Blog # 11 – Yancey and Selfe

Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key by Kathleen Blake Yancey and The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal by Cynthia L. Composing Selfe

Wow, I can’t believe this semester has gone by SO quickly! I feel like I just had to say that.

For this week, we read Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key by Kathleen Blake Yancey and The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal by Cynthia L. Composing Selfe. Both articles were very insightful and presented great information.

In Yancey’s essay she brings in the idea of writing being words on paper but she also makes the connection with writing and the digital world. As I read her essay I thought about our final projects and my experience creating mine. I first drafted a few pieces of my project and as I thought about what I did, I realized that I never used pen and paper. I got on my laptop and used my word processor to draft my piece. I continued to draft my piece until it was completed; all on a word document using my laptop. What I found more interesting about my experience was that when I went to transfer my written vignette into my digital application, I actually found myself revising my piece because the way in which I was presenting it in the digital application almost required for me to change a few of the pieces of my vignette. I found this fascinating because I am still editing my vignette in the digital application and Yancey talks about writing being not only words written on paper.

As I read Selfe’s essay I thought about times where I’ve been in a classroom where the teacher/professor has gone beyond presenting written text to deliver information to the students. Often I’ve seen how there has been videos played to proof a point or simply to deliver information to us. For instance, as I wrote this blog post I thought about Sabine’s lead night. Everyone did a great job on their lead nights but her presentation was the first one that came to mind as an example for my blog post. She presented a video where we saw what was going on in a classroom. I think that the same video she presented could’ve been presented in a written case study format. But the video delivered the information necessary for the audience effectively. We were also presented with a written poem which showed me that both multimodal and a written poem were both powerful tools to be use in the classroom. I don’t think that multimodal should replace the written information students need to receive but I think that it can serve as an aid when teaching.