sarah spangler's List: Currents in Electronic Literacy

• does it exist to prepare students for other writing they will compose in college, or to get students ready to participate as professional, literate citizens and workers in society?
• my approach to first-year writing is above all rhetorical.
• my students also needed to learn how to make rhetorically sensitive choices about mode and media
• Through her composition process, Kaitlyn made choices about how many and what kind of images to use, how much and what kind of written text to use, and what music would effectively carry and support her persuasive point, combining songs and lyrics with images and text and leveraging powerful appeals to pathos, ethos, and logos. 
• Kaitlyn uses lyrics, instruments, melody, voice, intensity, familiarity—these all collide with emotion and with logic, with words and with images, to forward the argument of respect for all athletes, both male and female.
• he first issue that the assignment and my students raise is the confusing nature of the terms we use to discuss the creation and consumption of texts
• how can instructors best guide students through today’s composition process, teaching them to recognize the vast array of rhetorical choices in front of them and to make rhetorically sensitive decisions? 
• Composition instructors like me desperately need a new 21^st century pedagogy that highlights all available means of persuasion, that allows students to discuss, analyze, and evaluate the choices they make and to become aware of why they make these choices, and that provides a clear and rhetorically appropriate way to articulate the effectiveness of the choices in the end
• Rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke illustrates how the reality that humans experience is mediated by the terminologies we use within our symbol systems. 
• his direction of attention is facilitated by what Burke labels terministic screens, a necessary and unavoidable result of the human act of creating meaning within a symbol system.

• These important questions highlight the pressing need for today’s compositionists and writing instructors to sort out what they mean by writing, composing, and composition, and to articulate these definitions clearly to our students.

   
• Instead of conflating writing and composition, therefore, Halbritter argues that today’s composition does not have to include traditional writing: “Writing entails composing, but composing does not entail writing. 
• Print writing, then, can be one facet or one “genre” of a 21^st century composition,
• This clear definition begins, for me, with the notion of a 21st century composition as multiple and shifting. 
• Along with its multiplicity, I also define today’s composition as participatory, where audience plays a key role in original and remixed text design and often alters and interacts with the character of texts.
• Third, my definition of today's composition is characterized by what Henry Jenkins labels convergence: “where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways” (2)
• To continue to ignore the rhetorical capabilities of sound and music in our discipline is not only to limit ourselves as instructors, but to limit the ability of our students to fully realize all available means of persuasion. 
• However, instructors and compositionists aren’t paying enough attention to the complex ways sound and music can be used, often over-simplifying the use of music as only an emotional appeal or viewing it as background. 
• Selfe joins others in the field who are asking for instructors and students to give renewed attention to sound and aurality in the writing classroom. 
• These affordances point to the need for what Michelle Comstock and Mary Hocks label a critical sonic literacy, defined as “the ability to identify, define, situate, construct, manipulate, and communicate our personal and cultural soundscapes.” 
• ot only can music evoke, intensify, and coordinate emotion, but it can also develop character, carry an argument, organize a composition, elicit cultural associations, and link to memory, to star
• I argue that Composition instructors highlight music’s persuasive potential and give students language with which they can describe and discuss the rhetoric of music in their own work and the work of others. 
• Once students are composing using music and sound along with other modes of expression, then, they also need to be instructed in how to critically discuss, analyze, and evaluate what constitutes the effective use of music in their own and others’ work. 
• n an attempt to demystify this evaluation process and help define what effective use of different modes of expression truly means, I required Kaitlyn and her classmates to each construct an individualized rubric that I used to assign grades.
• One former student includes “effective audio” on his rubric as one of eight categories for assessment, defining this term as sound that is “relevant and helps convey and strengthen the central argument.”
• , I realized that their rubrics failed to give specific, clear guidelines for how to evaluate if the sound or music aligned with or strengthened the message of the piece as a whol
• Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin claims that throughout a human lifetime, “our brains learn a kind of musical grammar that is specific to the music of our culture, just as we learn to speak the language of our culture” (108).
• The human brain often creates memory links between notes and the context in which they are heard. 
• All of our students can and should learn to consider, analyze, and discuss a song’s use of pitch, the cultural associations of a chosen piece of music, its use of different instruments with differing timbres, and its associations with memory or events.   
• song, but also through the ways the audience experiences that song as a cultural artifact that refers to historic context and the audience’s prior experiences (“Musical Rhetoric” 322). 
• obe, holding a position as one of the top most positive and motivational songs of all time. 
• Contemporary new media composition scholars such as Stuart Selber and Kathleen Welch also look beyond Aristotle’s definition of logos within electronic composition environments.  Selber urges us to redefine rhetoric “at the nexus of literacy and technology” (138), and Welch enacts such a redefinition, arguing for what she labels “Next Rhetoric” or “Electric Rhetoric” that seeks to extend beyond the “relentless logic” of Aristotle and Plato (68), and instead turns toward a Sophistic, Isocratic rhetoric that embraces qualities such as association, belief in “right” action, inner speech, and self deliberation (Welch 32, 46). 
• Additionally, music can also argue logically through what Welch labels oralist, postmodern techniques such as association, repetition, and mixing.  Music creates associations and continuity in a film, linking one part to another when it is played over spatially discontinuous images or shots (Sonnenschein 155)
• What is clear from the work of the Music, Film, and Media scholars above is that English Composition needs to pay attention to the rhetoric of music.  Scholars in the field like Halbritter have only just begun to explore the diverse ways music appeals to emotion, creates ethos, argues a thesis, and extends logic into electronic contexts, and we need more research about, more analysis of, and more experimentation with the rhetoric of music in our classrooms.
• The scene uses camera angles, melody, and leitmotif to convey an ethos for the scene, link the scene to the audience’s prior knowledge, and transmit the message that the person who was once Anakin Skywalker has now become dehumanized and evil.
• The first activity Chion calls masking, where participants screen a sequence from a film, video, or composition several times, watching the sound and images together, then masking the image, then cutting out the sound (188-9)
• rced marriage, where a sequence from a film or video is shown several times with the original sound cut out and accompanied by diverse musical pieces played over the images
• In addition, both masking and forced marriage could be performed in the context of full-class workshop with real student texts, where one student asks the class to consider the added value and rhetorical functions of music in a draft of his or her composition.   

36 more annotations...