The Prentice Hall Guide for College Writers [antikvár]

Preface Ready or not, teachers of writing today find themselves ushered or perhaps even beamed into a New Media world. In some cases, we have a technological head start on our students; in other cases, we are scrambling to catch up with our students' knowledge of and facility with hybrid texts. The Internet, with its proliferation of Web sites, databases, blogs, and Facebook pages, is quickly becoming the dominant medium, and it features an amazing array of genres, designs, images, photographs, video clips, sound bites, and other forms of digitized communication. The public and academic writing we prepare our students for is itself a rapidly evolving target. Academic writing is becoming more hypertextual, and public writing is more and more multimedia based. We need to think only of A1 Gore's An Inconvenient Truth to realize how academic and scientific information can be combined with digital images in a performed script to achieve a socially transformative goal. Like climate change, New Media is arriving with seemingly scary speed and inevitability, and like global warming, it has both its doomsday scenarios and its positive and constructive visions. First, the doomsday scenarios. Some teachers complain that when students turn to visual communication, two things happen and both of them are bad. First, because students focus most of their time and attention on selecting images, their critical thinking and critical reading suffer, and the organization, coherence, and readability of their prose decline. Second, students' choices of visuals are often ineffective because the images are not connected to the text or are not appropriate for the intended genre, purpose, or audience. On the positive side, however, if we treat visuals and digital texts in a rhetorical manner, we can reemphasize our overall rhetorical principles. Once students understand that readers expect visuals to function in context, just as examples, facts, or statistics should do, they can see how rhetorical goals should govern their entire text. They can learn that using images must follow the golden rule: Visuals must be relevant to and appropriate for the rhetorical goals of their text. Multimedia elements must add to rather than detract from the purpose of their text. Incorporating visual and digital elements into our writing classes thus places even more importance on designing our courses with clear rhetorical goals and principles. The WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition (available at www.wpacouncil.org) outlines four key goals: building students' rhetorical knowledge of purpose, audience, genre, cultural context, voice, and tone; improving students' critical thinking, reading, and writing skills; developing students' strategies for writing processes', and helping students develop their knowledge of conventions. Clearly, the first of these goals—building rhetorical knowledge of purpose, audience, genre, and cultural context—is crucial to helping students create effective New Media texts.