I'm old, and the wolves are after me

(Advance apologies for rambling and overuse of parentheses)

I'm sold on the growing importance of visual argument, and I believe it can have a place in composition, but I see it more in a supporting than a leading role (as others have said, I think). Writing _about_ visual argument, definitely- I want to explore this in my classes for sure, for its own value as well as to change the pace of the course. But creating visual arguments in place of papers, I don't know. I tend to agree with those who would use them as support assignments, leading up to a written paper.

The title of 1000 is Argumentation and Exposition- and that, tellingly, is not restricted to _written_ argumentation and exposition, so it's almost like someone knew what the future was bringing (Donna?). But it is offered through the English department, so I expect the students to use (primarily) English to do their arguing and exposing. Another worry is that the students will have inequal capacities for creating visual arguments via computer- possibly greater than the inequalities in their writing skills, and for different reason (economics). If I'm teaching in one of the dungeon rooms on the ground floor of GCB, I can't do all the things I could do in one of those nifty new rooms in Tate. In another course I'm in that uses that room, we see and discuss some kind of visual argument almost every class, to great effect, so I see the advantages of using the available technology. But if I'm teaching a paper about a movie, I can't expect them to create their own movies (not yet anyway), mostly because it's not a film class, but also because not all of them will have the wherewithal to create movies. Maybe it's available through the university, and I just don't know it. (digression/precedent: in a Shakespeare course I took in college, we had the option of staging a scene from a play instead of writing one paper. I got much more out of this than writing the other paper.)

On the other hand, I'm already softening on all this. I do intend to use some kind of visual argument paper- if not next fall, then in the spring- that has students look for advertisements that use the body to present an argument (my challenge: find articles suitable to prepare them for this task). I've found a number of interesting ads already, many of them from American Apparel (slimy bastards). I'm strongly considering adjusting my media-analysis paper to focus exclusively on news websites instead of traditional print media. So I'm not a total Luddite, but I've seen some pretty poor writing out there in cyberspace, and I think some webslingers jumped out of alphabetica too early. If they're going to be computer-literate whether we like it or not, why not also make them English-literate?

P.S. On the topic of the supposed impending death of the book: as a former bookseller, I fervently hope this never happens. Not only because people like me would be out of a job, but also because at this point I haven't seen a good way to write marginal notes on an on-screen text. "Insert comment"? not good enough.