“crafting new approaches to composition”

Prins argues for a revised understanding of writing as craft: “as a particular set of actions and relationships between people and between people and things – writing’s value explicitly shifts from being located in a writer’s ability to produce a set of ideal discourse to the roles textual production plays in shaping writers and the… Continue reading “crafting new approaches to composition”

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“rhetoric, humanism, and design”

Noting that *design* is a capacious field, includes a myriad of objects and kind of objects, Buchanan argues that design studies ought to be understood as a humanistic enterprise where *design thinking* is inherently rhetorical Products embody the intentions and purposes of their makers, and there is an intelligible pattern in the ongoing development and application of… Continue reading “rhetoric, humanism, and design”

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“process paradigms in composition studies: affinities and directions”

Identifying the process paradigm as the emerging paradigm in composition studies, Kostelnick looks toward another “field of creative problem-solving — design” to “she light on the evolution and future direction of the writing paradigm” GOAL: using design field pedagogies and theories to show that developments in design process *corroborate* composition theory and pedagogy; develop a… Continue reading “process paradigms in composition studies: affinities and directions”

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“from analysis to design: visual communication in the teaching of writing”

CLAIM: the role of the visual in composition has note been deployed as capaciously as it might be: “our students have a much richer imagination for what we might accomplish with the visual than our journals have yet to address” Traces the emergence of *visual literacy* in writing classrooms: through a number of reports from… Continue reading “from analysis to design: visual communication in the teaching of writing”

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“embracing wicked problems: the turn to design in composition studies”

Noting that the post-process — turns to critical cultural studies — failed to supply a theory of agency, Marback notes that the “centrifugal forces of critique in composition studies are giving way to centripetal interest in design, reinvigorating practical interest in agency” (398). Interest in design reinvigorates the field’s commitment to attending to student production… Continue reading “embracing wicked problems: the turn to design in composition studies”

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“design”

“multimodality needs design” – an emerging interest in multimodality necessarily leads to an emerging interest in design Multimodality is indicative of late modernity, a time when social arrangements, work, the professions, and practices were demarcated by clear boundaries (think: the print house) In that era, design was a higher order concern practiced by the upper echelons… Continue reading “design”

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going wireless

“The Changing Shapes of Writing” Johnson-Eilola and Selber argue for a more capacious understanding of composition by arguing for the inclusion of cellphone-based genres, e.g., text messages. They make their case by emphasizing the utility of a four-part framework for planning communications. Their grid includes the terms context (immediate/micro and ideological/macro), change (goal for communication),… Continue reading going wireless

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datacloud

Johnson-Eilola explores – among many things – the ways that computers participate/enable aspects of our lives: “our patterns of working, living, and communicating and our relationships to each other in those areas” which “are dynamic processes of ongoing construction and reconstruction” His theory is a constitution of two other theories: Articulation theory – one that… Continue reading datacloud

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“awaywithwords”

Rather than seeing the logic of modes as inherent to the mode, Wysocki highlights the ways that modes are shaped by social-historical conditions, i.e., the way that the page, as a visual space, has become natural to how we read insofar as we look for spaces inbetween words. Pointing to a difference between tattoos and… Continue reading “awaywithwords”

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“gains and losses”

Kress outlines his multimodal theory, tracing the differences between a web page and a book. For him, these two forms are representative of a modal shift, one informed by economic, ethical, and political positions. He points to two central assumptions: Communication is always multimodal Modes provide specific limitations for communication (see: Alexander and Rhodes) Mode:… Continue reading “gains and losses”

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