An assortment of ramblings on Wysocki

Of all the articles in response to Kress that we had to read for this week, I found Anne Frances Wysocki’s “awaywithwords: On the possibilities in unavailable designs” to be the most intriguing. I’m not sure if my interest in her work stems from attending the workshop she presented at BSU last year, or if statements like “…were we to consider ‘word’ in this same commonsensical way as ‘image’…limiting it to a particular size and to a set of compositional strategies and means of production, it would be as though we were asking people in our classes to go out in to the world believing that the only writing everyone everywhere ever does is the academic research essay” (58) simply make her my personal hero. In my own personal experience (and I apologize for getting somewhat anecdotal), there has been a lack of incorporating technology and technological awareness until just recently, and even then (with my additions of discussion board postings over paper journals and designing websites instead of final portfolios) my pedagogy for teaching writing always seems to revert back to the standard academic essay. Why? It’s strange that Wysocki mentions “compositional strategies and means of production,” since my emphasis on constant revision, deadlines, and high order vs. low order concerns certainly reeks of teaching a process that will ensure a product; but the product of a standard academic essay? Come on. Students will enter a world involving vastly different forms of writing, reading, and interpretation through a variety of forms and mediums – that much is clear. But how do we as practitioners make this transition? Is it as simple as requiring students to post all of their papers on the web, making hypertexts and links to their sources, and using visuals in a conscious, critical way? In other words, do we still teach the conventions of the academic essay and change the way the product is presented? My guess is that both Selber and Kress would shudder at this prospect. Personally, I thought Wysocki’s assignment of a video essay (which she presented at the workshop) was fascinating and something I would love to try out; but my fear is that I would spend so much class time teaching the program rather than teaching the students about making sound rhetorical choices. Is this fear irrational?

I apologize for the rambling nature of my post. Trying to coalesce all of these different perspectives with my own personal experiences has become a rather rocky undertaking.