| PhD Student at Michigan State University Rhetoric and Writing Program Emphasis in Digital Rhetorics |
"As the World Wide Web
and other visual media gain prominence in students' lives, we, as
teachers of composition, have to re-evaluate our strict adherence
to the verbal medium. If our classrooms focus on a single mode of
representation, the verbal, then the concurrent implication is that
only one voice deserves to be heard. In such a classroom, students
will not be able to recognize that verbal forms and visual forms,
or better yet their combination, carry an equal degree of complexity,
representative richness, and rhetorical power. Basing composition
almost exclusively on verbal instruction counters the very nature
of literacy education, because our current verbal-based education
system produces illiterates in our highly visual and multimodal
modern society."” |