Remixing Composition: Chapter 3

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          It seemed as though great deal of Palmeri’s third chapter addresses a question that Jay mentioned to the class in our most recent meeting: what should be the purpose of multimodal instruction? In response to this point, Palmeri expresses that this purpose should not be to merely disregard the teaching passages of the past, but rather “that we should value and build upon our multi-modal heritage—that we should be wary of valorizing new technologies so much that we forget the useful elements of our past” (111). I share a similar fear in throwing ourselves headlong into multi-modal teaching practices, especially if this focus on new strategies hinders in any way the ability of a student to develop linguistically. I feel strongly that multi-modal instruction must “complement” the student’s language and not work to replace it (99). This idea seems to be in conjunction with Corbett’s notion in the “insistence that the audience is the chief informing principal in any kind of communicative discourse” (93). This harkening back to Aristotle’s belief in the power of rhetoric seems to imply that the  form that a work takes in the heart of this multi-modal teaching pedagogy does still reflect the most effective avenue by which the composer wishes to create an effect in his or her audience. This has been the most compelling argument I have heard thus far for the inclusion of multi-modal writing as a tool not more powerful than, but rather as equally functional to, the written word. As an 8th grade English teacher, I feel as though I stand on the brink, on the precipice of these students learning the fundamental tools necessary for analytical writing, and to put those tools on the proverbial back burner in the name of other albeit useful forms of writing feels a bit as though I am doing my students a disservice; however, when taken into consideration alongside Corbett’s point, we must inform our students that the formal analytical structure is just one tool that could be used to convey an effect in the composer’s particular audience.