About the Author

Josephine Walwema received her MA in Rhetoric and Writing from the University of New Mexico. She is now a doctoral candidate in the Rhetorics, Communication and Information Design Program at Clemson University.  Her research interests include the history of rhetoric, rhetorical theory, technology as human capacity, and mechanical technology.

Contents

Introduction

Conceptual Framework

The rhetorical situation

The Topoi

Ethos

Ethics

Concluding Thoughts

Works Cited

Introduction 

Like it or hate it, Microsoft Word is the working platform in the technical communication classroom. Word's ready-made templates are not only suitable to most technical communication documents such as résumés, but are easily available to novice and expert users. However, one of the course outcomes for technical communication is that students learn the concept of document/visual design coupled with the expectation that as they do they will demonstrate or develop ethical conduct that eschews appropriating others' work. Because Word templates bear the digital branding of the creators, at what point do users take credit for a document that replicates the template? How does adopting a template affect the ethos of the document? Can instructors help students make proper rhetorical use of the template as topoi while maintaining ethical conduct? This paper explores the role of templates as teaching tools within the field of visual design in technical communication. It draws from the ancient rhetorical concepts of topoi and ethos, as well as ethics, to develop a conceptual framework applicable to visual design in technical communication.

I begin with a conceptual framework in which I discuss the essence of templates and the rhetorical precepts that I seek to make applicable to visual design and why. In my discussion, I underscore the notion of techne (which is the craft of making) as informing of disciplines of an artistic nature, such as visual design. Further, I draw attention to the rhetorical situation, which I argue is the starting place for discourse, but which, in the context of postmodernity and mass production, needs refiguring.

Contents

Introduction

Pedagogical Benefits

Practical Benefits

Considerations for Instructors

Works Cited

Introduction

Wiki technology creates opportunities for students in technical communication courses to gain experience with web design, writing for the web, and open-ended projects.  As tools for collaborative learning, they also develop students’ project management skills and teamwork abilities.

This article discusses the affordances, pedagogical foundations, and practical benefits of teaching with wikis, and suggests ways that technical communication instructors might incorporate this technology into their courses.

Why Wikis?

Numerous scholars in composition and technical communication have emphasized the value of technology-based assignments in these courses. Web 2.0 technologies offer many opportunities for students to produce multimodal texts and explore the possibilities these technologies have to offer. However, technical communication courses are somewhat more constrained in the kinds of projects we might incorporate; some multimodal projects, although potentially entertaining and useful in some ways, may not fit the mold of professional communication. Furthermore, tools for producing multimedia and distributing it online have become more expensive and more difficult for students to access from their own computers; they may have little opportunity to work with tools that allow them to produce and distribute online content outside the realm of blogging and social networking.

Wikis, on the other hand, provide what essentially amounts to free web hosting, allowing students to create and publish content that is available to the public using an easy-to-learn interface. Users can create wikis through the use of a wiki hosting site, within which they set up their own wiki site, assign it a URL, and start with a blank homepage. They can then add pages to the site, author content, and incorporate elements such as internal and external links, images, and videos. Other users that are designated as authors of the site can edit existing content and add content to the site. Authors and users can not only see the content in its current state, but can also view the history of changes to individual pages in the site, allowing them to track which authors have made which changes.

Wikis have the potential to be powerful tools in the teaching of technical communication because they require students to create their own structure and organization, collaborate with their peers, and make their work accessible to an audience beyond the classroom—all within a digital environment. Additionally, instructors can incorporate wiki technology at varying degrees in their classrooms and tailor assignments to focus on a variety of course objectives.

About the Author

A teacher of writing and multimedia texts for nearly 30 years, Nancy Fox is working on her Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington in Seattle where she serves as Associate Director of the Expository Writing Program. She holds an M.A. in Rhetoric and Writing Studies from San Diego State University, where she initiated the use of visual text construction as a mode of teaching argumentation and rhetorical strategy to first-year composition students. Her abiding interest is in the development of a Critical Discourse Analysis that addresses the complexities of multimodal texts by student composers in particular.

Contents

Introduction

Part 1

Part 2

Conclusion

Appendix

Bibliography

Introduction

All life for all of us is just a patchwork of thoughts, words, objects, events, actions, and interactions in Discourse. -- James Paul Gee, Introduction to Discourse Analysis

The mash-up culture is taking bits and pieces of elements of popular culture and then remixing them. It is in a sense a way to create one’s own subculture. – Anastasia Goodstein, Ypulse.com

Computer technology makes multimedia genres more convenient and accessible for all purposes. (It is) increasingly important to understand how the resources of different semiotic systems have been and can be combined. – Cheong Yin Yuen, The construal of Ideational meaning in print advertisements.

A recent study of multimodal discourse by Kay O’Halloran et al.[1] describes the scarcity of critical analyses of texts whose composition and indeed raison d’être are derived from diverse semiotic fields.[2] O’Halloran et al. define this complicated and emergent discourse as “involving the interaction of multiple semiotic resources such as (spoken and written) language, gesture, dress, architecture, proximity and (in film for example) lighting, movement, gaze, camera angle, etc.” (“Multimodal” 3). Indeed, the critical discourse scholar Norman Fairclough alternates his usage of the word “language” with “semiotics” to accommodate those analysts who study “meaning-making through language, body language, visual images, or any other way of signifying” (“The Discourse of New Labour” 229). O’Halloran et al. trace the evolution of such multimodal discourses throughout the twentieth century, as composers of texts began consciously to combine elements from linguistic sources as well as visual planes in new and provocative ways.. They argue that these multi-semiotic texts acquire meaning through the integrated and intentional use of formerly unrelated elements. This change of textuality, or radical “shift,” as they view it, gained dimension and momentum with the advent of technology which further deepened and expanded the creation and indeed discursive functionality of texts.[3] The theorist whose awareness of this transformation in texts informs the O’Halloran study most notably is Theo van Leeuwen, who argues that twentieth-century semiotics is characterized by transgression of boundaries, and notes that current multimodal texts resist discourse analysis as it has been codified and practiced (O’Halloran et al. 2). The study of multidimensionality is not only confined to the precincts of academia: the public sphere where practices of text-creation and consumption led to the transgressions that van Leeuwen perceives has also developed its own theory and terminologies for such texts—i.e., “remixes” or “mashups” that serve to complement and complicate the scholarly perspectives in interesting and potentially productive ways.

One form of digital multimodality that might immediately come to mind is the discourse of that particular “subculture” known variously as “the millennials” or “digital natives.” This cultural community consists of people who were born between 1982 and 2000 and have lived their entire lives on parallel streets of their brick-and-mortar communities and the web. They are as familiar with their computer screens as they are with the written page. According to recent studies of the technological lives of young people today, “digital natives” spend more time in activities that are electronically mediated than interacting in any other sphere of engagement.[4] As noted in a statement that fronts this paper, Anastasia Goodstein, publisher of Ypulse.com (“Your guide to youth via news, commentary, events, research & strategy”), this form of digital collage is “in a sense a way to create one’s own subculture” (Conroy). Given the centrality of such multimodal texts in the discourse of this digital generation, it seems both timely and useful to investigate the rhetoric of these intricate constructions, locate its position in Critical Discourse Analysis, and discover ways to incorporate this new genre of “writing” in composition pedagogy.

This paper offers, first, an overview of competing views of multimodal discourses, whose exigency persists despite disinterest and silence from scholars of linguistics generally. As O’Halloran’s Multimodal Analysis Lab explains on its website, “Video-sharing websites (have) become the standard forum for exchanging information.[5] Dynamic digital texts clearly require theoretical concepts and analytical approaches which extend beyond those developed for text-based data” (“Multimodal Analysis Lab”). Then, relying on van Leeuwen’s exploratory work in developing a language and methodology for “reading” multimodal texts, the paper’s central concern is the design and application of a model for a Critical Discourse Analysis of multimodality in a student videotext from a first-year university course in expository writing entitled “The Dream America.” Finally, the paper closes by considering how insights from this study might serve to help define a field of Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis that derives its strategies and techniques from academic praxis as well as from the “remix theories” of “mashups” on the streets of cyberspace.

   ____________________________________________________________________

[1]Submitted for publication to Critical Discourse Studies in December 2009
[2] As Theo van Leeuwen notes in “Discourse as the Recontextualization of Social Practice: A Guide,” while the term “discourse” may not be “synonymous with ‘text,’ … evidence for the existence of discourses will inevitably have to come from texts” (145).
[3]It’s relevant to note that this particular study is focused on the development of computer software capabilities.
[4] “The Pew Research Center found that half of American teenagers — defined in the study as ages 12 through 17 — send 50 or more text messages a day and that one third send more than 100 a day. Two thirds of the texters surveyed by the center’s Internet and American Life Project said they were more likely to use their cellphones to text friends than to call them. Fifty-four percent said they text their friends once a day, but only 33 percent said they talk to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis. The findings came just a few months after the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 spend on average 7 1/2 hours a day using some sort of electronic device, from smart phones to MP3 players to computers.” Hilary Stout, “How Does Technology Affect Kids’ Friendships?” The New York Times 30 April 2010.
[5]O’Halloran appears to use the term “information” to signal our cultural capital – knowledges integral to the work of the social scientists and computer scientists she addresses at other points in her website.

About the Author

Erin Clark Frost is a graduate assistant at Illinois State University. She is pursuing a PhD with specializations in rhetoric and composition, technical communication, and women's and gender studies. She especially enjoys studying visible rhetoric and culture.

Contents

Introduction

Cheshire Cat & Dodo

The Brothers Tweedle

Political Cartoons

The Hatter

Renaissance Era

Appropriation

Conclusion

Works Cited, References, and Image Locations

This text document on this and the following pages is a companion text to the multimodal presentation of the same title.  The multimodal presentation, included in the YouTube movie below, lets readers experience the visual aspects of this work and represents the normalization of new and innovative formats.

This presentation asserts that John Tenniel’s illustrations were and are integral to the Alice books and that those illustrations changed text-image relationships in history. First, we note that Tenniel’s illustrations cannot be divorced from the cultural meanings that Alice carries today. Later in this presentation, we will discuss the social importance of a practice called appropriation. The importance of Tenniel’s work to modern multimodal composing practices is apparent because of the continued appropriation of his work today in the venues of Disney movies and the world of art. Secondly, the context of Tenniel’s life changed how people read the Alice books, therefore playing into the aforementioned point about texts and images today, and also affecting the way that the Alice books went down in history. Finally, then, I suggest that the context and importance of Tenniel’s images altered the way texts with images are read, foreshadowing the Internet era and the multimodal composing possibilities that are available today.

This is the first page of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Readers can see right away that images are important because it is an image that first appears. In fact, the only thing preceding this page in the work is the introductory poem by Lewis Carroll. This first paragraph demonstrates very early on that Carroll knows how important images will be to his text. At the end of the paragraph, we see, “And what is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversations?” This is Carroll explicitly telling us that illustrations are vitally important to his work. Furthermore, Carroll originally wrote this story for his child friend, Alice Liddell; he also did his own illustrations for this version. When he later decided to publish the work, he sought out a professional illustrator—but not just any professional illustrator. Carroll sought the services of John Tenniel, because Tenniel was the best, and Carroll knew that illustrations would be highly important.

The illustration of the white rabbit is iconic today. I argue that a great many of Tenniel’s illustrations—especially those from the Alice works—are iconic in modern times. The use of the word icon today brings to mind a computer screen. Although this is not the main usage I am interested in here, my thesis certainly has implications for the usage of computers.