| FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | Contact: Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss | |
| PEER-REVIEWED WORK | Phone: 517-555-2400 | |
| January 15, 2009, 09:01 AM EST | E-mail: ridolfoj@msu.edu and devossda@msu.edu |
Composing for the Future and Teaching Rhetorical Velocity – “Today, we are witnessing … a writing public made plural … Whatever the exchange value may be for these writers—and there are millions of them, here and around the world—it’s certainly not grades. Rather, the writing seems to operate in an economy driven by use value” (Yancey, 2005, p. 301).
Along with Helsley, Skinner-Linnenberg, Welch, Trimbur, and others whose work we have cited here, Kathi Yancey has also addressed digital delivery. In the print version of her 2003 Conference on College Composition and Communication chair’s address, “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key,” Yancey (2005) speaks of the circulation of texts, and points toward ways in which we might better equip students to approach issues of digital delivery as an often rhizomatic process. She also wrote regarding deicity—the now and then of texts, and the ways in which texts change shape as they circulate in digital spaces. She spoke, in rich, eloquent, and illustrated ways, about the “proliferation of writings outside the academy” (p. 298).
Writing happens—and happens a lot—and lives in digital spaces like fan fiction sites, YouTube comments, blogs, and other spaces, and, Yancey notes, this writing dramatically counterpoints the writing done within the academy. Students are writing. A lot. They’re sharing. A lot. They’re circulating texts. A lot and across multiple spaces. As citizens and as professionals, they may be engaging in the strategic acts of composing-for-appropriation and composing-for-remix that Kimmage and Ridolfo (2007) describe. And this isn’t the sort of writing we’re asking them to do. And we certainly aren’t often enough asking them to think about rhetorical velocity, about how their texts might change shape in digital realms, and about how delivery shifts in networked spaces.
We have long known that students enter our classrooms with rich, established, accumulated, multimodal literacy practices (Brandt, 1998; New London Group, 1996; Cope & Kalantzis, 1999). This is nothing new—this was as true 50 years ago as it is today. What is new, however, are the spaces, surfaces, and interfaces in which and through which literacy practices are shaped and rhetoric happens. Jay David Bolter (1991) called our time—or at least the time 17 years ago, Jurassic in light of the rapidly evolving digital spaces in which we now compose—the “late age of print” (p. 150). We don’t think it’s time to say goodnight to print, but we do feel a need to recognize that “print,” “text,” “composing,” and, importantly, “delivery” change shape in different realms, and that, as composition instructors, we must grapple with those realms and what transformations occur in/through/with writing in these spaces.
The texts Yancey notes we typically ask students to produce are defined in the most traditional, narrow, and academic sense: white paper, black ink, 12-point font, one-inch margins, an appropriately linear approach to topic and development, writing toward conclusions and claims, etc. These conditions were the product of certain approaches to writing, certain values, certain understandings of delivery. And these approaches to writing are expanding, and the values that shape what writing is and what writing does are shifting—at least in the spaces in which many of our students write and deliver their texts. We initially wrote this conclusion on Thursday, March 6, 2008, and that day’s context was this:
We don’t mean to imply that these bits and bytes speak for themselves, but we do see these as compelling evidence of the ways in which writers and composers are remixing, rewriting, rescripting, and redelivering work in digital spaces. Each of these moments and the texts created within these moments and spaces point to the landscape of digital composing practices.
Yancey calls attention to the ways in which our classroom writing approaches are out of sync with the ways students are writing in the world. She encouraged us to think about the ways in which we can better situate students to be citizens writing in and to the world—members of a “writing public” (p. 31). Importantly, she also notes that we should better attend to medium and address issues of delivery—and the multiple ways in which a piece of writing can be shared “in those different media, to different audiences” (p. 311).
We see ourselves challenged, then, at the end of this article but still at the beginnings of this field conversation, to provide teaching materials that help foster these emerging conversations in our first-year classes, undergraduate courses, and graduate seminars. This is important because we think that in the next 10 years the canon of delivery will be reconstructed with an emergent range of concepts, and the best examples of these will likely begin in classroom conversations, where it is the coming generations who will be the most immersed in this type of remix activity. We propose the following exercise as just one route toward discussing issues of rhetorical velocity in the classroom:
Step One) Go to a government news release site such as www.defenselink.mil or a corporate public relations newswire such as www.prnewswire.com or www.i-newswire.com.
Step Two) Select a recent press advisory or release from the list (from within the last seven days). A highly popular or an event-specific story may be a good place to start.
Step Three) Select and search for phrases (in word groups of three, preferably including one proper name) on both the web and the Google news aggregate site (www.google.com/news). Use quotation marks to perform a more honed search. So, rather than searching for a string of terms, search for an exact phrase from the original release, for instance: “three U.S. servicemen, missing from World War II, have been identified and will be returned to their families for burial with full military honors.” The quotation marks will direct the search engine to search for that particular phrase, rather than for web pages that happen to have individual words (e.g., families, burial, honors) within their content.
Step Four) If you’ve located some hits, analyze the results and compare what you have found to the original press release. In what different types of documents has the press release content been used? For what purposes? For what audiences? Are there any authors listed on the original release? On the new documents you have found? What can we learn about the compositional use of the original release?
Step Five) To launch discussion, ask students to ponder the degree to which is it strategically plausible to think that experienced writers in this genre anticipate or strategize the re-composition of their work. You might also ask students to think about contexts in their professional lives in which they will likely do this sort of recomposing, or in which they will likely be the original writers of documents written to be recomposed.
We have integrated versions of the activity above in first-year courses and in undergraduate courses in professional writing. Drawing on the work of Jim Ridolfo (2005), Doug Eyman (2005) has also developed undergraduate teaching materials explicitly around a concept of rhetorical velocity. In an assignment titled “Rhetorical Velocity: (Press Release)” for his introduction to professional writing course taught at Michigan State University (a course oriented toward first-year and sophomore students), Eyman facilitated conversations around strategizing and delivery by working through the lens of economics, circulation, and delivery. His assignment offers a range of classroom possibilities:
1. Collect a minimum of six press releases (we'll call this our “corpus” for the following analysis). Looking at the examples you found, identify the common elements of the press release as a genre. Make sure that you look at textual construction, visual representation, and the activities supported by the release (that is, what does a press release do? What is the activity or activities embedded in the genre of the document?). You should write this as a brief report, using appropriate headings and organization of your findings. Include the URLs for the press releases as an appendix.
2. Imagine that you are in charge of an event or activity that you would like covered in the press. Write a press release for this event or activity, using the generic features you identified in Part 1 (that is, engage in the same practices that you see as contributing to a successful press release).
3. Taking into account the cycle of (re)appropriation outlined in the definition of “rhetorical velocity” above, write a memo that explains the decisions you made when you drafted the press release—what elements did you include or exclude? How did you hope to facilitate appropriation by the media? (Eyman, 2005)
We see surfacing in the ideas of rhetorical velocity an emergent, conceptual approach to rhetorical delivery, one that will surely yield many new heuristics and approaches to the fifth canon over the next decade. We are in agreement with Paul Prior and his colleagues (2007) that “the canon of delivery does not focus attention on the possible rhetorical configurations of distribution, mode, and other mediations.” We think, however, that delivery is a highly useful container and category to think from as a conceptual space. But there is work to be done to make the fifth canon useful as a classroom heuristic to talk about practice, and we see promise in these sorts of assignments.
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