Digital Rhetoric digital rhetoric describes a system of ongoing dialogue and negotiations among writers, audiences, and institutional contexts, but it focuses on the multiple modalities available for making meaning using new communication and information technologies”

identifying characteristics, affordances, and constraints of new media the use of rhetorical strategies in production and analysis of digital text identifying characteristics, affordances, and constraints of new media formation of digital identities potential for building social communities inquiry and development of rhetorics of technology the use of rhetorical methods for uncovering and interrogating ideologies and cultural formation in digital work an examination of the rhetorical function of networks theorization of agency when interlocutors are as likely to be software agents (or “spimes”) as they are human actors explore and understand digital spaces as deeply rhetorical spaces; understand the sociocultural dynamics of digital writing spaces; better understand the multiple and layered elements of digital writing conventions and digital documents; become more sophisticated navigators of the information available to us in digital spaces; and become more effective writers and communicators in print and digitally mediated space

What is different about writing online? Physical space constraints/possibilities Readers/Audience unknown Ability to research differently Hyperlinks Multimedia is available Possible different reading surfaces When we ask people in our classes to write for the Web we enlarge what we mean by “composition.” None of us are unaware of the visuality of the Web, of how that initial, default, neutral grey has a different blankness than typing-paper white, of how margins and spacings between lines require more thought and action, of how the size of the Web page can be so different from the size of the paper one—and of how color and image (and animation and sound) are not at all unusual. In this writing I consider how those of us whose lives have been concerned with the composition of words, and words alone, might set about helping people in our classes think critically about composing with words and images and how that compositional ordering affects our senses of ourselves and each other. 

Strategy: Think about a book’s structure I start by considering book design as a potential source for helping people in our writing classes design for the Web because it is out of books that our Web has grown: we speak almost exclusively of web pages, not of web frame sequences or web movements or web sculptures; in addition, web pages have the left-to-right and top-to-bottom orientation we have learned from reading.

How do we approach books? What are emphasized on these pages? Words are to appear on the page so that they visually convey our sense of what knowledge is The printed books that result from the desire to see ideally are to have words that melt into even, repeated lines on evenly presented pages: In the telling of McLuhan and Ong then, the visual order of books makes those of us who read desire to be rational, internalized, homogeneous individuals who see the world in a standardized, numerical, scientific, manner. But, also, as McLuhan points out, the way that order has been made transparent has made the design of books and book pages not worth discussing in our general practices—as has been the case in writing classrooms of this century, where at most we learned to give our pages adequate margins and double-spacing What then can we take from book design for helping people in our writing classes design for the web? “Human beings,” Mignolo says, “seem to conceptualize according to the regionality and materiality of their cultural practice” (99)—and based on those conceptualizations, we act. Minimally, then, we should at least acknowledge that it is problematic to teach as though the visual design of pages, any pages, is unimportant or not historically and socially bound; we should also question the effects of design structures that we see as frequently as we see the pages of books.

How do we approach visuals? Another potential source for helping people in our writing classes design for the Web is writing that analyzes the composition of paintings and other two-dimensional representations. As a counter to the book-design disembodiment I have just described, I consider here a strand of art theory that finds the base for its analysis in our bodies, these fleshy upright moving things; these writings ask how we represent the world to ourselves as we swing ourselves through it, breathing. In talking about the order imposed by book pages I turned from political order to speak of formal order; I will do similarly here with images. The Grammar of Visual Design, Kress and van Leeuwen draw out such observations in order to apply them to words and images together on a page: ....when pictures or layouts make significant use of the horizontal axis, positioning some of their elements left, and other, different ones right of the centre .... the elements placed on the left are presented as Given, the elements placed on the right as New. For something to be Given means that it is presented as something the viewer already knows, as a familiar and agreed-upon point of departure for the message. For something to be New means that it is presented as something which is not yet known, or perhaps not yet agreed upon by the viewer, hence as something to which the viewer must pay special attention. (187) Think of our flow charts and timelines, almost all of which start on the left. Kress and van Leeuwen also speak of the meanings that hold for the top and bottom of pages: If, in a visual composition, some of the constituent elements are placed in the upper part, and other different elements in the lower part of the picture space or the page, then what has been placed on the top is presented as the ideal, what has been placed at the bottom as the real. For something to be ideal means that it is presented as the idealized or generalized essence of the information, hence also as its, ostensibly, most salient part. The Real is then opposed to this in that it presents more specific information (e.g. details), more ‘down-to-earth’ information (e.g. photographs as documentary evidence, or maps or charts), or more practical information (e.g. practical consequences, directions for actions). (193-194) Think about ads with image and little text at bottom

Design  will not be a matter of teaching rules for design, but rather of developing context-alert strategies for both the composers and the scrutinizers of web pages, and of asking what the arrangement of images and words on a web page asks us to desire: what order is reinforced by a design, and what designs give us chances to re-order? -need to think about horizontal and vertical design