Our last class
opened with a lecture on case studies. Professor Craig explained to us the
details about how we would go about writing our own case study. He noted that
the type we would be writing would be an illustrative study, with the goal of
finding a new way to understand a print text, viewing it from the perspective
shown in one of our class readings, "making the unfamiliar familiar or
possibly making the familiar unfamiliar."
Next, we went
over the Five Components of a Case Study. First (1) is a study’s question (the
question that you are going to try to answer). Second (2), a study’s
proposition, or your theory for said question. Third (3) is a study’s unit of
analysis, which is fancy for saying the text you choose to do the study on. The
fourth (4) component is “the logic linking of the data to the propositions”,
which means making sense of how the example best relates to your theory. And
finally, there’s number five (5): the criteria for interpreting the findings,
or rather, deciding what data is necessary in order to support or demolish your
theory.
After the Five
Components, we briefly discussed composing case studies. Professor Craig told
the class that case study’s are much more flexible, and can be narrative and
stylistic in voice. He also mentioned that they are likely to be extensively
descriptive, for this reason, the saying “show, don’t tell” should be taken
into consideration.
Afterwards, we
were given a short period of time to write down information about our case
studies - what text they would be about and why, and the perspective from which
they would go about analyzing that text.
Then, we
launched into a discussion about Chapter 1 of Writer/Designer. We began with an
example of multimodality in the form of a case study (page 15). We focused on
Figure 1.19, a map of WPA street projects in 1936. We broke the map down into
three different modes:
1.
Linguistic Mode: Words on the map described what we were
looking at.
2.
Visual Mode: Color-coding showed us what areas
received the most assistance.
3.
Spatial Mode: Information is, of course, organized in
map form.
After the map,
we focused on the next figure, which was a table of data from the same
projects. After comparing the two, we came to the conclusion that the
linguistic mode is more detailed, but slows readers down, and visual mode often
cannot be as detailed.
Before getting
into the class discussion about multimodality, we briefly talked about Wysocki
and her focus on layouts and typefaces. Professor Craig pointed out that when
looking at different layouts, it is easy to notice different modes. Wysocki
considers the following to be visual elements: shapes, colors, photos,
charts/graphs, videos, drawings/paintings, and sounds. This bleeds into
multimodality but is still more focused on layout.
Next we
discussed multimodality. It was defined as a theory of writing that states
writing is really the use of different modes. These modes include: linguistic,
visual, spatial, aural, and gestural. Next, Professor Craig asked the class the
question: Is multimodal transformative?
First, someone
said that multimodality is interesting, but not transformative, it is more like
a theory that explains what we already knew. More than one student expressed
the sentiment that non-textual modes of communication do not count as a text,
saying a picture, for instance, should be defined as a picture and text as
text. However, many people in the class expressed the contrary view. We
discussed whether or not texts possessed intrinsic auditory or visual elements.
It was suggested that the movements and gestures of characters described in a
work of fiction could count as the gestural mode, or the voice the reader of a
book hears in their head could count as the auditory mode. It was also
suggested that multimodality is more a theory of communication rather than
writing.
We discussed
whether or not multimodality makes the well-written sentence less important.
Does all the focus we place on visual and other modes of expression reduce our
concern about writing well? The class was split on this topic as well.
Afterwards, we
studied examples of multimodal communication. First, we were shown a brief
political advertisement from Bill Clinton's 1992 Presidential campaign, and we
analyzed its different modes of communication, such as visual (video and
photos), aural (music and voiceovers), and gestural (hugging woman, shaking
hands with JFK, hand gestures).
Second, for an
example of poor multimodal communication, we were shown a web advertisement for
a church. We agreed that this webpage showed multiple instances of poor design,
like having distracting bright colors, too many different fonts, and poor
arrangement of its text with all the words centered in the middle of the page.
And finally we
watched the Kenny Powers video. Obviously created to be purposefully terrible,
this video did an excellent job of what not
to do. It used awful transitions and special effects, word art, horrible
quality video and audio, redundancies, and many other multimodal no-nos.
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