Sirc “Box Logic” from Writing New Media

I think Geoffrey Sirc’s “Box Logic” from Writing New Media was an excellent follow up reading to Jody Shipka’s Toward A Composition Made Whole from last week. Sirc’s chapter, just as Shipka’s text, provides readers with an explanation for the need to move toward new media composition, and it supports that claim with example-based activities. Sirc informs readers of his vulnerability with the chapter’s content in a confession in the first line of text: “Let me confess: it has been a frustrating last several years for me in my writing courses” (111).  As a reader, I became immediately engaged with what would be an insightful chapter; the author provided me with a sense of his experience with the topic and, therefore, credibility in those first few words.

Sirc introduces the analogy of “text as box=author as collector.” With it he provides a great deal of background information on historical collections and authors of creativity and then arrives at his own primary goal: “to show my students how their compositional future is assured if they can take an art stance to the everyday, suffusing the materiality of daily life with an aesthetic” (117). As a student reading these words (much the same as when reading Shipka’s), I was thankful. Yes! I thought to myself, this is where we find not only a connection and appreciation for art—however we may define that—but also a passion that can be triggered in the classroom by outside factors. Sirc talks about the need for “lived texts of desire” and his words are relieving; just as Shipka, he sees the revamping that so desperately begs to take place in the classroom.

I wonder: what is the real issue? I know that is a vague question, so let me attempt to deconstruct it with some additional questions. Why is this debate (traditional vs. modern, old vs. new, written, linear vs. multimodal text) such a great issue? Why can’t we (the collective academia) move with the times? If multimodality, technology, and the Internet are dominating in industry as well as in other fields of academia, why should English be left behind? Change is good, right? After all, technical communication underwent something similar. Isn’t there a way to remember the past and incorporate those “traditional” teachings into today’s lectures and meetings, yet still provide the revamped structure that today’s world and its entering college students nearly demand? The answer is a clear yes, because we are, in some sense, making moves toward this new curriculum; it is seen in works such as those we have read and heard about in references. Thus, if Sirc and Shipka—and I assume many other authors, teachers of writing—can provide the field with connections, claims, and criticisms for a re-tweaking, restructuring of writing in classroom, then what larger force is preventing us from doing so? I understand it is a more complicated feat than my simple-minded questions posed here reflect, but it seems like we are already so close to making it happen. What’s the holdup?

Sirc discusses his curriculum structure in latter pages of the chapter: “So the two basic skills I focus my course around are practicing search strategies and annotating material…it’s turning the internet into a virtual arcade…” (122). Sirc is clearly bridging the oppositions mentioned above, providing students with the ultimate experience. As a student participating and being educated in this particular curriculum, I would find these skills to not only be ones of great interest, but also ones of the utmost value post-course completion and post-graduation. Research and note-taking skills are ones that can be transferable to other classrooms as well as the workplace. Sirc’s later activities provide examples of how he teaches these traditional, expected skills in combination with the new media approach he advocates.

In Activity 1, A Basic Box, Sirc outlines appropriate steps for allowing the student to become “a mixer or DJ, practicing the key compositional arts of selection, arrangement, and expression” (129). This “simple lesson in juxtaposition” is one I have partially experienced. In last semester’s ENGL 852: Rhetoric and Professional Communication course, I took a similar approach to the final multimodal project. I juxtaposed excerpts from past president’s speeches (e.g., Kennedy, Lincoln, Bush) with those of college football coaches. I compared the rhetorics of both—president vs. coach—by using various forms of media, including written transcriptions as well as audio and visual recordings. Juxtaposing these snippets allowed me to practice using electronic technology in combination with historical, traditional text.

I want to touch briefly on something Sirc mentions on page 127. He writes: “The ‘questions for further discussion’ those reader-textbooks ask about their permanent-collection articles are designed to make the work come alive for students, to make them learn to savor it the way we in academia (supposedly) do, to make the work’s discursive field viral, recombinant” (emphasis added). I argue that these questions actually fail to do this. I have yet to feel inspired or “alive” when working within the limits of the traditional print text; in my experience, rarely have these questions pushed me outside the confines of the text toward other media. I agree that we “have not learned from the work done,” but I question how we will learn. With this, I argue again for the incorporation of Lunsford et al.’s Everyone’s An Author for ENGL 103.