Poet Ponders the Digital

English: An HP LaserJet 4200 dtns printer (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley August 31, 2015 Deadline October 2015 Issue Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek hacked a Jeep in July of this year. Chrysler recalled 1.4 million vehicles to fix issues with the “Uconnect” network, which used cellular Internet connections to enable features like remote access. If you’ve wondered how OnStar and similar services, like Uconnect, unlock car doors, now you know. They use the Internet. Uber, the ride-scheduling app company, hired Miller and Valasek in August to work on security for Uber’s autonomous automobile project, since a self-driving car requires network and GPS access to function properly. Everything in an autonomous vehicle is computerized and this invites potential mischief. Uber hired hackers to identify security vulnerabilities. General Motors, Volkswagen and other car companies have been tested by hackers. The 2016 Corvette’s braking system has been hacke...

Speaking is composing, but is it writing? I have long used dictation software to quickly compose drafts of short stories, plays, essays, and magazine columns. The results tend to read more naturally than when I type directly into a word processor. I am pondering whether or not the dictated documents are "better" because they are more approachable for many readers. When I type, I aggressively attempt to avoid forms of "to be" and a list of "weak" words and phrases lacking precision. For this reason, I have considered my typed documents superior to dictated documents. After all, we tell our students that writing should be more refined and precise than the spoken word. Yet, when I read student papers, their attempts to sound "educated" produce jarring prose. In their eagerness to demonstrate vocabulary skills, they instead expose a lack of reading and true word comprehension. Overly complex sentences also reflect internalized models students h...

Call for proposals for an edited collection: Type Matters: the Rhetoricity of Letterforms Edited by C.S. Wyatt and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss Stephen Bernhardt warned us almost 30 years ago that our "preoccupation with conventional essay format" excludes the rhetorical rigor of typographic elements. Later, John Trimbur extended this argument, noting that "one of the main obstacles to seeing the materiality of writing has been the essayist tradition and its notion of a transparent text." Many visual rhetoric scholars have interrogated the ways in which meaning-making happens iconographically, photographically, and via other visual means. Few, however (save for Anne Frances Wysocki), have paid much attention to the rhetorical work that typography does. Although always part of any text's argument, the choice of typeface is an under-articulated and under-studied aspect of textual production within composition and rhetoric. Today, even as there are thousands of fon...