K.I.S.S. or to kiss?

It seems that a growing push in online media is towards simplicity. The paragraphs are shorter, white space is emphasized, and we hear advice such as, "speak as if you were talking to a 7th grader." If this is the wave of the future, I think that I, like other people in the writing program, have an ideal of writing that may be outdated and soon to become extinct.

In the McCloud essay, there are  certain things he brings to light that are so obviously apparent, yet so ingrained in our culture that we take it for granted. For example, the specific roles that words and pictures should have. We have the ingrained idea that pictures are more simplistic than writing and he shows us the escalation of the reader throughout maturity, going from pictures, to mixed, to pure text. If someone was to turn Ulysses, by James Joyce,  into a comic, it would be the simplistic version of the book, one maybe meant for teens or young adults. It would have lost its deeper meaning and interpretation. This may be in part due to the notion that artists have of trying to mirror the style of writing with a style of picture. The artist might/would probably try to copy the artistic integrity of Ulysses, with realistic pictures and vivid landscape, but by so doing, would create a dissonance between the two forms that contradicts itself and the appropriate message to convey. This is because, as McCloud illustrates, the two specialized forms of writing and illustration differ in purpose and are not interchangeable on their extremes.

However, if an artist would create a comic book out of Ulysses, with iconic representation and simplistic figures, it would be interesting to see how the enjoyment would go up or down with the book. By using a comic figure as a self imposed representation of ourselves, the main characters would be seen in a reflective frame and we would probably identify with them easier or not, depending on the artists perception of each character and how Tolstoy wanted them to be imagined. This is, of course, meeting on the base line of the triangle that McCloud shown, with the two "pure" forms as opposites. But what if we go higher and higher, into the abstract creations of each genre? What happens then?

I can't imagine to be honest. It is exciting for me think about and at the same time a little disheartening. It is one of the pleasures of that book to decipher the meaning from the confusing prose and lack of time or place. If pictures were inserted, I'd imagine that they would have to be abstract, in order to mirror the style of Ulysses. Yet, according to the pyramid, the words would have to be simplified, in order to match the level of pictures.

While I'm writing this I can't help but think of a Roman rhetor/rhetorician named Quintilian who argued that we evolved and became the dominant species specifically because we were able to speak, and that this was the original supreme function, our language. He then considers rhetoric to be the ultimate art, the art of speaking well. What this brings up for me, is something that has defined my writing and one of the reasons that I write. If writing and especially really good writing deals with the abstract, and with rhetoric-complex ideas, then how can pictures compliment this abstract writing and if it can't, what does this say about the future of our writing and the topics that we feel the need to discuss? If we have to supplement everything with pictures in order to be considered inside the status quo, then do we have to dumb down our subject material? Or, could abstact pictures complement complex writing and could  both work hand in hand?

I don't know, but it does seem that this is the future, and since I have no skills in drawing, it means I must either collaborate with an illustrator(?) or change the content of my subject in order to reach the mainstream.

According to the Script..

At this point in our academic development I think that we have a certain idea of the way articles and stories are created, am I right? There are certain genres and patterns that we are susceptible to unconsciously and consciously. We read a novel and we can usually recognize within a few pages the style of writing, what is a probable ending, and what we should focus on. For example, in any story by Lee Child, we can usually skim over the description of background. It sets a setting, but for the main part of the story it is not essential. Likewise, in articles we can also (if well versed in a genre's patterns) follow the argument that the author is pointing towards.

Previously, before reading this article, and even after (taking me a good night's sleep to digest the information), I didn't buy the idea of skimming as acceptable in the academic community. Upon further reflection I see that it is possible and like Sosnoski says, essential. Before, perhaps due to my inexperience, I needed the whole story to make sense of the argument. Yet, the more versed I become in a genre or theory, familiar with key terms and ideas, the easier it is for me to see the direction of an argument. For example in the article by Jakobs, I had a good sense of the direction of the paper from the abstract and first opening paragraphs. At that point, I was able to skim over the paper, focusing on the topics that interested me.

But, we have to remember that skimming is made possible and becomes much much easier when an author is aware of a reader's tendency to skim, looking for relevant information. We don't want to see huge long paragraphs with no end in sight for an entire page. We also don't want to see paragraph after paragraph with no headers, subheaders, or framework. I just recently read De Oratore, by Cicero, and one thing that greatly increased my comprehension was the use of headers in front of each section. I'm not sure if this was done by Cicero or the editors of the text, but it really helped me set the own framework for my mind, and in a sense getting ready for the paragraph and knowing what to expect. Likewise, Jakobs and Sosnoski (awesome last name), are aware of the reader's comprehension and how to focus attention with digital texts.

If we do want to create texts that a reader will read from beginning to end, it takes a lot more guiding and  logical means of persuasion. Of course there is the heart of the message, and also the writer's style, which affect the reader and may persuade them to keep reading, but generally I believe it is the framing, or the structure of the paper that needs to be first managed before a reader, with hundreds of articles at his disposal, will choose to pick up and read.

Meditating in the middle of traffic

The main ingredient I gathered from these two articles is that writing has evolved and in order to account for its evolution, it simultaneously needs to be explained. Much like a new genre or idea it  has its disciples who push the thought forward and they also reflect on its evolution to further evaluate its uniqueness and divergency. In the first essay, From Pencils to Pixels, the author first stresses the idea that writing was a new  technology at a point in time. In order for it to be accepted it had to approximate the spoken language. At the time, in Greece, the leading discourse was on the values of rhetoric and the philosophy to describe the universe through reason. There was also the arts and tragedies that were written down, as well as law documents and court proceedings (or so I'd assume). Writing mimicked these forms of speech and genres or divisions were created to account for the individual needs.

What this set up  was a divide between reason and emotion. If we follow the strains of each, we find rhetoric as the original root, but to a common observer now, they would seem mutually exclusive. Plato argued against writing, saying that only a wise, practiced rhetorician, writing on truth, could begin to make a statement in writing. Even a writing like this is suspect, because the speaker does not know the audience and cannot formulate his argument to bear the individual's person. Also the writing has no sense of kairos and can be observed in any state or time outside the rhetor's control. What Plato seemed to argue is that there is no universal truth and different truths corroborate to different souls and a rhetor must formulate his argument accordingly. What this might mean for the formation of writing is the necessity for an outside audience when writing. A rhetor might target a specific audience for his writing that would understand previous connections and functions that other rhetors have established, building up a lineage and inter-connectivity between the writings. If we look to today though we see this notion of interconnection has morphed into something that Plato would probably shake his head at (in awe or horror I'm not sure). The notion of audience has disappeared. We usually cannot (and don't want to) control the audience that reads what we write online. They can come from all walks of life, age group, ethnicity differences, political opinions...whatever.  To account for this there is an increasing need for validity as well as an evolution towards the merging of reason and emotion, more closely mimicking true speech and rhetoric than anything we have seen in history so far. With free reign for people to comment and post articles on some sites, we see the revolution of an argument, and begin to consider all sides of a debate, instead of just one. Specific audiences are not pandered to, and in accordance, the text and wording has to change to account for this. There is such thing as computerspeak, in which people write in a shorthand English to maximize how much they can say. When I first reflected on this trend, with such outlets like Twitter, Blogs, YouTube, and Facebook, it seemed that there was a serious devaluation of language and reason, but now I wonder if I am just stuck in the past. 

I still value the individual debate between one person. I get lost in large groups and somehow feel left behind. The concept of multitasking seems like a scar against meditation and reason. 

Yet, the language is changing with or without me and young people (and old) are able to formulate arguments from a better place, seeing all sides of the story, rather than my perspective, in accordance with an old, outdated rhetoric practice that slowly accumulates information, acting only in a specific lens, framing things into it, and throwing them out if the vernacular does not quite fit.  I think universal truth might forever escape me.. 

The second topic I found interesting in From Pencils to Pixels is the notion that in order for a writing to be valid it has to have a record of existence. This was pushed with the history of Samuel Morse refusing Bell's patent to a telephone because he was convinced that no one would want a telephone due to the fact that it could not be recorded. With ancient texts and even newer Renaissance pieces such as Shakespeare's works, there is also the question of validity. This is important to the reader, because to understand certain pieces we sometimes need to compare them with previous works done by the author, or know if the author was an expert or not, or just Joe Schmo, writing in his attic. We need to know if we can trust the author and whether or not we trust the ethos they have built.

In regards to today and the internet, Baron states that we are, "faced with the interesting task of reinventing appropriate ways to validate cybertext" (23). He goes on to state that it is hard nowadays to determine who is and who isn't an expert because of the variety of opinions and ideas that we can find if we step into a chatroom or newsgroup. 

Intro Video

Intro Video Part 1-3.-Man I'm getting old..