Branscum and Toscano focus on making multimodal assignments "creative," but isn't creativity easily and often at odds with rhetorical effectiveness? How much knowledge about visual/multimodal/sonic design do we need to know before we can teach students to be effectively creative? How much do we need to teach students? Is there enough time in a quarter or semester?
Many of the texts that we have read use the facts that many industries, in the words of Branscum and Toscano (Chapter 7, page 83), "have begun to use and generate multimodal texts: not only the more convetional memoranda and reports, but also Web sites, video tutorials, public service announcements, pod-casts, and visual data displays," but this production is not typically done by just anyone, and definitely not everyone—businesses aren't just going to ask someone they already employ if they know how to do this stuff—but by specialists hired for this specific job. How does this fact translate into the implication that the ability to produce multimodal texts is becoming a necessary skill for everyone? Aren't advocates of multimodal composition comparing special literacies needed for certain occupations to alphabetic literacy that everyone needs to function successfully in culture and society?
A couple times in the texts we've read, I've noticed authors noting as Branscum and Toscano do that "What most teachers add to the process of composing multimodal assignments is a strong background in rhetoric" (85), but this glosses the fact that teachers obtained that background in rhetoric through reading and composing alphabetic texts, which implies that such rhetorical experience with alphabetic texts is transferable/applicable to multimodal texts, so why not just focus on the rhetoric of alphabetic texts to ground students in rhetoric that they can then apply to other modes as they need to?
In Chapter 8 "Responding and Assessing" by Borton and Huot, I noticed that the majority of the assessment criteria they list are transferred directly from the criteria for alphabetic documents. In the chart on pg. 101, only the last two criteria seem to assess things specific to multimodal composing, and these only address the differences in modes by referencing effectiveness and appropriateness without discussing how those things are to be measured. As I read this chapter, I started to think that none of the texts we've read have really addressed what makes texts aesthetically effective/appropriate. What, after all, is the difference between the various modes and their affordances? Isn't it essentially the modes of delivery? The interface? Doesn't delivery have everything to do with aesthetics? Doesn't an ugly, clunky, amateurish document (no matter that its purpose/audience/tone/organization/transitions/synthesis/formating are technically correct) destroy its own ethos? Is there any point of having students produce multimodal texts if we can't teach them the aesthetic principles that make all the difference between a quality composition and a composition that despite its apparent possibilities just didn't deliver?
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