Composing Exercise #5
The 8 Modes of Discourse How We Learn Through Writing
Remix Description
This remix presents the eight modes of discourse from Chapter 7 of Writing for Digital Media in an educational light. Every writing technique serves simultaneously as a teaching method. It is not enough for educators to just "assign" them; they must also model these techniques if they want students to learn them effectively. The same goes for the rhetorical modes: They can't just be told or assigned; they have to be lived and experienced to be genuinely learned. And they are often lived and experienced by educators telling stories, sharing information, and helping knowledge take root in all kinds of contexts. And what makes the living part of the story even more exciting is that the modes and techniques of digital discourse are largely visual.
This text's structure echoes the visual medium in which digital teaching and learning often occurs.
Image Description
An infographic entitled "How Writers Teach" occupies a narrow vertical space. It contains eight sections, each with a label for one of the common modes of discourse: Narration, Description, Process, Illustration and Exemplification, Cause and Effect, Compare and Contrast, Definition, and Classification. Each section imparts a succinct bit of information about how that mode of discourse can be used to facilitate learning. Next to each heading, an icon representing the section's content accompanies a bit of minimalist artwork.
Blog
After reading Chapter 7 of Writing for Digital Media, I began to consider how rhetoric orients us toward our learning. This might seem obvious: when we are learning something, we are, in effect, being directed by a discourse. But how a discourse directs us and in what fashion it prefigures us as e.g. a learner or a doer of certain kinds of acts is what I am getting at with "rhetoric and learning." This is also tied to "understanding taught well or poorly in some other path by the teacher when making choices is concerned." And it has everything to do with clarity, structure, and empathy qualities that are shared by the best writing, teaching, and discourse in general.