Practitioner Stories

In trying to research the delivery of texts, Ridolfo constructs a practitioner story: a narrative about how a specific writer composed and delivered their text to multiple audiences for multiple purposes.

Of what value are practitioner stories like these? What do such stories teach us about writing and editing?

Class Journal - 03/26-15 - Taylor Paul

Overview of the classic rhetoric of delivery:

• Delivery is the oral presentation of the message, such as formal speeches. 
• Some factors that surround formal speeches are location, physical appearance, who the audience is, and their perceptions.
• Historically: the white man was the only person with the right to the podium.

Overview of the Porter's ideas on delivery:

• Delivery became less important in rhetorical theory because 'places, body, and text' were not seen as important anymore.
• Porter feels that digital delivery:
• Makes sense of digital writing.
• Helps plan communication because the five topoi help you to create and write your content by giving you key factors to consider
• Porter also feels that is it acceptable to place more focus on certain topoi and feel that others are less important because that is their nature (it is also acceptable to add and remove topoi as we see fit).
• Internet communication isn't monolithic. Different rules apply to different spaces because the Internet is not a single entity. 
• Just as the printing press changed the nature of knowledge by adding consistency, technology is not a neutral tool and changes us as people.
• Digital composing is a techne (theory and practice/why and how of creating texts).

Group work uncovering the five topoi:

• Access/Accessibility:
• Considers the ability of people to obtain information regardless of location or physical ability, as well as considers ways in which users access information (mobile site, app, pc, etc.)
• Not everybody has the same technology (access) and not everybody has the same body (accessibility).
• There is a digital divide, meaning not all access is equal. Many people do not use the internet, and many that do access it primarily through mobile devices. 
• Because not everybody has the same body, some people are limited with their use of the Internet. This is why it is important to use tools that increase accessibility such as alt tags with photos. 
• Body/Identity:
• Considers online representations of the body, gestures, voice, dress, and image of identity and performance of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. 
• The body plays a key role in face-to-face oral delivery, and so creating a bodily representation is a part of rhetorical performance in digital spaces as well. 
• Examples of body identity is the use of emoticons which can accurately (or inaccurately) represent our bodies in digital space. Another example is the photoshopping of models (such as on the Victoria's Secret webpage) or the filtering of personal images (such as those on Instagram or Facebook).
• Controversial in the sense that we expect the representation of bodies in digital space to represent real life, and are often offended when it doesn't. 
• Distribution/Circulation:
• Considers the technological publishing options for texts, including reproduction, distribution, and circulation. 
• Distribution choices affect the composing process (tweets are composed differently than blog posts, and videos are composed differently than podcasts).
• Circulation is the potential for a text to be redistributed without the author's direct intervention.
• Essentially, authors control distribution by choosing where to share their work, but they can only slightly influence circulation by restricting it from being shared or requesting it be shared. 
• Circulation also involves the use of search engine optimization because texts that are effectively tagged will circulate more than those with no tags. 
• Economics:
• Considers regulations and copyright policy, as well as motivation for creation and value. 
• We don't create and share texts for no reason, so we must have some motivation for writing (be it monetary or social). 
• Economics of delivery also considers that everything must have value (for the author, and for the audience).
• Interactivity:

• Considers how users engage interfaces and each other in digital environments. 
• All texts are interactive, even if the only interaction is access (reading a blog post where comments are disabled, for example). 
• Porter provides the above chart where the lowest measure of interactivity is access and the highest is co-production (such as collaborative Google docs.

Digital Delivery

Porter's theory of delivery is comprised of five topoi. Given the nature of topoi, the five dimensions he outlines are designed to help plan the delivery of a message through digital media. In your estimation, are these five topoi helpful? Why or why not?

Writing for the Web

"Writing Style for Print v. Web" and "Why Linearity is Not The Issue" offer two competing views of the difference between print and web writing. Which view do you most agree? What are the features of that view? And why does it resonate with you?

Class Journal: March 5th, 2015 Rachel Haas

We started class with a visit from Megan Keaton, a Digital Studio consultant, who came to talk to us about designing our professional eportfolios (Re: Major Project 3).

·      Useful website builders: Wix, Weebly, Wordpress

o   “cheat sheets” found in class folder

o   Folder location: goo.gl/Lq9dkk

General consensus: Wix is easiest for first timers – most customizable and intuitive

Definitions:

Medium: A social and technological method of composing, storing, and transmitting information.

Hypermediacy: à looking through à glance

            e.g. CNN coverage of The Royal Wedding

Immediacy: à looking through à gaze

            e.g. Memoir; painting in an art gallery

(Hypermediacy and Immediacy are strategies/ways of looking remediation)

Thoughts on Digital Media: Howard Rheingold vs. Sherry Turkle

Rheingold (enthusiastic about digital media):

·      Digital media can be used to self organize

·      “Smart mob” – mob made smarter by technology

Turkle (apprehensive/concerned):

·      Digital media changes our capacity of self reflection

·      We can keep people at distances we can control

·      We sacrifice conversation for connection

Constellations of media: meaningful grouping of media

            e.g. Walking Dead Story sync

Every medium relies on another medium for meaning – if nothing else than for structure

            e.g. TV episodes borrow format from radio shows

Reform: (can be good or bad)

·      Media – improve media

·      Society – reform in social or political sense

Multimodality, "Readting," and "Writing" for the 21st Century

Jewitt's chapter offers some fairly thorough descriptions of some of the ways that multimodal texts produced and viewed on the screen disturb traditional views of 'reading' and 'writing.' Per Jewitt, what does reading/writing at the turn of the 21st century entail? And given the reality that technologies and platforms have changed radically in the last 15 years, what entailments would you add to Jewitt's discussion?

Remediation Cont'd

In theorizing remediation, Bolter and Grusin argue that "No medium, it seems, can now function independently and establish its own separate and purified space of cultural meaning" (55). What do you take this quote to mean? And what does it add to your view of writing? Or of media?

Class Journal 3-3-15 by Nathan Marona

Began class by composing and discussing a list of print's limitations within groups.

Print limited by:

• Harder to share with audiences
• Dispersed slower than digital sources
• Difficult to quickly find specific details
• limitations on media that could be incorporated (ex: audio, video…)
• Different availability (^audience)
• Not interactive
• It can’t read what your eyes are looking at
• The finality of it, once it’s published if you want to re-publish it has to be altered    
• Restrictive audience sample
• Price of admission
• Less able to make gestural indicators in a file
• Harder to store/easier to misplace

Some of these points were controversial. Digital media carries a price of admission too, often more so on the writer's end.

Modality of Print vs Digital

Is print's lack of "interactivity" always a bad thing? Is more interactivity (aka more modes) necessarily better? Talked about how the merit of interactive texts depends on immediacy.

• As a class we agreed that digital media tends to resolves the limitations of print texts

Remediation Discussion

• key terms: immediacy, hypermediacy, remediation
• Immediacy- often called transparency, "looking through" a medium and only seeing the content, an immersive text. Immediate texts do not want us to see the mediation at work
• Hypermediacy- "looking at" media. If immediacy makes a text feel "natural" then 
• hypermediacy makes it feel "unnatural" (but not always in a bad way)- used example of Instagram filters

• Current American culture prefers hypermediacy right now. Lots of browser tabs open on screen, email, Spotify, etc. Not immersed in any particular window.

• Remediation- Refashioning old media into new media; a shift from one medium to another. Painting led to photography, plays led to films, etc.

• Example of computer based solitaire. The software remediates a table and a card game. Has immediacy and hypermediacy. Hypermediacy exposed at game's end when cards explode, it's unnatural, runs counter to what happens in a physical game of solitaire

• New media has potential to remake old media. Examples: USA Today, computer graphics in films

• Is remediation different than assemblage? Yes, remediation deals with shifts in medium, not so much content

Class groups found examples of remediated texts, explained why we thought they were remediated. The Wells Fargo app example was controversial. Prompted discussion on how much change is necessary for something to be a remediation. Is an app a media shift from a website? Professor doesn't believe this is the case. Defined remediation as a shift in medium.

Journal 13: February 26th, 2015 Melanie Richard

Thursday, February 26th, 2015

Editing is a Negotiation

1. State of Text & Goals of the Text
2. Format of Text & Own Practices
3. State of Text & Deadline

• The editor and the author must come together to figure out which approach is best.
• Not so much about rules, more about inventions
• Deadlines must be kept in mind when making suggestions and working with a writer

Editing Alphabetic Text Handout

1. Standard Proofreading: Involves resolving mechanical errors, resolving formatting errors, and checking for grammatical correctness
2. Editorial Proofreading: Encompasses standard proofreading tasks; Also involves editing for clarity and word choice
3. Copyediting: Involves standard proofreading and editorial proofreading; Also involves improving  phrasing and organization
4. Substantial Editing: Involves giving the writer substantial advice for revision; Can include discussing and resolving global issues and conceptual issues 

• Who has license to do what with the writer's text?
• It takes multiple passes to catch all errors
• See document "Proofreader's Marks"

Principles of Design

• Check out pages 31-37 of Writer/Designer (quoted below) for the principles of design
• Check out the World's Worst Website at www.theworldsworstwebsiteever.com

1. Contrast: "The difference between elements, where the combination of those elements makes one element stand out from another". (Ex: Color, size, placement, shape, etc)
2. Organization: "The way in which elements are arranged to form a coherent unit or functioning whole". 
3. Alignment: "How things line up". (Ex: Centered alignment, left alignment, etc)
4. Proximity: "Closeness in space. In visual text, it refers to how close elements are placed to each other and what relationships are built as a result of that spacing".
5. Emphasis: "Stressing a word or a group of words to give it more importance". 

Another design principle we discussed in class was Repetition. Repetition means repeating a certain aspect of the text throughout the piece, adding consistency. For example, deciding to use all square bullet points consistently is repetition. 

Workshop 

Towards the end of class, we workshopped our Main Project 1 rough drafts in groups of two. Each partner had the "Editing Alphabetic Text" worksheet, and used it to make suggestions about each genre to their partner. It included a space for editing headings, lists and tables, and it also described each of the Principles of Design to help create the suggestions. 

NOTE: There will be a quiz Tuesday, March 3rd, on the reading. Your Main Project 1 is also due through Blackboard!

Happy Writing/Designing!