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Anne
Agee, Executive Director of DoIIT, focused her remarks on what she
referred to as "visual rhetoric" and our need as teachers to
become aware of ways to help our students become proficient in this new
rhetoric. Defining rhetoric as "the art of finding in any situation
the available means of persuasion," Agee noted that gone are the
days of the complex formatting machinations required in using the typewriter.
Word processing software allows students easy access to formatting options,
from margins, fonts, and centering to footnotes, graphs/table, and clip
art.
However, Agee asserted, "students may be very media-attuned, but
they can't necessarily articulate the rhetorical strategies behind their
formatting choices. What can result is a tendency to show off technology
with an attitude of 'the more plug-ins the better,"'orical rationale
for such choices. And since visual literacy isn't a high priority in the
educational system at about the 3rd grade when they stop giving out crayons,
teachers of writing generally have not developed a strong visual literacy."
Since electronic communications tend to blur the distinction between the
visual and the verbal, teachers of writing in all contexts need to develop
an awareness of the different literacy expectations of print text and
electronic hypermedia. For example, the roles of the reader and writer
are less distinct in electronic hypermedia with a reader choosing her
own path through a hypertext. While organization in a print text tends
to be linear with a clear beginning, middle, and end, organization in
a hypertext is associative, recursive, and nonlinear. Consequently, the
unit of development, which in print text is the sentence and the paragraph,
becomes the screen, the page, and the web in hypermedia. Coherence in
print text is accomplished through transitions and repetition; in hypermedia,
coherence is accomplished through such mechanisms as visual cues, templates,
consistent fonts, and graphics. And while a reader of print text will
sometimes scan and perhaps even read the text, in hypermedia, a reader
tends to search, scan, print, and read, since reading on the screen is
25% slower than on the page.
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