Ball State Alumnus Magazine, Rethinking Teaching Methods

Writing in college has changed. Gone are the days when students handed in assignments on loose-leaf paper. Gone, too, are the days when faculty had to specify that papers must be typed. To see the widespread influence of technology in higher education, one has to look no further than the "papers" students write today.

Students today compose in multiple media for classes across the curriculum. In one class, a student may be asked to create a PowerPoint presentation to accompany a speech. In another, a student may be asked to create a design board with images, drawings, and text. More than ever, students are asked to create digital texts—texts composed on screens to be read or viewed on screens—often with multiple modes such as sound, image, and words. In many classes, even traditional essays never meet paper; they are handed in, graded, and returned digitally.

These material changes in writing technology necessitate a change in the teaching of writing. For, although many students are technoliterate—they know how to use gadgets and programs of all sorts—as a teacher of writing I see them struggle to make the rhetorical choice of when to use what mode in composing. That is, they struggle to know when a chart or graph, for instance, would be a sound choice based on their audience, purpose, and format and when it would not. Many students know how to add that chart to an essay, but they have not thought critically before about what kind of chart, where to place it on the page or screen, and how it should relate to the text. The Ball State Writing Center, a place where thousands of students have come for one-to-one peer writing help since 1967, has begun to support students in this new age of composing.

In 2003, I was hired as the first faculty Writing Center director at Ball State. Since that time, I have immersed myself into the study of writing pedagogies and the changing face of composition at the college level in order to participate in the scholarly conversation, and, importantly, in order to best train my tutors to work with students. I soon realized that as a whole, writing center theory was not promoting changes in practices even though student writers were changing the ways they write.

In particular, I found that most writing center theory did not contend with the visual nature of writing today. Writing center tutor training manuals, of which there are a dozen or so, do not discuss how tutors are to deal with images, graphics, charts, tables, or the like in papers. More troubling, little of the writing center literature discusses what to do with digital texts like Web sites for which the words may be secondary to images and the traditional logic of an essay may be displaced by a logic of the screen.

So, I began looking to other disciplines to find ways to help my tutors assist students with the types of writing students are actually doing. Among other places, I found answers in the literature of professional and technical writing studies. For example, Karen Schriver describes five different relationships that a writer can evoke between graphics and words:

• Complementary: when words and graphics are both needed to make sense of the text, such as a how-to manual where the illustrations help the reader see how to do a process.
• Redundant: when words and graphics "say" the same thing. An example of this is a definition of the parts of a cell which has words and a diagram that give the same information.
• Supplementary: when one mode dominates the other (usually words) and the graphics provide a visual element or decoration but do not change the meaning of the text.
• Juxtapositional: when words and graphics connote opposing meanings; the reader must have both to get the intended, often ironic, meaning of the text. For example, many advertisers use striking or dramatic images or video to garnish attention, and then only in a voiceover or words the reader/viewer discovers what product is being advertised.
• Stage-Setting: when one mode (often image) precedes the other and sets the stage for what's to come. Some books or manuals use this technique on chapter divider pages.

I've taught my tutors these terms in order for them to have a vocabulary to talk to students about their texts. This has proven helpful to many Ball State students including those enrolled in the required composition classes who must compose at least one major project in both English 103 and English 104 that employs multiple modes. Without coaching, many students do not see that the graphics change the meaning of the text.

Besides changes in our tutoring, we've made other changes in the Writing Center over the past few years to physically support the digital nature of writing. We've added a half dozen computers for tutoring onscreen, researching, and returning student and faculty e-mail questions.

We've moved our appointment calendar and recordkeeping online, increased our Web presence with a new Web site (http://writingctr.iweb.bsu.edu), and started a wiki with a private blog for staff communication.

Recently, we've integrated instant messaging into our tutoring for virtual writing questions. In these ways, I hope we have insured our relevance to today's Ball State writing students who grapple with more rhetorical choices in terms of mode, genre, format, and materiality than ever before.