I don't think that the definition
of rhetoric is getting changed as much as the
technology is making writing teachers see something
that was always there. We've always has these
multiple ways of looking at text. If you look at the
first paragraph of a student essay vs. television
commercials, it seems to me that what technology is
doing is bringing into our classrooms ways that we've
always had text, but have never talked about because
as writing teachers we always thought that we had to
teach only the 8.5 by 11 inch page essay.
There's this frustration that I see
in teachers when I'm training them how to use a
computer lab and they're doing it for the first time.
It's the realization that it's not just about word
processing, it's "now I have to teach graphics,
and now I have to think about helping them be
critical of computers."
And so this issue is a really
important one for us as writing teachers to be
thinking about, because I think it points to the way
that technology changes a lot of what we do and a lot
of what we've always thought about what we do. I
think that computers have revealed to us how long
we've been holding on to a form that's really not in
dominance and more in our culture. -- Pam Takayoshi
