers differ from students because their goal of revising is to shape or form their entire argument.  They also consider many more levels such as readership, discovering meaning, and recognizing recursiveness.

I can understand why the importance of revision is often forsaken because the education of writing does not make it a priority of study.  In schools, it is drilled to follow the linear process of composition.  Revision is only thought of as going back and correcting grammatical errors to follow rules.  Revision allows authors to rediscover their argument and can often enhance or strengthen their writing much more so than their original thesis.

"Media In Everyday Life" by Sturken and Cartwright

The definition of the term medium has expanded drastically with the coming of the digital age directly due to the rise of new technologies.  It has allowed for all media content to be communicated and relayed in more methods that make delivery faster and more convenient, which inversely affects the way it is arranged and styled for audiences.  It is clear that in the presence of such devices as the iPhone and services like iTunes that convergence is also meshing all these new technologies with old ones and mediums, as many as they are separately, are becoming intertwined.  Now expectations of readers or viewers have changed and their perceptions of content is now relative to what medium they are using.  A youTube video would attract audiences for different reasons than a primetime drama on network television, yet both achieve the same goal of communication.  This also means that the dominance of large corporate media outlets is fading because of the ease for anyone with a computer and some creative endeavor to steal audience with a niche perspective.  So outlets have tried to overcome this by catering to those fans by hiring those “amateur” types to create TV content or those bloggers to publish writing.  Media creation is becoming more open and democratic because now the playing field is more level and the idea of mass media itself is not the only option of delivery as it once was.  Media is also now instant and transmittable across the globe at the speed of a mouse click.  People from all over the world can get news and updates from every city and capture a sense of connectedness that would have been impossible just a decade or so ago.  This also affects the role of censorship.  Censorship is widely used in mass media, especially for controversial issues such as war, to mediate between actual events and the content the public perceives.  Thus, with the advent of new media technologies, it is difficult for government or media conglomerates to control the flow at all because a simple cell phone photo can be uploaded and spread across the entire Internet within moments.  At this time, we have already passed the crossroads of the digital age and embraced the mediums of new media.  Technologies have converged and created a multitude of facets to obtain information at rates we have never experienced.  If one were to dismiss this transition, he or she would most definitely be left behind in the dust of traditionalism, while still relevant, is clearly not the powerhouse it once was.

"Material Literacy and Visual Design" by Lester Faigley

This article by Faigley of the University of Texas at Austin is clearly a bit dated as it was published more than a decade ago.  This is evident because his concern about the coexistence of prose and visual design in the same medium, the Internet, has already found a conclusion (for the most part).  Discourse displayed on websites with visual aids blanketed all around it is the norm of this digital age and there doesn’t seem to be a problem.  Sure, the expansion of authorship has definitely increased beyond measure with personal websites, blogs, and social networking, which has in turn allowed for the creation of a certain “Internet” speak that some may consider a deterioration of literate language.  However, this is a mere effect (or perhaps casualty?) of the culture that technology has spawned.  But despite the jungle of “LOL’s”, prose can still be found intact in many parts of this networked Wild West, often with the accompaniment of multimedia.  Sounds, pictures, movies, and more have since enhanced audiences’ overall experiences, allowing for supplementary material.  There may be an over-reliance on other mediums being spread and not enough emphasis on text, but for over a decade since this published article, it seems as though discourse may be bullied, but never expelled entirely.

Not to be a smug, self-referential author, but doesn't this post, this blog, with its scholarly text and visuals, serve to dispel the literary concern? O btw, brb.