Multi-Modal, My Aunt Fanny

(or Why I Think This is the Worst Idea Since Sliced Poison)

While I spent a meaningful amount of time as a technology executive as well as executive editor for a trade publication covering technology in finance, I’m still a bit of a Luddite when it comes to writing pedagogy. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love having computers in every classroom and having access to classrooms where each student can use a computer. I even use the MS Word comment feature to grade papers. But when it comes to the work being generate by the students themselves. I’m OLD SKOOL! I want to see 12 Times New Roman on 8.5 by 11 with 1 inch margins and a running head. Unless the essay is about a photo, or a chart or graph are truly helpful to communicate, no thank you, please.

So maybe I’m not the audience Takayoshi and Selfe had in mind for Chapter One Of Thinking About Multimodiality. I am a resistant audience. I’m twisting the rhetorical triangle into a parallelogram waiting until page nine when they finally speak to my primary concern: When you add a focus on multimodiality to a composition class, what do you give up?

Yeah. See that’s the nagging question that kept me from engaging with their argument. And what do they have to say on this: “We believe that teaching students to make rhetorically-based use of video, still images….can actually help them better understand the affordances of written language.” Well, pardon me for calling BS, but I wasn’t aware the composition studies was so close to theology that an “I believe” statement could be employed in place of evidence. Where are their rigorous studies performed with various groups/types of students performed over long periods of time tracking how well students learned in a composition class?

I applauded when Larry Ellison banned PowerPoint from Oracle as a colossal time waster. ( I had done the same at the PR firm where I was managing director the same month.) The joint chiefs of staff also saw an issue with people using all their time and bandwidth fooling with bells and whistles instead of communicating facts.