"Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key"

From DigitalRhetoricCollaborative

Yancey, K. B. (2004). Made not only in words: Composition in a new key. College Composition and Communication, 56,2, 297–328. Retrieved from http://jstor.org

Chair's address given during the 2004 CCCC annual convention. Calls on new pedagogies to teach, address, and incorporate multiple modalities in composition as we recognize the multiply mediated experience our students bring to our classrooms. The journal article text seeks to remediate, but not replicate, the generic conventions of a presentation, an address, a web text, and a printed text. Yancey self-consciously crosses and problematizes generic conventions of these several modalities.

Yancey identifies several activities that students are not asked to do in pedagogy — and advocates that we should be encouraging and preparing students to consider these activities.

• consider the issue of intertextual circulation: how what they are composing relates or compares to "real world" genres;

• consider what the best medium and the best delivery for such a communication might be and then create and share those different communication pieces in those different media, to different audiences;

• think explicitly about what they might "transfer" from one medium to the next: what moves forward, what gets left out, what gets added—and what they have learned about composing in this transfer process;

• consider how to transfer what they have learned in one site and how that could or could not transfer to another, be that site on campus or off;

• think about how these practices help prepare them to become members of a writing public (p. 311).