Journal 5: 1/27/15 by Kayla Anderson

The Multiple Media of Texts - Wysocki

• focused on visual choices based on purpose and goal
• Steps for approaching visual text/ analyzing a text
• Page 4
• Looking at the page
• Before looking at content. Layout tells you how to read the page. Ex: Immediately know text is a poem because of stanzas, etc.
• Looking at what is on the page
• Looking at what contains the page
• Page 13
• Name the visual elements
• Name relationships
• Consider connections to audience
• Genre (a category of texts)
• Determines how visual the text is and what kind of visuals 
• Every genre has a set of expectations. We adjust expectations to genre.
• Picking a genre is understanding your audience, purpose and goal for writing.
• A set of visual conventions has to come along with genres. Ex: diagrams in science books
• Lists
• Animations
• Charts/Graphs
• Pictures/Illustrations
• Transitions
• Written (Font/Shape/Size)
• Different typefaces do different work
• Decorative vs. extended reading
• style, size and shape of type
• Class believed Wysocki was "suffocatingly thorough" but everything made sense

Relationship between Kress and Wysocki

• Wysocki's terms are much more specific than Kress
• ex: Kress might say visual, Wysocki says typeface
• Wysocki is mostly visual and gives firmer sense of terms
• She thinks broadly about roles and roles depend on the text
• Wysocki thinks text and image are dependent on each other
• Similarities
• Choice
• Kress- default is no longer there. We have a choice of what we want to use
• Wysocki- elaborates on choice, gives us long list of choices
• Porter- says choice is created by new technologies
• Audience 

Group Activity

• Groups chose a text, picked a page and then described what modes were operating
• Mode/Layout
• visual, lingusitic, spatial, gestural (visual of)
• first 3 deal with layout
• We then received prompts that were an adaptation of Wysocki
• Looking at the page
• Looking at what is on the page
• Looking at what contains the page
• Audience - text is used for specific purposes for specific reasons. Genre conventions like quotes, colored initial letters, bolded quotes, images. Fragmented approach v. linear approach based on who wants to read it and why

- Wysocki is keyed much more to audience, purpose, genre
- She wants us to make unconventional text.
- Everyday we're faced with writing situations. We do this through genres.
- Wysocki wants to make the case that we need to ascend to genres but there are also ways to break the genre.