SEPTEMBER 16, 2018 (Stephen Bernhardt and Anne Wysocki)

SEPTEMBER 16, 2018 BLOG POST
"Seeing the Text" By Stephen Bernhardt
"The Multimedia of Texts" By Anne Wysocki

Stephen Bernhardt speaks my language. I feel the premise of his essay surrounds breaking the convention of feeding students one form of writing and expecting purely non-visually informative compositions. Unfortunately for the educations systems there are many different types of persuasion and "rhetorical organization," as Bernhardt identifies it.

This terminology, "rhetorical organization," makes me want to analyze how Bernhardt defined it. Based on what I understand about rhetoric, I find this term linked with the persuasive elements of how we interpret text. Bernhardt writes, "

He seems to have a problem with the "conventional essay format," which rarely sees visual components. He writes, "A preoccupation with conventional essay format allows little attention to visual features. Instead of helping students learn to analyze a situation and determine an appropriate form, given a certain audience and purpose, many writing assignments merely exercise the same sort of writing week after week, introducing only topical variation” (77). He appears to be suggesting that rhetoric has foundations in determining the appropriate form for a persuasive composition, and depriving students of the opportunity to decide what form best suits the need of the composition, we're fundamentally teaching them nothing about what options they have for employing rhetoric to their advantage. I also find it somewhat perturbing that most educators exclusively assign non-visually informative compositions from students.

However, it's worth addressing the problem of non-visually informative texts being consistent, which is the aim of many educational systems, consistency. Consider in simple terms a high school English classroom, a place most familiar to me from being there as a student and a substitute teacher more recently. A high school English teacher assigns students an "project" rather than an "essay," and students can make a video, a poster, or some other form of presentation to demonstrate their knowledge about whatever book they've been reading. Let's say students are relatively creative and make some posters, a short film, one writes a song, another does a re-enactment from a scene in the text. Now, the problem of grading. At a high school level, where standards are rigorously enforced, the grading scheme can't always be based on effort, but on content. There are no standards for grading content. It's all up to the discretion of the teacher to assign grades to each of these nonlinear projects that students have worked on and composed. Consider the other teacher who assigns his/her students "essays" and not "projects." He/she takes away a bit of creative demonstration from the students, but the exchange is that they receive a pile of papers that A) use a consistent grading scale, B) all likely possess similar points, and C) can be graded based on a standard that has been applied to years and years of high school educators. Which is easier? Which is more expressive and entertaining? Which will stimulate students' interest most effectively?

Bernhardt writes, “…view the rhetoric of visual design as an evolving art” (75). So our understanding of subversive and alternative forms of rhetorical organization, at least in academia, is somewhat undeveloped at this point. Although, it is "evolving" as he says, that is, expressive modes are being explored everywhere and by rhetoricians across the globe. Even "animal rhetorical expression" is being explored as an avenue.

The main point to take away from this essay, in my opinion, is that it's unconventional to use visual features for conventional student compositions. The conventional essay is the preferred method, but this prevents students from learning how to experiment with form, purpose, and audience. It limits their expressive abilities and fits them into a margin. Persuasive elements come in a variety of forms and it doesn't end with Bernhardt's exploration of visual components.

Now, to address Wysocki. Her essay seemed to be like a form of style-guide for visual rhetoric, how "...visual elements and arrangements of a text perform persuasive work” (124). She outlines all the possibilities of using text, shapes, organization of pages, how they all play off of one another. Her detail is astounding, but the punchline from all that appears to be quite similar to what Bernhardt is suggesting, that visual aspects of text can be understood as being just as rhetorically effective for an audience as "conventional text." This rarely-explored avenue for persuasion features a composition process with just as much, if not more, specificity as to how the rhetorical effect is employed in relation to conventional forms of rhetorical persuasion, in modes ranging from organization to purpose to audience considerations. It all matters when employing rhetoric.