Multimodal Assignments and Connecting with Audience...

In reading Chapter 3, "Composing Multimodal Assignments," I began thinking about how these types of assignments might help us to accomplish the goals of the course. This is something that I must admit, I was feeling at a bit of a disconnect about. I was wondering how working in these different technological formats would help students to learn to utilize "all available rhetorical means."

Hess argues: "Because video and audio are more popularly based forms of communication, students have a great deal of experience in receiving and interpreting such communicative forms--much more than they have, indeed, in reading and interpreting academic genres. Students know how video and audio messages are delivered and distributed differently for different purposes and different audiences" (31). This rings so true for me. I think that coming right out of high school, a person is much more likely to be able to connect the mediums of audio and video with the concept of an audience. This is an audience that, for them, is much more concrete, primarily because they are so used to being that audience. The idea of an audience that lurks behind a piece of writing like "The Symbolism in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter." is probably much more difficult for students to see than the audience that eagerly awaits the next High School Musical movie. When I was 18, I certainly would've been able to more easily understand the latter than the former.

This applies, I think, also to the idea of marketing and other related concepts. I'm currently toying with the idea of a course theme something like "The World is a Text" or something dealing with the many different avenues of communication both within the academy and without, because I do feel that if they can see how language functions as communication outside the academy, in an environment with which they are more familiar, that it will be easier to help them relate that to the communication that goes on inside the academy. I see it as a sort of "bridge-building" exercise. (There's the preview of my forthcoming (almost as big as High School Musical) movie...premiering October 13th in SFH room 106.) Although I have disagreed elsewhere on the board that this generation should be treated as a different species from the ones to which we belong and maybe we shouldn't tailor their experiences in school entirely to their experiences outside of school, I guess this is my answer to my own question. I think that if we can start with what they know and inherently understand (yet not stop there) before we even set eyes on them, we can begin to build a bridge between their world and ours.

From this, I think that the multimodal assignments that Hess discusses can be quite useful in introducing and reinforcing the importance of considering your audience in writing, no matter which means you choose to use to write. I think that in a way, that this brings the idea of audience home, much more than only writing alphabetic essays and nothing else. Even in this course, as I work and rework (almost obsessively) my movie, the fact that I'm approaching it with the understanding that I will be showing it to students on the first day of class in an effort to show them what I want them to begin thinking about and give them glimpses into my theory of writing and communication (in all spheres where it occurs) is continually reinforcing audience for me, in a very intense way, and in a way that feels "new" to me. Considering I've been writing for a long time and audience is nothing new to me, I see this as a really powerful tool. If it can make me rethink audience, when audience is something I'm almost instinctively aware of at this point, I think that it will also help beginners to bring this extremely important component of writing into focus. I wonder if there is any more effective way to reinforce the idea of audience....than to have them making videos and audio presentations. They have not been on the receiving end of academic writing, (and if they have, it has been very limited,) but on the other hand, they have been on the receiving end of video, movies etc. for their entire lives. It's a concept with which they are intimately acquainted. So for me, I can definitely understand now, at least on the level of audience, how useful these kinds of assignments will be.