Selfe's "Toward New Media Texts"

"If our profession continues to focus solely on teaching alphabetic composition--either online or in print--we run the risk of making composition studies increasingly irrelevant to students engaging in contemporary practices of communication."

--Cynthia Selfe

Here, for me, Selfe verbalizes the "thesis" of ENG 658. Instead of degrading visual texts "as the less-important and less-intellectual sidekicks of alphabetic texts," composition instructors need to recognize visual text as equal to "conventional" text (70). As composition courses continue solely to devote instruction to the "essay," students will increasingly wonder how this type of writing will help them in the "real world."

While I think many reasons exist for traditional compositionists to clutch to alphabetic texts and devalue new media, Selfe asserts that much of this stems from our own fears. Fears of being discovered as ignorant in a particular area. Fears of being deemed irrelevant.

The remainder of Selfe's chapter provides guidelines for teachers to integrate the study of visual rhetoric into their classrooms and specific assignments which reach that aim. I especially gravitated toward Activity 2 "Visual Argument Assignment," since much of what we read in Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World for this week discussed the validity of the visual as argumentation.