book reviews

Faigley, Lester, Diana George, Anna Palchik, and Cynthia Selfe. Picturing Texts. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. 640 pp. $47.00

Wysocki, Anne Frances, and Dennis Lynch. Compose Design Advocate. New York: Longman Publishing Group, 2005. 456 pp. $56.00.

Position of Both Texts:
Both Picturing Texts and Compose Design Advocate were written partly in response to a perceived institutional and cultural need. Specifically, a new course designed at Michigan Technological University in 2000 had turned three composition courses into one communication and rhetoric course (the University switched from quarters to semesters in that year). This course took composition and combined it with other information like technical writing, graphic design, and rhetoric, and was part of a new University Wide courses program. At about the same time, the New London Group had published their text Multiliteracies, which encouraged instructors to approach teaching composition as an amalgamation of “literacies” that students already have use of in their daily lives—more about this later. Other American Universities were also resituating their courses in this way—creating new courses that help students communicate in more ways than simply writing, as well as learn about their world, discover advocacy, and so on. It was clear to many instructors that this sort of course could use a new kind of textbook, and not the reader that was thrown together for the first few years of the course.

This particular course covered written, oral, and visual rhetoric. Teachers were strongly encouraged to use “advocacy” as a way of getting at rhetoric of all forms, though it was not required. Many decided to use technology and new media instead—since some sections of the course could be taught “computer intensive” and have access to a department ran computer lab. Every teacher had to give a research paper assignment and one oral presentation—otherwise the course varied a great deal from one teacher to the next.

The existing text for the book was a reader without exposition which students were extremely prejudiced against. The reader was expensive, printed in black and white, and poorly constructed which meant that students could rarely resell it. This was extremely unfair to the text, which offered a decent selection of readings, but students’ preconceptions of the text made it difficult to use in the classroom. Because the class would have a graphic design component, the fact that this text was thrown together essentially as a course pack—no formatting changes made to articles contained within—teachers knew that they needed something new, something colorful, and something that would give them examples of good design, photography, and a variety of “texts” (and not just writing) to rhetorically analyze in class.

Out of this need, at least three textbooks have been published. Of course, these books are useful outside of their immediate discourse community, and outside of the University they were published in. They are all colorful, well designed, and contain information about rhetoric, advocacy, and image. However, the two texts I review here take a very different approach to confronting the issues of multiliteracy, advocacy, visual design, and composition, which makes them useful in different sorts of classrooms even though they were essentially designed for the same course.

Picturing Texts, Specifically:
According to its authors, Picturing Texts is a book written for students that are growing up, communicating, and living in an information saturated society, which teaches composition and rhetoric via rich visuals (3). These authors seem to believe strongly in multiliteracies: literacy has changed, people are learning and communicating in new ways, and even composition texts can be highly visual in nature. Because texts that students will encounter in their daily lives will likely be visual, the aim of this book is to expand a composition course to encompass visual and written texts—to “picture” texts, if you will.

The chapters of this text follow an understandable sequence: introducing visual and verbal composition, analyzing visual and written arguments, three chapters about social and cultural representation (again, written and visually), and lastly some instruction on creating visual texts. All information about visual design is contextualized with composition, although this is not a text for anyone looking for explicit instruction in grammar or composition forms, or a text for anyone looking for explicit graphic design instruction. The only information about graphic design (contrast, repetition, etc.) seems to be taken from Robin William’s text, The Non-Designers’ Design Book, but is greatly abbreviated.

Each chapter, no matter its intention, contains about four to six readings that are framed by exposition. This exposition tends to introduce very basic information: “In both writing and design, we regularly use comparison to explain or demonstrate an idea” (30). However, the accompanying visuals (two signs that use toilets with the seat up or down to signify men’s or women’s bathrooms) are clever and make a better argument in many cases than the text does. This really isn’t out of place in a text about the power of visual argument, but the framing might be written on too basic a level to engage all students.

Fortunately, the readings themselves are well chosen and can lead to discussions in class about nearly anything—social justice, cultural anthropology, visual composition, race, class, and so on. The “Focus” and “Respond” questions available in the text after each reading may sometimes seem to be easy for a college level text, however, the Instructor’s Guide, written by Cheryl Ball, provides more assignments and exercises that can be directly applied to engage students more fully. Each chapter also calls for students to write about pieces—whether visual or written—and in some cases, to create visuals of their own. These projects could easily be incorporated into a course that has students journal or blog—many of these writings could be interesting if shared. The book’s website, www.picturingtexts.com, also has additional assignments, readings, and writing that ask students to do things like analyze websites, use of visuals online, and even use of text online. This fills a gap in the text, since the text itself does not deal with visual rhetoric online itself (which makes sense in a way, since reproducing a webpage on one or more physical pages would change the experience of looking at the page entirely, links create a sort of rhetoric on their own that is not reproducible in a text. However, it is a shame that students or classrooms without internet connections will be missing the richness of the online materials.) Other supporting materials—a brief glossary, an easy to use index, and a well situated preface, complete the text and offer support to students who are wondering why this isn’t “just another composition book.”

Diana George previously published a textbook with John Trimbur called Reading Culture. Trimbur writes briefly about that textbook in his article “Composition and the Circulation of Writing,” published in CCC in 2000. He states in that article that one of the concerns of Reading Culture was keeping students from experiencing semiosis—accepting mass culture, simply being readers and consumers of it, without being critical of it (12). For this reason, Reading Culture is primarily a text about looking at cultural artifacts and analyzing them critically, as well as learning to be immune to their rhetoric. Trimbur suggests in this article a break from that idea, that “texts” don’t need to be read as such, and that students aren’t as susceptible to the mass media as we might assume. However, Picturing Texts, ironically enough, seems to be exactly the sort of text that could be used in this manner—to produce students aware of the rhetoric around them and to make them somewhat immune to the pressures of a mass media society. It would be interesting to find out what Trimbur might have to say about this newest text of his old partner—would he be as critical of it as he is of his own stance from six years ago?

This textbook fills a gap in undergraduate textbooks created by composition and rhetoric’s focus on multiliteracies and visual rhetoric. Any number of articles have pointed out that instructors must expand their focus of composition courses, and some books have been written to fill in a theory gap (see Wysocki and Selfe’s Writing New Media, Kress’s Literacy in the New Media Age), but very few textbooks have been created that begin to address how exactly visual and new media rhetoric can actually be included in a undergraduate textbook. This text is even further set apart from other texts being published about visual rhetoric because visuals are presented as texts themselves that can be read and analyzed separately from text. This is exactly the sort of reading that visuals often receive in the “real world” and are invaluable skills for students to have.

However, despite the fact that the text is attempting to fill a gap, it does not do much to actually give students any instruction in how to produce visual texts. What software can be used? What materials are necessary to do so by hand? Some students, if simply asked by their instructors to “create,” may feel lost without some basic instruction in these areas.

The visual design of this book is highly professional, and each page will help students learn new things about layout and visual argument. This is not surprising considering that Diana George, one of the authors, has published repeatedly about visual argument and using it in the classroom. The layout is inviting, and pages that are black and white often are given a color background instead to remain visually interesting. There is not a single page in the book that does not have a visual element to it, here, form meets content and creates a strong visual whole.

There are many different ways of using this text, and it could be used in a number of different classrooms. For this reason, it is probably best for an instructor interested in it to read the entire text and decide which pieces would be most useful for the classroom in question. For example, the expository information that bookends each chapter might be left out to deal with the readings as cultural artifacts.

Students that are interested in design or even just the internet, movies, or magazines are going to find this text more engaging than one that is “simply” about the composing process on its own. The idea that writing and visual composition might have a lot in common, and that students could probably learn to combine their composing process of one with the other, is relatively unique in an undergraduate text. This beautifully designed textbook will probably reach any number of students that believe they are enrolled in yet another boring composition course and help them to engage with classroom material.


Compose Design Advocate: A rhetoric for integrating written, visual, and oral communication:
According to the back cover of Compose Design Advocate, the text’s goal is to make students “fluent in multiple modes of communication: written, visual, and oral.” In addition to helping students to read these sort of texts, the book also provides instruction in creating them—and not just standard five paragraph essays either. Compose Design Advocate (hereafter CDA) treats these as separate entities only passingly—there is a clear connection between the rhetoric used in designing each type of communication. The text also makes it clear that students can and should be creating texts in all of these modes, and should also be thinking about choosing the best mode for any given communication. This purpose—empowering students to write more than the standard essay, and to start composing in more than just written form—could be achieved through the text alone, though how much this happens in each classroom will probably depend on the instructor’s focus.

This book is both one that could be used easily in a traditional composition classroom and also classrooms of many different types (graphic design, creative writing, etc), and due to its aims we are lead to thinking that this is not a bad thing—if we don’t already. CDA is divided into three sections: designing compositions rhetorically, producing compositions, and analyzing the arguments of others—an emphasis on production makes this book potentially stand out as a composition text and a reader. Instead of focusing on traditional academic writing for undergrads (5 paragraph essays and their ilk), Wysocki and Lynch (referred to in text as Anne and Dennis, which gives the text a familiar feel) start with giving students tools that can be used for any composition project. Students are lead to create a “design plan” that can be used for posters, academic essays, speeches, or even books—any time communication is necessary. Two design plans are created (one simple, the other more complex) as examples, and the final communication is also included. This approach gives students tools that might be useful after they escape the institution, instead of just giving them tools that will be useful in future courses but potentially fail them in the workplace.

The majority of the text is exposition about various forms of communication, rhetoric, and designing all of the aforementioned. Each form of communication (oral, written, visual) is discussed in rhetorical terms. In the last section of the text, students are also given tools and language that can be used to analyze photographs, posters, instruction sets, and even comics. Many different assignments could be written out of these sections—a teacher could use the instruction set section to run a technical communication unit, or use the comics section to introduce students to combining written/visual communication in new ways in other projects.

One of the strongest elements in CDA is that it gives students real language to discuss difficult subjects. For example, in a section about making an argument the text uses syllogism (and gives a definition) rather than avoiding the term as many other “basic” texts might do. Real rhetorical, photography, and communication language is contained here—the book assumes that students have a basic level of understanding and intelligence which students in turn can work up to. Unlike a lot of other texts, this one doesn’t speak down to them at all and leaves a place for the instructor to define any terms that they are having problems with. Armed with language, students can start developing discourse of their own.

Each section of the text not only discusses existing work, but also suggests that students can create any of the documents included. Student examples are also used to give students in doubt more confidence. The tone of the book is calming (mirroring its writers) which could go a long way toward giving students the confidence they need to begin writing. Additionally, the essays included exemplify what the authors want students to begin creating—documents that develop from narrative form, that use sources as more than guiding points for body paragraphs, and that are planned and developed well. The text itself is well written and well designed and stands as a good example of the sort of rhetorical design Lynch and Wysocki are proposing.

The weaknesses of CDA will vary amongst student bodies. Most of the readings chosen have something to do with civic advocacy, which might work well for some students but might make other students less likely to pay attention to any point the book is making. Although the given definition of advocacy is low level and unfrightening (they’re not suggesting students go out and protest anything) the very word advocacy could make some students likely to think that anyway. Instructors might also feel threatened by the word if they aren’t very politically active, so although the writers suggest that argument and advocacy are everywhere—present whenever you discuss something you are passionate about—the chosen readings and title of the text might prove difficult to overcome in some student bodies.

This text is beautifully designed. Every page is full color and should help to engage students in the material thereon. The chosen readings (although there are very few of them) support the exposition wonderfully. However, at $56 new (amazon.com) this text will probably be the only one used in any given composition classroom, and it almost seems like it would work better in support of a reader, or maybe with more readings. There are additional new media, videos, and images available on the website—and the book suggests using the web as an additional resource—but if these materials are not available in a classroom the instructor will be left on his or her own to locate additional readings.

Overall, CDA performs well and can be used in a number of different ways. It is malleable enough to be useful in many contexts, and allows for instructors to run a variety of different units throughout the term. Since examples of posters, comics, websites, essays, and so on are included, it also includes information on students creating these materials. It does this in a very professional way, and gives students some language in each section to talk about communication academically. Where other texts might fail at giving students only the technical tools to create images and writing, this one succeeds in giving them rhetorical and design processes that they can use into the future.



Other Sources:
George, Diana, and John Trimbur. Reading Culture: Contexts for Critical Reading and Writing. New York: Longman, 1999.

Rogers, Paul Michael. “Teaching Literacy in a Rhetorical Age: A Review of Picturing Texts.” Kairos. 9.1. Fall 2004.

Trimbur, John. “Composition and the Circulation of Writing.” CCC. 52:2. (Dec 2000). Pp. 188-219.