Thinking Through Production

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Chapter 7

We read a range of blogs, and we’ve noticed in our reading that ethos tends to be emphasized over pathos and logos in blogs. Does your own reading support this? If so, why might this be? How might the shape of the technology for writing in blogs affect how people write? How might audience expectations of blogs have developed such that readers expect writers to emphasize their ethos over the other strategies? What might the connection between blogs and diaries contribute?
Compare a range of blog writing on current events with a series of opinion pieces on current events. Use the questions above to help you develop a report on the kinds of writing encouraged in different online and paper genres of writing. You could record your observations in your own blog, and then in a paper, to compare how your own writing changes as you write in different contexts.
Here are some links to blogs that tend to write about current events, from a range of political positions:
Here are links to newspapers where you can find editorials and opinion pieces:
Here are links to blogging sites where you can start your own blog:
- Blogger: http://www.blogger.com
- LiveJournal : http://www.livejournal.com/
- TypePad: http://www.sixapart.com/typepad
- Xanga: http://www.xanga.com
We worry that all the “Thinking Through Production” activities we’ve described in our textbook and here online can sound lifeless and boring because we’ve written them, as our publisher wants, in pretty standard textbook-style writing—but we are people who are passionate about making and experimenting with comics, animations, cards, or writings our friends will think are cool or that will make our mothers cry—with something like joy—on their birthdays. We want some of that enthusiasm to come through, and for you to feel some of it when you follow some of the suggestions for projects we’ve described. We do believe that making cool communications requires the discipline to think and to explore ideas—to develop statements of purpose and design plans—because all the people we know who do cool work follow some sort of similar process.
How would you rewrite the “Thinking Through Production” sections to suggest more enthusiasm and possibility? Pick several different of the projects from across the chapters in the book, and rewrite them in a style that either will still work in a textbook or that rethinks the possibilities of textbook writing. If you are happy with what you write, please send them to us.

Do you think writing is more serious—and encourages more serious thinking—than visual texts like posters, comic books, or movies? Do you think that the forms we learn through developing complex sentences encourage us to think complexly, and that visual work cannot support such complex structures? You can explore these questions through taking sentences or paragraphs from writings that you consider to be complex and serious and trying to recreate the ideas in visual terms, or by taking visual texts and translating them into words. You can also explore visual texts from the past—such as illuminated manuscript pages, narrative oil paintings, or stained glass windows—to learn how people in the past regarded the possibilities of visual texts; visual texts from other cultures, if you read about how people in those cultures understand them, can also provide you some directions for your thinking on these questions. Do some exploring with these questions, and try to approach the questions broadly through examining different kinds of writing and different visual texts. Then try to respond to the questions through a written text and through a visual text.

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