Moe Folk’s essay this week was interesting for me because I tend to assign a lot of video essays to my students. Folk made me think about the possibilities of merging the visuals with the text to explore new possibilities. Folk’s recognition of the fact that “style is distributed throughout modern cultural constructs” underscores the need to re-evaluate the composition processes by exploring the potentiality of the new media for communicative purposes. The radical potential of digital composition lies in the fact that it offers new ways of ‘writing’ or ‘telling’. In the film studies, for instance, where the photographic medium has enjoyed the same privileged status that paper or a blank page on some word processor have enjoyed in the composition classes, the debates about the digital turn sound remarkably like Folk’s analysis. Folk has problematized the digital turn in composition by proposing that technological competence of the users and instructors will remain the most important variable. The problem of style remaining subservient to available technology is a valid, though I take it more as a historical problem than a permanent handicap. In cinema, for instance, photographic composition has only benefited from the digital turn, and the problem of technological competence is steadily being solved by the evolution in the pedagogical practices and syllabus designs. Although I understand that using the templates provided by WIX restricts free expression of anyone’s stylistic choices, I was thrilled by the idea of taking elementary instruction in computer languages from Dr. Josh. Folk is gesturing toward possible disciplinary alliances that can revolutionize the pedagogical possibilities of composition studies.
I also found Star Medzerian Vanguri’s essay on rubrics interesting for the purpose of my own teaching. I chanced upon this essay because I was writing the assignment sheet for one of the courses that I am teaching. I realized, much to my chagrin, that I did not use the word ‘style’ in the rubric, or as Vanguri argues, did not really have a clear idea about what I meant by style. Although I had deliberately avoided mentioning grammatical correctness, I was still prescriptive in giving broader expectations about what an argumentative essay might look like. I could see the validity of the approach taken by the author in asking the instructors to consider the students as their readers and how they understood instructor’s expectations about style.
Loewe’s essay supplemented Folk’s point of approaching writing instruction from novel theoretical perspectives. Although systems theory and cybernetics sound unusual pairings when it comes to writing instruction, the emphasis on understanding the interrelationships between the writer, text, and audience was convincing. The example of the carp to explain how any understanding of a system fails when the parts of the system are studied as enclosed, isolated objects will forever be etched in my memory. By foregrounding the relational nature of the triad, Loewe has proposed a more fluid, and autonomous model of writing and reading in which style is a kind of negotiation that is influenced by both feedback and feedforward loops. It also puts the writer, the text, and the reader in a relational arrangement where each acts and reacts in relation to the other.
Scott Farrin’s essay was not aligned with the other readings but more a reflection of my interest in the issues of voice. As I mentioned in our first class this semester, I cannot overemphasize the value of imitation for an ESL writer. I loved the examples in the essay and see the value of the exercise that we have been assigned in this course where we imitate the style of someone we admire. To go back to T. S. Eliot, knowing the tradition helps foster individual talent as they are not mutually exclusive, but interdependent. I could also read the anxieties about voice and discourse communities in this essay, and its recourse to imitation as an important step in guiding struggling writers was interesting.
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