Visual and Digital Writing

Every weekend I'm torn between a desperate desire to watch TV (I've always been a TV and movie fan) and the need to read hundreds of books and write various papers - "if only all this stuff was presented in a TV show, it'd be way easier" I inwardly scream. Then today, I was looking at our class Wiki, and even with the stress of knowing the Wiki is due any day now, I noticed how many people included images on their pages. Therefore, when I cracked our Handbook of Research on Writing, I couldn't help but read: 'Seeing the screen: Research into Visual and Digital Writing Practices' (Wysocki, 2008).

I'm glad I read this chapter, because I learned a alot about how the visual has been valued (or indeed devalued) over the years. The author includes a quote from 1948 which describes comic books as "The marijuana of the nursery, the bane of the bassinet, the horror of the house, the curse of the kids, and a threat to the future" (as cited in Wysocki, 2008, p. 600). Comic books and graphic novels are still with us today, showing that whatever criticisms were leveled at these texts, they hold a great deal of interest for a wide audience. The author explains that historically there was a belief that "interpretation of words, unadorned and unaccompanied by illustrations, is what produces the steadily rational beings we often believe we ought to be" (p. 600) - the idea was that visuals detract from the sense of the written word. However, I think most of us would agree that this is counter-intuitive; afterall, children begin to "write" by first drawing and scribbling - writing is a visual medium.

Of course, recently, the digital world has opened up discussions about visual practices and writing. Traditionally, authors have "used rhetorical and subject knowledge to produce and arrange texts" while the power for "readability [and] aesthetics" has been firmly in the hands of the printing press (p. 599). However, today writers have more power to decide how their text, and images, will look using the online medium. Not only is it now extremely easy to insert images into text online, but the structure of text can more easily be manipulated to convey different meanings (p. 606).

I believe that any kind of writing instruction should include aspects of multi-modality in various forms, especially in today's digital age. As I looked at our Wiki pages today, I was struck by the fact that many of them are formatted very similarly to a traditional printed page. In order to successfully utilise the computer and the Internet as media for writing, I think that instruction in how to work with and structure online texts would be most helpful. As Wysocki (2008) puts it, "readers needed [sic] new strategies for reading new digital (and digitally designed print) texts", and I would go one step further and say that writers need new strategies for writing new digital (and digitally designed print) texts.