Storyboard

Storyboard - Script

Why Oral Rhetoric should be taught in composition classes

In composition classes today alphabetic writing is king. Should this be a surprise? Isn’t composition writing? It’s what most people probably thing of, but what about other forms of composition? In the digital age and with the growth of “new media” in composition studies, writing is no longer universally accepted in composition studies as the only form of composition. [insert Selfe, Wysocki]. New media composing might include video and audio composing.

New media compositions that include audio are, of course, not entirely new. Orality has been part of rhetoric since ancient times. [Insert quote from Cicero? Not sure which one yet] By the end of the 19^th century, however, rhetoric had drifted from a focus on orality to a focus on written composition, which remains the primary focus today. To a large extent, the oral aspect of rhetoric has been entirely neglected. Many teachers now assume that teaching students to compose effective written rhetoric should be the focus of English composition classes. They are service classes, whereby students learn how to write in an academic setting and eventually in their careers (which may or may not involve writing).

Certainly, students probably write more papers than they give oral presentations. However, to assume that written rhetoric is all that students must learn is to ignore all other forms of communication in a communication age. Students encounter others forms of communication every day: websites, videos, the radio, music, speeches and oral presentations.

In this increasingly visual age, some rhetoric textbooks have some forms of visual analysis should be included in composition, but why is sound neglected? Videos have sound, music is sound, radio broadcasts are sound, speaking both privately and publicly is sound. Teachers largely depend on their students learning in classes through lectures and class discussions—sound. Yet, studying and composing oral rhetoric, sound-based rhetoric, is absent. Why?

Like any communication medium, sound communication has its limitations, but also advantages that writing does not have. With oral composition, one must consider tone of voice, emphasis of words, speed of delivery, and clarity in pronunciation, which are not concerns for written texts.

For instance, tone of voice can convey emotion that is more difficult in writing:

[Here I will insert an audio clip from a speech to demonstrate this.]

Emphasizing words or certain points is also easier with oral rhetoric:

[Another audio clip].

This kind of emphasis is more difficult in writing. Writers must use visual cues, such as capitalization or italics to emphasize some words or points, but it is often less effective. With writing, one’s readers read at different speeds, but with oral delivery, the speed at which one speaks can greatly affect its effectiveness. I once attended a conference presentation in which the presenter read her paper so quickly that I, and I presumed much of her audience, could not even follow her main points, and so she received no comments or questions about her presentation afterwards. One’s speed of oral delivery can make one’s words more effective, such as by slowing down to give greater attention and emphasis to certain words.

[Here I’ll insert another audio clip]

Then, of course, one’s clarity and pronunciation are important. Mispronouncing words can have a negative impact on one’s message:

[Insert sound clips to on mispronunciation, such as Obama and “corpsmen”, Palin, etc]

Dialects are also can play a role in oral rhetoric that are less present in writing. While one might try to write in dialect, it is often meant to reflect what is naturally oral:

[Here I’d like to insert some audio clips in different dialect, perhaps demonstrating the oral skill of bidialectalism, such as with Oprah]

With the many means of communication today, tone, emphasis, speed, and clarity and pronunciation all have an increasingly important role, as many new forms of communication involve some orality.

Certainly visual communication is more important today than it ever has been, and so it is only appropriate that many of our rhetoric textbooks include sections on visual arguments. But oral communication is also more important now than it has been for the past few centuries. While the writing cultures of the 19^th and 20^th centuries caused composition studies to focus on writing, the 21^st century’s technological and multimodal culture gives oral rhetoric an important role. Our composition classes should also give it a place.

[NOTE: Obviously this script is very rough. It’s really the basic argument I’ll be making and where I’ll be using some sound clips, although I am still deciding exactly which speech excerpts to use. I would like to also work in some music of some kind, although I am uncertain as to where and exactly what kind of music. The same goes for sound effects. I was considering doing something to the voice effects whenever there’s a quotation from one of my sources. I’ll have to play with the sound once I record to see how it might work. I still need to insert the exact quotations from sources that I’d like to use. I’m also looking at where else I should use them. I’m concerned about being too heavy on quoting sources if I start bringing in a lot of them. We’ll see how that goes. I welcome suggestions on everything, including the argument and organization. I do, after all, need to make a strong argument].

Project Proposal

For the Assignment Assignment, I created an assignment that asked students to compose an argument in the form of 1-2 minutes of audio. While I would like to do my project with audio, in following the assignment I designed I would be restricted to only 1-2 minutes to make an argument, and I would like to be able to compose something longer (5-10 minutes). Therefore, I would like to do an audio-based project that would be similar to the assignment I designed, but longer.

Essentially, the argument I would like to make in the form of audio is the argument I make in my conference proposal: oral rhetoric has a place in composition classes and can be revived in new-media composition projects, such as the audio essay. To make this argument, of course, I will need to do a lot of research. I will use the Cynthia Selfe article I reference in my conference proposal, and probably Walter Ong, some of the readings we had this quarter, and other sources I have yet to locate. (My research on this is really just starting).

For the project, I plan on using my own voice, music, sound effects, and clips of other voices. I will need to write a script for this, of course, and so I will be composing in both alphabetic text and sound. As far as programs and equipment go, I will primarily use Audacity for the audio editing and mixing, and I have a microphone built in to my computer at home, a microphone I can plug in, and a digital audio recorder in my mp3 player, which works well.

Revised Conference Proposal

Reviving Oral Rhetoric in Composition Classes Through New Media

In her 2009 CCC article, Cynthia Selfe points out that when printed alphabetic texts are the only accepted means of composition, we “ignore the history of rhetoric and its intellectual inheritance” (618). In particular, Selfe argues that sound “is often undervalued as a compositional mode” (617). Today, students are frequently exposed to multiple modes of communication such as audio, video, webpages, etc, and so they should have the ability to compose in multiple modes. Therefore, Selfe says, some focus on aurality and other modes of communication should have their place in composition classes in addition to writing (625-26). Building on Selfe, I will argue that because modern students should have the ability to compose effectively in multiple modes, oral rhetoric has a place in composition classes. Further, new media composition’s use of audio might be viewed as an effective way to revive oral rhetoric in our classes. When students compose multimodal projects with audio, using their own voice, they must carefully consider their tone, emphasis, speed, pronunciation, clarity, etc., which are all concerns of oral rhetoric. Further, music and sound effects can play an important role, affecting how the voices are heard. While new media composition is new in that it largely depends on computers and technology, the oral element of an audio essay is an important part of traditional rhetoric. From ancient times until the nineteenth century, orality was of central importance to rhetoric. With the increased need of writing by the end of the nineteenth century, however, less emphasis was placed on oral rhetoric, and so today it is given little attention in composition classes. With new modes of communication, however, oral rhetoric does have a place in our classrooms, and new media might be a way to give it a place.

Conference Proposal

Will New Media Revive Oral Rhetoric in Composition Classes?

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Most composition classes focus primarily on traditional alphabetic texts. While many new rhetoric textbooks include visual analysis, the means of analysis is still alphabetic. With the rise of new media in composition classes, however, students are beginning to compose in non-traditional ways using multiple modes, such as video, audio, webpages, blogs, etc. This kind of composing involves more than writing, such as video and audio editing and mixing. In her 2009 CCC article, Cynthia Selfe points out that when printed alphabetic texts are the only accepted means of composition, we “ignore the history of rhetoric and its intellectual inheritance” (618). In particular, Selfe argues that sound “is often undervalued as a compositional mode” (617). Therefore, she says, some focus on aurality and other modes of communication should have their place in composition classes (625-26).

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While new media composition is new in that it largely depends on computers and technology, the oral element of an audio essay is an important part of traditional rhetoric. From ancient times until the nineteenth century, aurality was of central importance to the study of rhetoric. With the increased need of writing by the end of the nineteenth century, however, less emphasis was placed on oral rhetoric, and so today it has little importance in relation to student compositions.

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I will explore the idea that new media composition’s use of audio might be viewed as an effective way to revive the oral aspect of rhetoric in our composition classrooms. In assigning students to compose multimodal projects, whenever audio is involved, especially their own voices, they must carefully consider their tone, emphasis, speed, pronunciation, clarity, etc., which are all concerns of oral rhetoric. Further, music and sound effects can play an important role in an audio composition, which affect how the voices used are heard. I propose, then, that if multimodal compositions involving audio are a revitalization of oral rhetoric, then more emphasis on effective oral rhetoric needs to take place in composition classes, such as through analysis of oral texts and practice with oral delivery.

Final Draft of Audio Argument Assignment

Here's my final draft of the Audio Argument Assignment.

Reflecting on Blogging

Blogging has been an entirely new experience to me. Before this class I had never maintained my own blog or even commented on someone’s. I just looked over my other postings and the first thing I realize is that writing on a blog changes my expectations of my finished product. Unlike most of the academic writing I have done, when writing for the blog I did not worry about using a formal academic tone, even though in posting what I wrote it was “published” in a way that other responses and papers I have written were not. I think this relaxation of tone is largely due to my own understandings of the genre of blogs. Blogs are not supposed to be polished academic pieces, and so I did not feel pressured to produce a polished academic paper when I wrote. Even when I write responses for other classes and give a hard copy to the professor, I am usually overly stiff and formal in my writing tone. Writing and publishing on the internet seems like a less academic setting and, with the possibility of receiving and leaving responses, much more conversational.

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It is this conversational nature of the blogs that I liked the most, which I have also experienced on online forum board (although I liked the look of the blogs better). So, with this conversational element of the blogs, I found it to be less an exercise in new media and more a way of expressing my response to readings and seeing how others responded (and then commenting on each other’s ideas). This, of course, was one of the main purposes of the blog. This opportunity to respond and see how others responded often covered ideas that were not touched upon in the class, and so the blogs were an opportunity to engage with the readings and ideas of the class in greater depth. Not being the most talkative person in class (I never have been), I enjoyed the chance to engage in the blog dialogues.

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As I reviewed my blog, I also noticed that I only included one picture throughout all of my posts. That post, on Sirc, was the only one in which I could actually think of an image to include, as a box image perfectly fit Sirc. Even then, trying to get the picture to do what I wanted it to do was frustrating, (which is one reason why I did not include pictures in subsequent posts). Although images, videos, etc, can make a post more attractive or interesting, for the most part, most of my posts were picture-free merely because I could think of no reason to include them. Perhaps this is because I am not usually a visual-learning kind of person. For the most part, then my posts were very alphabetic-text based. I usually composed my posts in a Word document (as I am doing now) because I am afraid that the blog will delete what I say or post it incorrectly. The Word document offers more security that I won’t have to recompose the whole thing if it gets messed up. Of course, the fact that the blog will not let me copy and paste this into the message box and so I have to make the window small and drag it there is quite frustrating, but at least it works.

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I think I enjoyed reading others’ blog posts and commenting more than writing my own. Each person had their own particular style and approach with both design (such as use of images) and general tone of response. It was this variety of voices and perspectives that was most valuable with the blogs. I looked forward to seeing any comments my classmates might leave in response to any of my posts, just as I enjoyed posting comments on other posts, although I did not have time to comment on everyone’s.

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The experience of blogging has made me more interested in using blogs in one of my classes in the future. We’ll see…

Multimodal Peer Review

I liked much of what Kara Poe Alexander wrote about Responding and Peer Reviews in Chapter 9 of our reading for today. Although peer review is always a part of my 151 class, I had completely forgotten about the possibility of using peer review in a multimodal composition class. (Perhaps this should have occurred to me).

Most of the tips Alexander gives, however, seem to be just adaptations of suggestions for peer reviews with alphabetic texts. This, of course, might make sense to some degree, if we still want to call it a composition class. Obviously many tips for giving feedback on something can be easily applied to alphabetic or multimodal texts, such as questions evaluating the rhetorical effectiveness, or how to prepare students to give each other useful feedback.

Those of us who have our students do peer review with alphabetic texts, of course, (probably all of us) know that it can be effective and helpful for students, but that there are also a lot of problems with it too. Some students still will not go beyond “I think your paper was great. I really liked it,” not matter how much you model and tell them that that is not helpful to their peers. Then, of course, there are those students who might offer suggestions, but are so afraid of offending their peer that they focus only on minor obvious problems. My own teaching and preparing students is probably at fault to some degree, of course, but nonetheless, there will always be some problems with peer reviews.

Now, as far as Alexander’s chapter goes, I was hoping to see more about potential problems with peer review on multimodal projects and more tips that were particularly applicable to multimodal projects and that might not have applied to the alphabetic texts we have always taught. Yet, as I read the 11 tips, it was always obvious how they were just adaptations of peer reviews on alphabetic texts. Perhaps I am assuming that there should be more difference in such peer reviews than there actually are. However, even if it is as simple as applying what we already know to a new medium, just adapting, then perhaps some anecdotes about how such adaptations worked would be useful.

One other problem that I had with Alexander, or perhaps just a question, is how am I supposed to fit in time for instruction and experimentation with the technology, time for students to create their initial “drafts” of their project, time for peer reviews, and “time between peer reviews and project deadlines”? (130). Perhaps a simple timeline schedule would be helpful for me here, but my impression from this and previous chapters, is that having students do a multimodal project is extremely time consuming, and, especially with a quarter’s system (which won’t be round for much longer here), I don’t want to spend half the term, or more, on one project. Of course, perhaps I would teach a class that is strictly multimodal composition rather than just one multimodal project at the end with alphabetic projects before, but even then, I see time management as a potential problem.

New Media Looks Better Now Than Last Week

While I am not yet sold on using multimodal assignments in my own classes the chapters in Multimodal Composition brought me a little closer. One thing I really appreciate from these chapters (and in Writing New Media) is that the authors really address the question: How do I implement new media assignments in the classroom? The sample assignments in Chapter 2 and the advice on designing multimodal assignments in Chapter 3 helped me feel more comfortable with the idea of implementing such assignments in my classes. Too often, I am discouraged by abstract theory that gives me no practical advice on what I can do in the classroom and how to deal with some of the challenges. (Of course, I should hope this book would be helpful on this, as its subtitle is “Resources for Teachers.”)

I find it interesting that in these chapters only really address new media composition in terms of audio and video. While these are the first two things I think of with new media composition, it is certainly a sharp contrast with Wysocki, who looks at new media so broadly that it might even include non-digital composition. Are audio and video composition the only real multimodal composition forms that most of us think of in terms of new media? While they are the first that come to mind for me, what about webpages, blogs, wikis, photos, etc. (many of which have been addressed in some of our other readings so far)?

The practical advice this book gives on assignments and implementation of audio and video multimodal assignments is great, but the fact that they leave out other forms of new media is puzzling to me. Now we can feel more comfortable (maybe) with implementing these kinds of new media assignments, but where is all the practical advice on giving students a blog assignment? The omissions make me wonder if the authors think audio and video are the real substance of multimodal composition that we are going to assign our students.

To shift gears a little…

On the positive side, in addition to being happy about the practical content of these chapters, I am especially interested in the idea of composing with audio, as discussed in Chapter 2 (and in some of our readings last week). Having done some audio composing myself in the past (not for class, just for fun), I know how much writing is an essential component. So, this helps alleviate my initial fear that new media might push away the writing component of composition. To me, this kind of composition brings back oral delivery that we don’t focus on in our classes, but that is an important part of rhetoric. So, in some ways this kind of new media really could be a return to oral rhetoric.

At the same time, the assignments offered in Multimodal Composition helped me see a little better how such assignments (while including some writing, such as a script) can make our composition classes more engaging and enjoyable for our students, without resorting to neo-avant-garde. The idea of my students first composing a text (perhaps an argument) and then delivering it through sound or video is appealing to me. As Hess says in Chapter 3 of MC, with such assignments, students’ work has a wider audience, perhaps being published online, and so their motivation and interest in the project might be greater (35).

I don’t see myself as really adopting Geoffrey Sirc’s “pedagogy of the box” (121), perhaps because I don’t really want to infuse my “composition instruction with a spirit of the neo-avant-garde,” which is what Sirc wants to do (146). At the same time, however, like Sirc, I want to make my classes more interesting for my students, and perhaps some kind of new media project is the answer. But I don’t want to completely abandon “the essay.”

Sirc rejects the traditional essay point out that “the falseness of a unified resolution gets prized over the richer, more difficult, de facto text” (123). At the same time, however, I see a lot of value in the “traditional essay,” and I think making composition more interesting for students is just as possible with the essay.

My concern with the box pedagogy is that if we adopt it, the entire goal and purpose of first year composition will change, and so must everything else. Sirc asks, “What is essential to composition? What are the inescapable, minimal institutional constraints that must be considered?” (126). And a little earlier he states, “So the two basic skills I focus my course around are practicing search strategies and annotating materials” (122). So, are research and annotating two of the inescapable essentialities of composition? There must be more than that.

Sirc’s composition course is radically different from what we teach. If we all changed to the “pedagogy of the box,” could we still see our courses as composition classes? Sirc wants his students to be “designers” rather than “essayists,” which I like, but will the composition class become a design class instead? So, right now I am not sold on "Box-Logic" "Box Pedagogy" "Box Students" or just plain "Boxes." (I have too many boxes in my garage already. Perhaps I should bring them in to my English 151 class...) Some other "new media" such as the online articles we have read so far, blogs, wikis, etc are, I think, very useful tools for composition. However, Sirc's class is a little too "neo-avant-garde" for me.

Reading New Media

I enjoyed reading Ball and Moeller’s web article. Sorapure’s annoyed me. Each of these was a new media text and reminded me of one aspect of new media that I do not worry about (as much) when I read a regular old hard copy ink on paper book: design. I liked Ball and Moeller’s design (for the most part), but I hated Sorapure’s design. The different fonts Ball and Moeller used and the mixing of textual voices in their introduction impressed me and was a great demonstration of the potentialities of new media. While I continually forgot which block of the alphabet I had last clicked, the content of each “block” kept me reading. The intertextual links were effective (mostly).

Sorapure, on the other hand, had a design that was extremely distracting from the content of the words (which might have been the intention). I did not like being required to click something every three seconds to read the next two sentences. This, as well as the puzzle keyboard, seemed to be there only because she thought it was cool and wanted it to be unlike other reading experiences. (Again, this may have been her intention, then). However, whether it was her intention or not, the distracting and frustrating nature of her web design, for me, made it a very ineffective piece of new media. (Unless, of course her idea of effective was to frustrate and annoy her readers). Is this the future of academic articles? I hope not, if they follow Sorapure’s design.

Now that I have ranted a little at my dislike of Sorapure’s website, I did take a few other things from the experience of reading multimodal articles. (If we can still call them articles). As I read, I thought, “This would be a great way to read all the writing center articles I used to read (and all the other articles that spend an inordinate amount of time on describing what might have been more easily seen in a video clip of a video-recorded interview).” Some articles I’ve read (and no, I can never remember exactly which ones off the top of my head . . . it’s been a little while) have struggled with the medium of paper and ink. When a study depends on transcripts and visuals and the only medium of publication is a limiting hard copy journal or book, then something more freeing, like a new media digital article with lots of bells and whistles, would be a lot more effective. When Ball and Moeller describe the students’ projects, I did not have to sit and wish I could see them or go to the trouble of finding a computer and typing in a web address to see it. All I had to do was click, download, and watch the student projects they were talking about.

I have come this far without addressing the words of their arguments. Much more than hard copy books, of course, these online articles made other, visual and layout arguments that were prominent. While there was a lot of text, the layout and appearance was another layer to be looked at rhetorically—something I pay less attention to with old media texts. While this can certainly be a benefit and can add something to the argument while giving rhetorical choices that were not available before, this new media kind of text could be a problem for some academic articles. If all articles used the layout of Sorapure, I would pay much less attention to the content of the argument. While I like all the new rhetorical choices available with new media, I don’t think we should forget the challenges that such rhetorical possibilities can bring with those choices.

Can You Read This?

"New" Media Texts

Anne Frances Wysocki defines new media texts as “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/comsumers/viewers stay alert to how any text—like its composers and readers—don’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. . . . Under this definition, new media texts do not have to be digital” (15).

I was genuinely surprised by Wysocki’s definition, and found myself rereading it several times to be sure that I was understanding what she was saying. If her definition is accepted as true and accurate, and if new media texts do not have to be digital, as she asserts, then, I wonder, how are new media texts new? If it does not have to be digital, does it still have to be technology-based? In my reading of the text, it does not, and so are all new media texts really new? Have there been no composers who were “aware of the range of materialities of texts and who then highlight[ed] the materiality” until recently?

Perhaps this would be clearer to me if Wysocki had unpacked her definition more, with some specific concrete examples of what she sees as “new media texts.” Perhaps someone can help me sort out her definition? Does anyone have some specific examples that would make her definition clearer? I pondered through the activities at the end of the chapter and was still a bit uncertain. (I also had a very difficult time imagining that I woke up one morning and found myself “and everyone else in the world—with the body of a giant cockroach.” No, I do not know how to design a computer desktop so that cockroach bodies could use it.) (See page 28).

So, despite my initial adverse and confused reaction to Wysocki’s definition, I am also intrigued by the idea that new media texts do not have to be digital. (I’ll ignore, for now, my inclination to think that if it’s not digital or technologically based, it might not really be all that new). The idea of the composition classroom going all digital seems overwhelming to me now, and so something that is not digital sounds more doable, inasmuch as I might not have to become a technological expert, which I am still working at. Of course, I wonder, having not yet read extensively on the topic, how many others also believe that new media texts do not have to be digital.

Introduction

I am Matthew Nunes, and I am a first-year PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Composition at Ohio University. In May of 2010 I completed my Master’s degree (in the same subject) at the University of Louisville. My research interests include the history of rhetoric, 19^th-century American rhetoric, classical rhetoric, metacognition in composition, and probably a few other things. It’s all interesting to me. I also love literature, especially 19^th century and before, mostly American and British. Additionally, I also dabble in creative writing (or at least have quite a bit in the past). I am currently teaching English 151, which is a lot of fun.

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About me (non-academically): Aside from the academics, I have two adorable children. My son is almost two, and my daughter was born just over two months ago. They are lots of fun. In my younger days I competed in gymnastics and then equestrian eventing. I am originally from California, the land of everything and expensive living. My hobbies include old-time radio drama and reading. I am also a big fan of my San Francisco Giants, and proudly wear the Giants 2010 World Series Champions t-shirt.

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I am looking forward to the Computers and Composition class, although I am a bit nervous about some technology. Although I have done some audio and video editing before, using this technology in the classroom as a teacher and student is a bit daunting.

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