Re-imagining composition via visual rhetoric
This week’s readings brought to mind an undergraduate class of mine, Journalism 4506: Magazine Design. This was the only course I ever took that approached anything like “visual rhetoric.” And, frankly, I wasn’t a big fan of the course. Perhaps that will manifest in this response, as I intend to take a detour shortly.
Most of the class focused on discussion, which I enjoy. The professor would show us designs from magazines, and we would critique the designs. (For anyone with little confidence in their designs—read, me—the true horror were critique days: Your design went up on the projector, and everyone critiqued it.) I don’t remember much talk of “visual rhetoric” per se, but we did look at many of the elements Claire Lauer and Christopher A. Sanchez mark as important: use of white space to draw attention, an uncluttered presentation with a dominant image, tying the images into the thematic ideas without relying on words. Nifty, but I remember one thing irritated me about this course; we never really focused on learning the tools, such as PhotoShop, InDesign, and Illustrator. We went over the basics, and I think I graduated with “competence” in the tools. Truly great designs, though, were out of my reach because I didn’t have the technical skill to pull them off.
While I won’t say this class recreated the “studio environment” Eva Brumberger envisioned, we did have some of the hallmarks. We had to plan everything by hand. Our “drafts” were always done on paper with a pencil. And we, the students, would rework and critique our work, creating some of the “process” that goes into design. But, at the end of the day, we’d have to fire up a computer and put that design to disc, on a PDF, emailed to our professor. That last step is what killed me.
And—here is the detour—this got me thinking about composition. I, and I would guess others, would contend composition is a process that is difficult to codify. And, I don’t think I’m alone in this class when I say I’m sympathetic to Kent’s ideas that writing happens as a process of dialog. But, we also had frustrations about Kent in class: How do you teach this writing if nothing can be codified?
Well, while I may hold on to this ideal with writing, reading about visual communication made me wonder whether I have the same ideas about that type of rhetoric. My own experience in a class that was—at least tangentially—about visual communication showed me that what I really wanted was a technical, step-by-step instruction for how to create a design—and not just in my mind; I wanted to know how to use the computer to make this design whole.
Brumberger seems to suggest that composition instructors would do well not to put all faith in computers or those coveted (?) computer-based classrooms. Instead, we should work with students so that they understand this hard-to-qualify “process” of writing. The reality is, though, that these students will have to perform myriad writing tasks on a computer—sometimes through multiple programs and revisions on a computer. And, just as I was frustrated with my inability to translate my pencil-and-paper design to a computer file, I wonder whether some students face similar frustration about writing itself. In other words, am I more willing to approach writing as a nebulous process because I’m comfortable with it. And, consequently, am I frustrating students because my own comfort doesn’t translate into their comfort.
Maybe this boils down to one of the keys Brumberger brings up for teaching visual thinking: “making the familiar strange.” Talking about rhetoric in terms of visuals is much less familiar to me, and I’m less comfortable for it. Still, this has allowed me to see how—perhaps—other people might consider writing. In this way, perhaps Brumberger’s curriculum for visual thinking could help teachers who are comfortable with composition make the process more comfortable for their students. The five elements may well read: demystify composition and rhetorical thinking, make the familiar strange, conceive of composition as a process, valuing visual and verbal thinking, creating a studio environment.
Two of these elements likely have a place in the majority of composition classrooms, demystifying composition and rhetoric and conceiving of composition as a process. A third, valuing visual and verbal thinking, is probably present to some extent. But I’d like to consider the other two as possibilities for extending composition pedagogy. When describing making the familiar strange, Brumberger notes that students would take small areas of familiar ground and focus on those areas until they became “strange” and until the students could approach the areas as design. Could we, as composition instructors, trouble the “familiar” compositions of emails, text messages, Facebook updates, tweets, etc. to help students focus on the composition? Also, what might a “studio environment” look like for composition? And would there be value in creating one?