Writing As Design: Revisiting Hocks - Understanding Visual Rhetoric

Hocks' article is directed to writing teachers who themselves were taught in and grounded in print-based rhetorics. Now these teachers, myself included, are faced with not only having to evaluate the new digital writing practices which are primarily visual, but also teach them to students. Hocks offers readers a window into the new technologies of digital writing practices and "the complex relationship between verbal and visual meanings" (630). Her approach is to introduce these principles and demonstrate their use by evaluating Wysocki's "Monitoring Order" and Boese's "The Ballad of the Internet Nutball."

Hocks states, "I believe that teaching digital rhetoric requires profound changes in how all of us think about both writing and pedagogy: Critiquing and producing writing in digital environments actually offers a welcome return to rhetorical principles and an important new pedagogy of writing as design" (632). Now that I have become more adept at navigating in and through the new digital technologies and more importantly have recovered from my initial generational shock, I find Hocks article immensely useful. I have undergone a profound change in how I think about visual-based writing; I am now ready to learn to evaluate and teach "writing as design."

The new principles of evaluating how visual rhetoric operates in digital writing environments are, according to Hocks:
audience stance - how the writer invites the audience to participate in the online writing piece and the ethos that requires, encourages or even discourages this interaction.
transparency - the ways the online document follows standard conventions of writing, design, film, etc. "The more the online document borrows from familiar conventions, the more transparent it is to the audience" (632).
hybridity - the way the document combines the use of visual and verbal design.

I found most intriguing Hocks' evaluation of Anne Wysocki's "Monitoring Order." I had just begun this digital literacies course and it was all a confusing mystery to me. I was still locked in print based media with a need to see the typical conventions of print: page, linear order of lines, etc. But as I progressed in Hocks' article curiousity surfaced and I googled "Monitoring Order". (And now you will notice I have the skill level to offer you an unobtrusive link!)

"Monitoring Order" is as Hocks describes. The audience stance is inviting, encouraging me to continue reading and exploring. The transparency follows many of the conventions of print-based media without distractions of other links or videos. Pages or chapters, I am not sure which, are indicated at the top by the colored square buttons. Directions at bottom tell a reader simply to click on boxes to proceed through the text. Hybridity is an easy blend of print and visual. I find this much easier to read than a "normal" (conventional I suppose) academic paper online or in print. And I love the quill at the top of the first page. I am ready to read more - perhaps Boese's "The Ballad of the Internet Nutball."