Right away I love Wysocki's humorous entry into the article, but I begin to ask questions immediately too. She mentions beauty as an inherent quality... and I wonder, is that even fundamentally possible? She also throws around phrases like 'consistency' and 'content' without defining them for her own purposes. She does note that form's current function, is to 'take what is messy and particular and to abstract it and generalize it and universalize it'. She says:
"We have learned to think that form should do this, and we have learned to expect that form should do this, whether we are working with visual representations such as photographs or with the visualities of type on a page" (22). And then the magic happens. Wysocki pushes hard on tradition, using "contemporary" modes to make use of some of our tools-- like inserting images, bolding important passages, underlining key and emphasized words, and playing with in-text examples of her point-- that are nearly shunned in academic essays.
http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/01/07/this-is-what-happens-when-a-kid-leaves-traditional-education/
You can skip to 4:00 minutes, and get a better feel for what boundaries are being pushed here, 7:00 for the implications on writing, but I recommend you watch it all.
This kid has some serious thoughts, -- let's hack writing (something that should be creative already) and take a new twist on our prose. Wysocki, is essentially, a hacker. Love it!
Something the past two weeks of class have made me aware of is how arbitrarily narrow my frame of my own writing has been. Since I tend to identify more as a creative writer, I am all for breaking out of traditional formatting and playing around with unlikely word choice and sentence structure. It dawned on me, first last week with color and now this week with the freedom associated with image and form, that I do not use nearly enough variation and pizaz as I should in the age of technology. Even here, on this blog, I have virtually any image at my fingertips, as all of the internet awaits. I have tools that would have spun Plato's head back into his cave and roiled the entirety of Galileo's galaxy.
You have these powers too-- but why aren't we using them?
Is it because it's too 'easy' to just write the way we know how?
Or is it because we feel our work might flee from the norm, that we may not be a widely accepted because of it?
Is is more of economic issue? (though magazines seems to defeat this one)
After reading Wysocki, I opened up the PDF for Jaimeson's essay... how dissapointing. No arrows, no pictures, no differentiation of one paragraph to another. No 'unncessary' indentation... just words, and boring words, on a stream of white pages.
I think Wysocki
made her
point.
Great choice of video! I happened to watch it a year or so ago and felt VERY disappointed about my own experiences with education. I love his emphasis on "school kills creativity"— my high school experience in a nut shell. I would have never thought to mesh these two frameworks together. Well done! It helped me look at Wysocki from a completely different perspective.
ReplyDeleteYou are correct we do revert to the norm, we push aside color and pictures if we want to really delve into a subject. Especially if we want to be taken seriously. The reality is that those colors and pictures could really bring depth to the piece. I too was struck by the use of font changes and epigraphs through Wysocki’s piece, but I have to admit, I struggle with my bias. There really shouldn’t be one, I should embrace the artwork, but my lifelong training has beaten it out of me. I believe that multimodal writing will change that, we begin to see alternate ways to communicate and that has crept into all sorts of publications. I wonder though how long it will take scholarly reviewed articles to catch that wave. Quite a while I suspect.
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