Poet Ponders the Digital

Should we teach our digital composition students the "tricks of the trade" for bloggers and other new media publishers? The ancient texts on rhetoric discuss proper attire, gestures, and tone of voice to appeal to audiences. Aren't these almost as shallow as writing the best headline to drive traffic to an online post? Clearly our Greek and Roman ancestors understood that the superficial (nice robes, deep voice) was part of the persuasive art. We tell our students to focus on the quality of their arguments, while blogging, reporting, and scholarly writing fades fast on the Web of today. The great World Wide Web that was going to bring information to everyone is one giant magazine rack, thanks to Facebook and Twitter. Short headlines, ideally implying something sexual in nature, drive traffic. Shocking. Horrible. You won't believe your eyes. From the Huffington Post to old-stalwarts like The Atlantic, clickbait headlines dominate the flow of information (as op...

I posted a response to Geoffrey Sirc's "Box Logic" ( Writing New Media , 2004) that might have been my reaction to his essay, but I also think I didn't quite understand the essay. Hearing Prof. Sirc speak on November 27, 2007, I realized his theories were not far from my own, at least within creative writing, which might have been why I didn't sense any "revelation" in the essay. At the same time, the links between art theory and composition that escaped my comprehension when reading were much much clearer during the visual and oral presentation. However, I also don't complete agree these approaches help in a college composition course meant to teach academic norms. This leads to an interesting question: why would I be thrilled by his presentation, but utterly flummoxed by a text? Why did the text leave me confused and disappointed, while hearing Prof. Sirc was fascinating? I think it is important to admit -- Sirc's ideas are interesting....

Assignment: find images of interest to you and collect them. I do not collect much of anything. I do not know of any "scene" nor do I have any particular focused interest at the moment. Maintaining my Web sites is now about maintaining content, not creativity or discovery. (They are academic tools, not hobbies.) I seldom leave my house, except to travel between the home and the university campus. I do not have any hobbies, which would merely distract me from writing assignments. I have no desire to gather random things without purpose, and the "purpose" of completing an assignment was painful enough with the Flikr slideshow I was asked to produce earlier in the semester. Without my wife's assistance, the idea of looking at pictures would have been too daunting. When I have "nothing to do," I do whatever I am asked to do by my family or employer. I have a list of stories and projects at all times, though, giving me guidance when I wonder wha...

Responding to Geoffrey Sirc's "Box Logic" ( Writing New Media , 2004): 1) What should we be teaching as composition? (p. 110) I do not spend much time on Web design (HTML, CSS) because those technologies will change within a year or two. Rhetorical thought, however, is a skill that can be applied for both analysis of existing material or synthesis of new. Thinking strategically is a portable skill. 2) I truly despise the "creativity" of making blocks of text non-columnar (113). It is painful to read as it is, so why make it any more difficult? If this were poetry, I would be forgiving — poetry is condensed meaning. This is not poetry. It is a mockery of poetry and creativity to have a scholarly article make pretense of creativity. Bluntly, the blocks serve no purpose in this text. They do not move me emotionally, they merely annoy me as a reader of a dense text. If you want to be poetic be poetic, but this is not even prosaic. It's silliness. 3) I a...

Selected Bibliography My views on the implementation of online writing curricula are also informed by the following texts and articles: Anson, Chris M. "Distant Voices: Teaching and Writing in a Culture of Technology." College English 61.3 (1999): 261-80. Applebome, Peter. "The on-Line Revolution Is Not the End of Civilization as We Know It. But Almost." New York Times 4 April 1999 1999, sec. Education Supplement: 26-28, 35-37. Armstrong, Alison, and Charles Casement. The Child and the Machine : How Computers Put Our Children's Education at Risk . Updated ed. Carlton North, Vic.: Scribe Publications, 2001. Beniger, James. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Berlin, James A. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures : Refiguring College English Studies . Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition. West Lafayette, Ind.: Parlor Press, 2003. Callister, Nicholas C. Burbul...