In the size and scope of this project, I cannot provide a comprehensive survey of all of the very compelling arguments for why we can and should incorporate digital technologies and digital rhetorics in our composition classrooms. Instead, I offer a brief, selective overview of some of the reasoning that has held sway in the computers and composition community. For additional depth and breadth that you will not find here, you may want to browse through the Additional Bibliography and be sure to visit the WIDE Research Center Collective essay “Why Teach Digital Writing” as a starting point.

One of the fundamental premises of arguments for rhetorical understanding of and rhetorical production of digital texts is that “writing restructures consciousness” (Ong). The idea that the ways in which we use and shape tools also shapes us and the ways we think and communicate continues to inform calls for rhetorical consideration of digital texts and digital media. Alex Reid argues,

if we subscribe to the belief that writing is not simply the recording of preexisting ideas, but instead participates in the composition of knowledge, then we are committing ourselves to exploring these intersections between technology and the embodied mind. (5)

Many others note the intersections of society, culture, materiality and consciousness, insisting that teaching digital and multimodal literacy is not and should not be simply teaching the tools (Anderson; Gurak; Johnson-Eilola; Lunsford; Wysocki; Selfe; Sheppard)

With the acknowledgement of the intersection of technology and mind, many scholars argue for a widening of our definitions of and understandings of literacy and how we teach it (Hocks; Hull and Nelson; Selber; Selfe; Selfe and Hawisher; Yancey). To move beyond the construct of writing as print and to redirect the concerns of compositionists who firmly see themselves as teachers of writing, Andrea Lunsford offers a new definition of writing:

A technology for creating conceptual frameworks and creating, sustaining, and performing lines of thought within those frameworks, drawing from and expanding on existing conventions and genres, utilizing signs and symbols, incorporating materials drawn from multiple sources, and taking advantage of the resources of a full range of media. (171)

In addition to redefining writing, many scholars have challenged composition’s tendency to focus exclusively on the production of alphabetic texts, calling for a turn to teaching students to produce multimodal texts that blend images, words, and sounds (DeVoss, Grabill, and Cushman; George, Hocks; Johnson-Eilola; Kress; Lunsford; Manovich; New London Group; Selfe, Selfe and Hawisher; Wysocki; Yancey). These scholars point out that writing is changing (as in the new definitions), that meaning is made in a multiplicity of modes, that multimodal texts are increasingly central in everyday life, and that students are increasingly arriving in our classrooms with strong visual/multimodal literacies. To be fully literate in the contemporary world, these authors contend that students and teachers need to be able to choose actively among and combine visual, alphabetic, and audio modes of representation to suit their particular communicative purposes and contexts.

Yancey and Selfe, in particular, argue that we have a responsibility to our students to incorporate digital practices in our classrooms. Yancey warns that by not embracing digital technologies, we risk becoming irrelevant to the literacy needs of the students we teach. Selfe reasons that we need to both teach and understand a wide range of composing modalities as a means of providing students:

the opportunities of developing expertise with all available means of persuasion and expression, so that they can function as literate citizens in a world where communications cross geopolitical, cultural, and linguistic borders and are enriched rather than diminished by semiotic dimensionality. (Selfe "Aurality" 618)

Further, as so many teachers and scholars in computers and composition suggest, we have a responsibility to ensure our students become comfortable and competent with multimodal literacy practices. This must include attention to critical reading and analysis of digital texts, as well as the ability to compose and produce them for others. If we fail to expand our understandings of literacy and rhetorical considerations to incorporate digital composing practices, Selfe maintains, “we not only abdicate a professional responsibility. . . but we also run the risk of our curriculum holding declining relevance for students” (“Students” 55).

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