What about visual communication?

Emig’s essay was particularly interesting to me because, in researching my exploratory paper, I’ve just come out of reading a ton of information about the over-emphasis on writing in the composition classroom. Other forms of literacy, like oral, visual and aural literacy, have been relegated to a secondary, inferior role, and some of the articles I read argued that they should be recognized as complex forms of communication in their own right rather than just marginal methods that are attendant to writing. Emig is correct in that writing is unique, but with technology use growing exponentially every year, our students’ lives are saturated with digital media and electronic images. With this, my research argues, comes a pressing need to teach them how to interpret and understand all these images, as well as engage in visual rhetoric themselves.

There have been several questions raised against this, primarily: Is a composition classroom really the place to teach this kind of literacy? I’m not sure if I know the answer to that yet, but I do realize that the nature communication is changing rapidly due to technology. I agree with Emig in that writing is unique and that, in a general sense, it facilitates learning better than oral or aural communication, partly because of its permanence. However, isn’t it possible that visual composition can be just as complex and just as engaging as written composition? It’s interesting to me that Emig consistently uses the term “graphic”—though by this she means symbols, and by this she means letters.  I think it’s also telling that this essay was written in the late ‘70s, prior to the boom of computer technology, and long before the average teacher had access to such technology for the benefit of her classroom. Emig mentions offhandedly that students "are not permitted by most curricula" (122) to engage in visual forms of composition (like "painting") but I wonder if she would make the same arguments nowadays when every student has easy access to Photoshop, InDesign and other software on many college campuses.

Just some thoughts. I don’t really disagree with Emig—as a writer, I don’t think I can. But I’m just bringing in some points from my research that might be opposed to what she’s saying.