Understanding Visual Rhetoric in Digital Writing Environments
The article by Mary Hock focuses on arguing that literature is changing directions away from simply writing to a design of writing. Hocks believes a new age of writing that includes technology is considered a type of hybrid design. She emphasizes that hybridity in new media digital writing environments requires a multimodal literacy. Hocks provides us with three elements of analysis with which we can talk about visual and digital texts: audience stance, transparency, and hybridity. It is thought that modern media is changing and rewriting literacy by mixing historical writing with new age writing skills. She explains that it’s a necessity to recognize that visual and print literacy occupy the world of writing together and compliment one another rather that oppose one another. By paying attention to the influence that visual writing has on writers, literacy will give students the opportunity to completely understand the digital age of writing.
Furthermore it is thought to be the responsibility of instructors to stress the importance of being a critical critic of new age media. Once those observational skills are practiced and strengthened, when it comes to their own work, students will be self-aware their own text. Being able challenge ones own designs in a new digital world is what makes a writer most successful. Hock states that the composure of the literature should be able to look at an example or a model and create something from deep in their mind to create a composition visually and verbally that compliments an argument together. When literacy shows proper fluidity the reader challenged to think on a deeper level and can produce a visual to support what is being read in the text.
Hock describes that It’s important to include text production as well as rhetorical criticism to the students’ classroom so that its easier to understand digital rhetoric. It’s best to not only be a critic of digital rhetoric but also a designer of literacy knowledge. Being a designer of the text provides backing and support to new media with showing full involvement in media text. Hocks analyzes two scholarly texts by Anne Wysocki and Christine Boese and pays particular attention to the three following elements: audience stance, transparency, and hybridity. According to Hocks, analyzing digital texts in such terms allow us to adopt pedagogy, which is the method and practice of teaching as an academic subject. Today’s world revolves around technology and the demand of information and writing on the go. It has become vital to appeal to readers not just with text but add video and images to the text for all viewers.
She concludes that teaching design has a transformative potential for students when they create digital literacy and observe how audiences use and understand the work. The students then view themselves as producers of knowledge in their own skill group. New students have to be taught how to improve this rhetoric-writing format so that they become experts who create masterpieces in literacy along with teaching others preceding them.