Composition Forum 46, Spring 2021
http://compositionforum.com/issue/46/

Remediation that Delivers: Incorporating Attention to Delivery into Transmodal-Translingual Approaches to Composition

Tait Bergstrom

Abstract: This case study of students enrolled in a composition course at a large public university examines multilingual students’ application of multimodal composition practices to writing assignments that emphasize delivery and circulation. Assignments in which students remediate or translate a text in one genre or medium into another are widely used to foster transfer of writing knowledge from classrooms to public discourse. Remixing may be especially useful for multilingual writers by allowing them to draw on translingual meaning-making strategies. However, such assignments must be framed in ways that make explicit the rhetorical implications of how remediated or translated texts are taken up and circulated within larger ecologies and suggest how uptake can be measured and assessed to be useful. This article draws on Rhetorical Genre Studies and Translingualism to address this issue in Multimodal Composition by outlining a pedagogical approach that emphasizes delivery and measuring uptake.

In recent years, multimodal-multilingual or transmodal-translingual frameworks for composition have been proposed as means of addressing the problems involved in developing students’ ability to participate effectively in complex rhetorical ecologies (Fraiberg; Horner, Selfe et al.; Ray). One common assignment used within such a framework is that of the multimodal genre translation or remix. In such assignments, a text in one genre is recast into another, a task which Kathleen Yancey suggests can then serve as the basis for a written reflection on “what [writers] have learned about composing in this transfer process” (311). Asking students to consciously attend to how texts and meanings are transformed as they are translated may help them “integrate their multiple literacies in meaningful ways” (Depalma 632) as well as gain awareness of the rhetorical affordances and constraints of different media (Sheridan et al.). Such multimodal remixing may be especially useful for those that identify or are identified as second language writers by allowing them to draw upon translingual practices that they have already developed in which they move fluidly between linguistic repertoires (Gonzales). A pedagogical approach that recognizes these strategies serves to resist a standard language and modal norm and draws attention to how all writing is always drawing upon a wide and promiscuous array of dynamic semiotic resources both linguistic and modal. This article extends such an approach by considering how the incorporation of an emphasis on delivery and measurable reception into genre translation or remix assignments can make them more effective tools for developing an awareness of how texts circulate within larger ecologies.

One of the chief weaknesses of genre translation or remix assignments is that instructors often use them in a manner that presents genres in isolation (Ray), instead of in the context of larger ecologies in which one genre is taken up as the occasion for another (Fraiberg; Spinuzzi, Network). This approach can obscure how genre performances, like language itself, emerge out of a particular moment and situation such that each performance is necessarily unique. This paper brings together concepts from Rhetorical Genre Studies and Translingualism to outline an approach to Multimodal Composition pedagogy that moves beyond the privileging of particular genres, modes, or tools. Such an approach aims for what Juan Guerra has called a pedagogy that develops “a rhetorical sensibility that reflects a critical awareness of language as a contingent and emergent, rather than a standardized and static, practice” by emphasizing how texts circulate and considering how uptake might effectively be measured (228). Through analysis of a case study in which students attend to delivery and circulation in fruitful ways, I describe how calling attention to these factors in remediated or remixed composition assignments has the potential for fostering such a sensibility. What the data in the cases presented illustrate is that it is not enough for students to become aware of genre remediation as a midway point to somewhere else in a larger chain of uptakes. Each of the writers described below can only achieve their rhetorical goals by also considering how their texts are going to arrive at a desired point with a desired audience further down the line and, more importantly, how they can measure the success with which it arrives.

Translingualism and Rhetorical Genre Studies

Translingual approaches to composition pedagogy that recognize “the linguistic heterogeneity of all users of language” (Horner, Lu et al. 305) have grown increasingly influential as part of a larger project to subvert a dominant monolingualist ideology that conceives of languages existing like islands of “discrete, autonomous, essentially static communities of language uses and users” (Students' Right, 743). Translingualism draws upon work in Applied Linguistics, which has begun to consider language as a social phenomenon emerging out of the complexity of local practice rather than as a pre-existing system or competency employed by language users (Pennycook). This idea of language as an emergent of social interaction, instead of as a matrix—the stable organizational structure of which makes social interaction possible—informs a pedagogy that can be used to resist “demands that writers must conform to fixed, uniform standards” (Horner, Lu et al. 305). In this way, a translingual pedagogy lends itself to foregrounding the idea of composition as a dynamic social practice of language in circulation rather than the mastery of a set of language and genre norms.

Phenomena in which writers conspicuously merge or move fluidly between linguistic repertoires, such as code-meshing, have usefully been presented as examples of translingual practices (Canagarajah). However, the valorization of such examples can obscure how difference is inherent to all language creation—a problem that extends to the use of multimodal remix or remediation assignments. The act of “making a fetish of specific deviations from what are thought to be formal features of academic writing” (Ideologies of Literacy 4) may simply replace one set of fixed standards with another. Similarly, multimodal remixing can be valorized as good in itself instead of serving some specific rhetorical aim in a specific situation. In response to this problem, Juan Guerra has proposed introducing different language ideologies to students and asking them to consider how these competing concepts influence their own writing practices (232). In this paper, I propose broadening the scope of that consideration to include how students’ writing practices are shaped by the larger systems of delivery and circulation in which they encounter writing situations.

Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), based in Carolyn Miller’s concept of genres as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” employed as a “rhetorical means of mediating private intentions and social exigence,” has been adopted as a powerful pedagogical tool for understanding writing situations (163). While genres are theorized as dynamic, only conditionally-stable phenomena emerging out of social interaction (Schryer), it is all too easy to mistake the characteristics of a genre such as they appear to be at any given moment as the parameters which define it. This confusion is particularly likely to occur when texts are presented in composition classes as isolated instantiations of different genres. This approach can result in teaching students how to ‘do’ certain genres that are identified by the instructor as being more useful than others and obscures how, while typified, genres exist in flux, such that each genre performance is characterized by difference (Bawarshi).

This is why presenting genres in relation to one another within the context of larger rhetorical ecologies creates an opportunity for students to explore language creation in a way that cultivates a kairotic sensibility of when and how to employ genre knowledge in the moment. A text or utterance that is produced through one genre becomes the exigency for another, a process known as uptake that Anne Freadman defines as “the local event of crossing a boundary” (43). The crossing of the boundary between one genre and another is also a force that holds them together into a chain or network of genres. When one genre is successfully taken up as the occasion for another, it confirms the genre status of both as means of rhetorical action. However, boundary-crossing, particularly that of an intergeneric sort, is not fixed: one cannot predict how a text produced through one genre with a certain purpose will be taken up by another with a different purpose. Thus, a rhetorically-oriented translingual pedagogy informed by RGS can be advanced by presenting language and genre performances not as more or less deviant from a norm. They are shot through with difference in the negotiation for meaning that occurs at each moment, even as that difference emerges out of social activity that self-organizes into the recognizable, if unstable, patterns that constitute genres.

Multimodal Remixing and Delivery

Multimodal composition scholarship has increasingly found itself aligned with both Translingualism and RGS (Fraiberg; Gonzales; Horner, Selfe et al.; Selfe and Horner; Shipka). Horner, Selfe, and Lockridge have argued that language is itself multimodal or “transmodal,” with meaning made by moving creatively between linguistic and modal repertoires. The rapid proliferation of multimodal digital composition tools has facilitated this increased attention to composition that goes beyond the assumption of a single modal norm of alphabetic text in English. As part of an effort to “increase the bandwidth of semiotic resources for communication in order to make available all means of persuasion,” Steven Fraiberg has called for a “complex blending of multimodal and multilingual texts and literacy practices” (102). However, just as instructors may privilege particular kinds of linguistic performances or genres, traditional or otherwise, as those that students must master, they can also focus on teaching students how to use certain tools (e.g., iMovie, Audacity, Wix), seeing attainment of competency with an application or an ability to produce a kind of multimodal text as an end in itself.

Often, this can be seen in the ubiquitous remix assignment in which students are asked to translate a text in one genre or mode into another. One reason for using such exercises is that they may help students learn how to transfer composition skills to new situations. However, as Brian Ray notes in his review of theoretical understandings of remixes, they generally only extend to asking students to consider which mode or genre might be most appropriate for a certain audience. This can result in an approach to composition centered on instructing students that certain tools are best for certain modes, which are, in turn, most appropriate for certain genres and situations, as though these were fixed relations that could be mastered by memorizing which applies to which. In response to Fraiberg’s call for tracing literacy practices across official and unofficial spaces, Ray has proposed incorporating the concept of uptake into the way we use remix assignments in classes. This would allow students to see how texts are received and become the occasions for new texts in the context of what Clay Spinuzzi has called genre ecologies (Tracing Genres). Thus, students would have an opportunity to consider “the larger rules governing the relations between genres” while also viewing “circulation and reception as integral to their process” (Ray 186). Creating opportunities for this kind of reflection may help students consider how each performance will call for creative translation of what they already have learned about working in a genre such that this knowledge is remade appropriately for new situations.

For an emphasis on delivery and circulation to effectively develop students’ ability to remake their genre knowledge in the face of novel writing problems, students must have some means of measuring how texts in circulation land with an audience. This involves writers working out what kind of uptake they intend to secure and determining what metric would allow them to evaluate their relative success. In Laura Gries and Collin Brooke’s recent edited collection on the subject, Gries identifies circulation as an emerging threshold concept in the fields of rhetoric and composition. The concept of delivery has also been the subject of much retheorization (Morey; Porter; Trimbur) and the benefits of incorporating it into writing pedagogy have been explored (Adsanatham et al.; Kessler). Much of this work has made use of the idea of “rhetorical velocity” as developed by Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle DeVoss, which describes how rapidly a text may circulate and the ease with and conditions under which it may be remixed or repurposed. While excellent tools like MassMine (Van Horn and Beveridge) have been developed for the purposes of data analytics research and developing data literacy (Beveridge), they are not designed to assess how well one’s own text has achieved one’s rhetorical aims. As I will argue later, much simpler and more practical measures of how a text has been taken up by one’s audience and the degree to which that uptake aligns with one’s specific goals can be used by students as a basis for making modal and linguistic choices.

The study presented in this paper describes how foregrounding the role of delivery and circulation and the measurement of rhetorical success can serve to “reposition multimodal projects as beginnings or midpoints” (Ray 183) in networks of uptake. Using these data, I will suggest how remediation assignments can be framed not as end products that should conspicuously display something that can be identified as translingual or multimodal as though these were a new type of writing to be mastered. Instead, such assignments can show how the literacy practices students have already developed are enactments of processes of language creation that do not begin or end with them but flow through. This in turn may foster a rhetorical sensibility about the decisions they make when creating language. I will conclude by outlining some implications as well as practical considerations involved in this approach.

Data Collection and Analysis

The data collected for this case study are a subset from a larger project examining student uptakes of educational materials in multilingual and multimodal composition classrooms{1}. This subset comes from a first-year multilingual and multimodal composition course I taught that was offered at a large Western research university. The online course description refers to multimodality in terms of “words, images, sounds, design” and how they “work together to produce meaning.” This same description notes that this class is for “multilingual students only.” A total of 18 students were enrolled in the class.

To examine how students perceived remix assignments that emphasized the role of delivery and circulation and the relations they saw to their own efforts to translate between genres and modes, I performed interviews with five students enrolled in my class during and after the time in which the course was offered. These five students were selected on the basis of whether or not they indicated that they were going to distribute their multimodal projects in some context beyond that of the classroom. Seven students indicated that they intended to do this, but two declined to participate further for scheduling reasons. Of the five remaining, analysis of data collected with two students is presented here. These students were chosen not only because their accounts of their composition decisions were, to some extent, representative of others’, but also because their texts serve as powerful illustrations of remixing or translating with a specific and measurable rhetorical purpose in mind.

Both participants were first-year students at the time that they took the course. A brief profile of these two students is as follows:

Laura: Laura is a nineteen-year-old Indonesian woman who attended an international high school in Indonesia. She describes Indonesian as her first language and English as a second language that she studied in high school. She stated an intention to major in business. Her final project for the course involved translating a “mini-ethnography” assignment about the Indonesian students’ association at the university into a fundraising proposal that would be presented to this association in preparation for their annual on-campus Indonesian cultural event.

Lijuan: Lijuan is a nineteen-year-old Chinese woman who attended public school in China until the age of sixteen, then studied at a private high school in San Francisco for two years. She described Chinese as her first language and English as a foreign language that she began studying in primary school. She stated an interest in computer science and informatics. Her final project involved translating a short essay about beauty standards into a video in which she filmed several of her classmates’ reactions to a ‘beautifying’ smartphone application popular in China.

Datasets collected include: 1) course-related texts, including the course syllabus, lesson plans, assignment prompts, instructor feedback, assigned readings, and messages distributed through the learning management software; 2) student-generated texts, including drafts, completed assignments, and written reflections about the composition process; 3) semi-structured interviews conducted with participants during the course and after its completion, each of which lasted approximately 45 minutes to one hour.

These data were analyzed thematically by comparing course-related texts with student-generated texts and interview transcripts, and then identifying and coding common themes. Emerging themes then served as the basis for refining the coding scheme for reiterations of the analysis process. Prominent emergent themes that will be discussed below include composition choices involving genre and modality that are made based on timeliness and resources available, and predicting and measuring audience uptake. The concepts of genre as a social action, uptake, circulation of texts, and language as an emergent phenomenon were explicitly presented in classroom lessons, assignments, and materials, and these concepts are referenced in students’ reflections.

The remix assignment given to students in this course asked them to remix or translate a previous assignment in which they had created an argument in the form of an analysis of an issue important to a particular community. In the assignment that served as the basis for the remix, students were asked not to analyze a single text concerning an issue relevant to a community of their choice, but to analyze multiple texts “composed by community members and how these texts relate to one another.” The remix assignment called on students to draw on what they had learned about the genres of “texts that this community circulates in order to make meaning” and present the results of their analysis as an argument that they could, in turn, circulate among the community that they chose to study. All remix projects had to be approved by first sending a short proposal to me for preliminary feedback. The remix was explicitly framed as being an intervention that could be circulated within a community with the intention of securing a preferred uptake. Students also wrote reflections about their composition process in which they were asked to outline what action they were hoping to accomplish, predict what uptakes might result, and describe how these considerations influenced their work.

Class materials developed to scaffold these assignments included models students could use to identify what constitutes a community in which genres of texts circulate and new and divergent genres and language practices emerge. To illustrate the concept of genre performances in circulation, students were asked to read and analyze the links between a series of short multimodal texts about who gets to be included in a particular community and who may be identified as an outsider. The community for this particular example was that of cartoonists in North America and the issue that of professional jealousy and barriers to women attempting to enter the comics industry. These interrelated texts included webcomics, tweets, a Tumblr post, community weblog posts, and a comics fansite op-ed. In their analyses, students were asked to consider why some participants in this community decided to respond to a comic that was published on Medium by James Sturm (2014) called “The Sponsor” with a Tweet, while others chose to respond with a comic of their own, and still others with other semiotic resources. They were also invited to analyze how these genres related to one another, what creators’ multimodal composition choices made possible, and how these responses were received in turn by a larger community.

Discussion

Laura: “We didn’t have time to make a presentation and present it to each sponsor.”

Remix assignments are often designed to make students aware of the affordances and constraints of different media but, if these assignments are seen as ends in themselves, such an awareness may be difficult to operationalize outside the classroom. This difficulty is compounded if it is not clear that the larger ecology in which a genre performance will occur carries its own affordances and constraints that may be just as important as any advantages inherent in any given medium. One benefit of an approach to remixes that foregrounds the roles of delivery and circulation is that students are encouraged to consider what a given medium will allow them with relation to a specific preferred uptake in a specific community. Laura’s case is a particularly striking example of a writer making composition choices based primarily on a community’s measurable goals, when they need to achieve them, and the time and resources necessary to respond to that need in an effective manner.

In my interviews with her, Laura’s accounts of her decisions are characterized by a rhetorical awareness of who needed to be convinced of what to move forward with her project and the time and resources she needed to make a compelling case. This means that she made decisions not only based on what kind of medium is good for what kind of message in some abstract sense of affordances and constraints, but on what means were readily available in her situation to achieve a measurable end. In her first assignment, she had created a mini-ethnography about the Indonesian student’s campus organization to which she belonged. When considering how to translate this work into a text that could be circulated within this community, she decided that fundraising for the organization’s signature annual event was “the most relevant issue at that time...my organization happened to be finding sponsors. I thought of ideas of how best I could use the skills I learned in class to attract sponsors. Should I make a presentation? A proposal? A sponsor web page?” The sponsorship proposal pamphlet was not chosen because this medium itself presented the greatest affordances and fewest constraints for making a persuasive case, but rather because of a “lack of manpower.” She had initially thought that making individualized in-person presentations to potential donors or developing and promoting a webpage might be most convincing. However, “the sponsorship division had only four active members at the time, we didn’t have time to make a presentation and present it to each sponsor. The IT team at that time was also tied down with the tally system for the food vendors that will be used during the event.” As a result, “we decided to make a detailed sponsor proposal, one that is able to provide all information necessary from organization profile, mission vision, financial projections, package deals and so on. We wanted it to be a one stop booklet where the potential sponsor could read it and make a decision without having to wait for further presentations and so on.” Consideration of how much work she could get done in the time she had and how much assistance she could expect from others factored into her decision of what modes would be best suited to her purpose—raising a certain amount of money for the event.

Laura’s description of her work is also characterized by a shifting awareness of who would receive her work for review at different periods in the composition process and how she wanted them to respond. This attention to what she expected others do with her writing indicates an understanding that her work would be involved in a larger chain of uptakes throughout her chosen community. While her idea for her remix assignment first had to be approved by me before it could go forward, she does not attend to this in her interviews. Instead, her account is focused on how she used this short proposal as a means of convincing officers in her organization to adopt her idea of creating a pamphlet that could be circulated among potential donors: “The project proposal was actually something I really worked hard on as I had to actually use it to convince the finance director, vice president and president of my organization. I had to think about the proposal thoroughly, like the design, the information it will carry, the target audience and so forth.” The proposal she submitted for her remix was significantly longer than those of other students, supporting the idea that it was written for more than one audience: the instructor as well as the officers in her organization.

By circulating her work in a community beyond the classroom and evaluating its reception, she noticed that one genre performance secured the uptake of another, and that uptakes had a kind of ripple effect throughout a community, involving new people and genres as they went. While my own response as instructor was to give feedback and approve the project, the officers’ uptake was to respond with a different genre involving new people, a meeting of the organization’s leadership team to discuss its merits: “It took several hours of discussion with the primary members and the next day the idea was presented to the finance team.” At this point, Laura began working on the pamphlet itself: “I was in charge of making the proposal with one of the four members in the sponsor division. The other members helped to find potential sponsors and listed their contact information for us.” At each stage, moving from executive member to finance team to sponsor division, she is a participant in the performance of a genre that allows her to move onto the next only when all participants agree that the performance is successful.

Upon securing organizational support, Laura shifted her attention to persuading targeted sponsors to contribute funds to the event. With this task, the available means of persuasion now included elements that generally never enter into student projects: goods and services with a quantifiable value, as well as the institutional memory of the organization itself. The Indonesian student organization had held their annual cultural event multiple times. Thus, regardless of member turnover, the organization had historical data on attendance, fundraising activities, funds raised, and so on. Laura drew upon these resources: “The first days of making the project, I took time to make sample designs while gathering pictures and necessary information from my organization. The organization gave me the package deals, pictures from past events, mission and vision and so forth. At the same time, I also started writing the letter to sponsors, event descriptions, statistic descriptions and other writings.” Beyond gaining awareness of how composition strategies may or may not transfer from one medium or genre to another, Laura gained a sense of what strategies employed in previous genre performances might successfully carry from one instantiation in time to another. This is something that could not have happened without her being involved in a community that could give her access to these resources and place her in a position where she was responsible for using them in ways that mattered.

The linguistic choices Laura makes in her text reflect her awareness that she is appealing to sponsors to see her organization’s event as a vehicle for advertisement and promotion. While the pamphlet emphasizes that the event is a celebration of Indonesian culture, the only word written in bahasa Indonesia is the name of the event itself, Keraton, for which no translation is given. The word, which Laura in her reflection translates as “royal palace,” is metonymically deployed to signify Indonesian culture as a whole. “Keraton” used as a proper noun acts as a form of branding in the pamphlet, which describes how popular the event is, thus indicating its value as an advertising opportunity (see Figure 1). Very few in the target audience of potential donors are likely to engage in Indonesian literacy as a practice in their own communities, so this lexical item is used for a more specialized rhetorical purpose within the context of this particular writing situation.

Finally, because her work was designed to be circulated within a specific community to secure a specific uptake, Laura had a means of measuring her rhetorical success. In Laura’s case, “The main goal of the project is to get the recipients sponsor our event...Of course, we knew it wasn’t an easy task, so we agreed that we would consider our proposal a success when a sponsor responded to us and asked for a follow up meet up.” After the class was over and she had actually sent out the proposal, she reported: “We knew the sponsorship proposal was a success when we got many responses for a follow up meeting or call. The coming weeks after the finance division was actually busy talking to the recipients who responded...In the end we did raise a few thousands of dollars from the sponsors.” While the grade and feedback received from a teacher indicate a certain degree of success or failure with regards to a classroom assignment, this sort of uptake is really only demonstrating that writing is a social act that can result in evaluation—positive or negative. This evaluation can have consequences for a student’s academic career, but does little to suggest how writing can be used to produce results in other contexts. By circulating her work first among the members of her organization and then among a group of targeted potential donors, Laura found herself making rhetorical choices about how to turn a report on a community into a project proposal, then a draft of a donor pamphlet, and finally into a finished pamphlet. Each translation in this process was marked by choices shaped by her knowledge of who would be reading and how she wanted them to respond in ways that would allow her or someone else to move the project on to the next step.

Lijuan: “The video has been viewed by 29,000 people on bilbili, which surprised me a lot.”

The case of Lijuan is particularly rich in its layers of translation and remediation, each time with a different rhetorical purpose and audience uptake in mind. Unlike Laura’s project, one uptake did not necessarily lead directly into a fixed sequence of uptakes, nor could her rhetorical success be measured in something so discrete as U.S. dollars. Her intention was for her message to be seen and to provoke discussion, and so different measures of success were identified. Furthermore, after securing a desired uptake in one system of activity, Lijuan noticed that the text she had created could be translated afresh and circulated for a new purpose in a different system. When translating, Lijuan would integrate new features into her text, depending on the uptake she desired to secure with her genre performance. Her remix project began with a short essay about differences she saw between Chinese and U.S. beauty standards, particularly when she noticed the popularity of tanning among young people in the West: “I am living in the U.S. for more than three years and I understand that the beauty standard in China is really different compared to the U.S. One of my friends has told me that he was surprised when he saw the skin whitening surgery commercial in China...I was curious about how American people think about the beauty trend in China.” She decided to translate this idea into a video exploring Americans’ reactions to a popular Chinese ‘beautifying’ cell-phone application, 美图 (meitu). Her video features split-screen shots of American students of different racial backgrounds using the application alongside their ‘beautified’ images on their phones. The students describe how they feel about the images and what standard of beauty they think is used to create them. Later, the author decided that she wanted to shift her audience from me, her instructor, to the audience of a YouTube-like Chinese social media platform, bilibili.com, so she edited the video to four minutes and translated all dialogue into Chinese subtitles. She uploaded the video to the bilibili site, where it has since been viewed over 33,000 times{2}. In each one of these translations, Lijuan revised or recontextualized her video by considering the desired uptake in her new rhetorical context and adding features shaping how that text would be received.

Beyond simply considering a medium’s affordances and constraints, Lijuan ultimately reevaluated her argument itself as part of the remediation process. Lijuan began her project with a short alphanumeric essay that communicated a clear thesis about the beauty standard reinforced by an application like 美图, which lightens the skin, enlarges the eyes, and narrows the face of users’ images as captured by a smartphone’s front-facing camera. This text was created with no audience other than me, the instructor, in mind. When she translated this text to video, however, Lijuan stated that she was interested in creating something for a Chinese audience. She eventually decided against simply trying to find a visual equivalent of her essay’s written thesis. Video afforded her the opportunity to present the 美图 application to Americans, ask them how they felt about it, and record their uptakes as a way of introducing Chinese audiences to the idea that there are multiple standards of beauty. While those she interviewed might not share her opinions about the application, this approach opened the possibility for creating a text that would serve as the beginning of a conversation rather than the last word. She reports:

At the very beginning, I was actually offensive of the filter because I didn't like how getting a lighter skin color becomes a social trend in China. I thought people should be comfortable with who they are and their skin colors, and I wanted to inform people in China of this information. However, after talking with all my interviewees, I realized that it doesn't really matter what I thought about the filter. What I should do is to let people in China to see how people in a different country think of the filter and make them think about how the beauty standards are different in different places.

Lijuan’s rhetorical purpose changed over time depending both on what her medium made possible as well as who her audience was. Thus, what began as a strongly worded condemnation of a single beauty standard shifted to a presentation of how standards differ between cultures that was designed to open a dialogue on the subject.

While Lijuan was interested in starting this discussion with her audience, she was also interested in shaping that discussion to some extent. Thus, her composition includes a suggestion of its own preferred response. Accordingly, she tagged her video on the bilibili site in a way that suggests how she predicts or hopes to shape audience uptake of her video. The bilibili site primarily features short videos designed to amuse and entertain rather than provoke or critique, and Lijuan’s choice of tags reflects an awareness of this expectation. Users who upload videos categorize where on the site their video will be featured. User-generated videos can be featured under such categories as “Living,” “Dance,” “Fashion,” “Gaming,” “Music,” and so on. Individual videos can then be described with more specific tags to facilitate search queries and auto-generated user recommendations, influencing who will see the video. While Lijuan had written her original essay framing it as her analysis and critique of cultural differences between the U.S. and China, she categorized her video under “Living,” in the “Funny” section and tagged it: “Funny,” “Wonderful,” “America,” “Hilarious, “Living,” “Foreigners,” “American Show,” “Foreigners view China,” and “Weird.” The tags all emphasize the humorous and entertaining aspects of the video, suggesting a lighthearted approach to the topic of beautifying filter mobile applications and inviting a response in the same spirit.

By uploading her video to the bilibili site, Lijuan also identified a highly effective means of measuring and assessing uptake: the site allows users to comment on videos in two ways. Viewers can add comments in the traditional manner by leaving them in a static comments section below the video. This has become a less fashionable uptake for users of some social media platforms in China and only 17 such comments are on the video’s page at the time of this writing. The second form of commentary is 弹幕 (danmu), a term that can be translated as “bullet comments,” and refers to a form of comment that, when uploaded to a video’s website, will scroll chryon-style across the video at a selected timestamp. Thus, they are embedded into the video itself like a kind of living graffiti wall. Extremely popular videos on sites like bilibili are noted for having such a barrage of commentary running across the screen at any given moment that the visual contents of the video are almost completely obscured unless one turns off the 弹幕 feature. This commentary renders uptake visible: Lijuan as the creator/uploader and her audience can see each comment appearing at the moment in the video at which a commenter identified an occasion calling for response.

Uptake, then, can be seen as the video plays in terms of individual viewers’ comments on the video as well as on one another’s comments. At the same time, any given moment in the video in which there are many 弹幕 can be read as a kind of visual index of the video’s rhetorical power to secure audience uptake as well as the rhetorical power of the audience to translate the video into their crowd-sourced reading of it. Lijuan’s video has attracted 40 弹幕 to date, the contents of which range in complexity from “很好看啊” (“this is good”) to “我们和西方人不一样 美白确实更适合亚洲人的审美” ）（“We’re different from Westerners; whitening is actually more appropriate for Asian aesthetics.” This crowd-sourced commentary running along the top of the screen both directly responds to the video as well as remediates it into a new form of text: an interactive dialogue between viewer and creator as well as viewer and viewer. Consider the 弹幕 starting at 2:30 in the video as a student using the application describes the beauty standard it promotes (See Figure 2):

Student 1: and their beauty standard is kind of like American like they want to you know how like an American white Caucasian person has big eyes um small lips um tall like stuff like that they I kind of see it in these apps

[2:46]

弹幕1: 中国也是哈哈 [China’s the same ha ha]

Student: where they also want to have those kind of features cause obviously like Asians have smaller eyes and...

[2:50]

弹幕2: 嘴小倒是没注意过。。。 [I never noticed that about small mouths...]

弹幕3: 自信最美！[Self-confidence is most beautiful!]

These 弹幕 are typical in that they refer directly to the video, commenting on Student 1’s statements, and they all appear within five seconds of one another in a kind of burst. This may indicate that the content of the video is particularly noteworthy at this moment, but it also suggests that the appearance of 弹幕 creates its own rhetorical situation, inspiring other viewers to comment.

Comments can also refer to one another more directly in a manner that transforms the video into a forum for discussion of the argument it presents as well as what constitutes correct or appropriate styles of commenting. In the next excerpt, we see a viewer leave a 弹幕 that is more critical of the video and Student 1’s statements in it. This 弹幕 follows directly after the excerpt quoted above at 2:55, at a point where the video first cuts to a caption on the screen asking a question (See Figure 3) and then to a second student, Student 2, who answers this question (See Figures 4 and 5). Despite the fact that the topic has changed and a new student is speaking, the 弹幕 that is critical of the previous speaker, Student 1, becomes the focus of discussion for the 弹幕 that follow.

Caption on screen: DO YOU AGREE WITH THE BEAUTY STANDARD OF THE APP?

弹幕4: 知道了，知道了，你能不能多说点？就你们眼睛大了，行不行 [I know, I know, but can you say more than that? Your eyes are big, I get it.]

Student 2: not really like I think it’s cute but I don’t see it and go oh I need to look like that

弹幕5: 这位黑人小姐有说错吗？？？？篮子能注意你说的预期吗？[Did this young Black lady say something wrong???? Blue text commenter, do you notice the tone you used?]

Student 2: [UNCLEAR] doesn’t look like that

弹幕6: 说的有问题吗......篮子在酸什么？人种区别，亚洲人眼睛却是较小 [Is there a problem with what she said...... what’s the blue text commenter so salty about? As for ethnic differences, Asians do have smaller eyes]

In this exchange, 弹幕 5 and 6, which appear above Student 2 as she is speaking, are not actually referring to her at all. Instead, these commenters are focused on coming to the defense of Student 1 and criticizing 弹幕 4’s tone. 弹幕4, written in blue text, picks up on Student 1’s statement that “Asians have smaller eyes,” and responds with “but can you say more than that.” A sense of impatience and dissatisfaction is suggested by the “I know, I know” that precedes this as well the “your eyes are big, I get it” that follows. It is this disapproving tone that is criticized by 弹幕 5 (“do you notice the tone you used?”) and 弹幕 6 (“what’s the blue text commenter so salty about?”). Even though the video has moved on to Student 2 and a new question, 弹幕 4-6 indicate that commenters are not engaging with this part of the video because they find Student 1’s opinion and their own responses to it as a community of viewers more salient. The suggestion that the commenter in blue-colored text is rude reinforces the general tone of the bibibili site and of the tags that Lijuan chose to describe her video: this is a platform for fun, entertaining videos and friendly commentary, so be respectful of others.

Uploading her video on bilibii afforded Lijuan a means of evaluating the success of her genre performance in terms of the metrics afforded by the website: views, number of comments, and the content of those comments:

The video has been viewed by 29,000 people on bilbili, which surprised me a lot. I read all the comments for my video. Some people talked about how people should be more confident about how they look, but there are other comments saying that some people are just pretty enough so that they don't need to use an app like this. I am glad that people are willing to express their opinions, which makes me feel like my video actually make people think about the app and the beauty trend.

Lijuan’s choice of tags and platform indicates artful decisions made with the intention of securing a preferred uptake. Here, the goal was to expose people to a new idea in a manner that results in a casual, friendly discussion recorded for others to read or contribute to as they will. Success could be measured in the number of total comments as well as the way in which comments engaged with the text and each other.

Conclusion

I have argued that Rhetorical Genre Studies and Translingualism provide useful ways of foregrounding the role of circulation and uptake in Multimodal Composition and that this might help students develop a rhetorical disposition towards questions of modality and language creation. Laura does not choose to create a fundraising pamphlet featuring a single untranslated word in bahasa Indonesia because there is something intrinsically valuable about this form; she states that it seemed to fit her particular situation given the means of persuasion available at the time. Lijuan did not create a text that moves in between English and Chinese because she was taught that there is something inherently desirable or powerful about this kind of hybrid linguistic performance. Rather, these semiotic resources are common in the venue where she felt her message would be most likely to secure the preferred uptake. In both cases, a rhetorical disposition towards language creation was fostered by presenting the remediation assignment as a translation across generic borders that would then result in further translations linking genres in chains of uptake. Furthermore, student texts had to circulate beyond the classroom for these chains of uptake to become visible.

This approach presents certain challenges. There are real dangers that exist for people making meaning in a highly networked world that increasingly does not have a useful means of discerning public from private. It is obviously unethical to require students to circulate texts outside of relatively controlled rhetorical environments. Creating assignments in which students must make posts on social media platforms, even in groups in which privacy settings are tightly controlled by an instructor, is inadvisable since the data produced and published are ultimately exploitable by the owners of the platform in ways that may not become clear—even to those owners—until long after their production. Consequently, perhaps the most instructors can do is carefully choose the texts they assign as reading to model the kinds of rewards and dangers that can result from crafting texts in ways that attend to circulation and uptake. Teachers can then encourage students to work on projects that may actually be of use to them in writing situations outside the classroom or that they are already encountering, as a way to use class time and get credit while pursuing aims that matter to them.

Another challenge is how to effectively scaffold this kind of remediation assignment by presenting a collection of texts that can serve as models. Many of our students may be laboring under the belief that a multimodal composition class means that instead of learning how to write expository essays about The Great Gatsby, they will be learning to create PowerPoint slide decks about The Great Gatsby. In order to present texts to students in a way that does not privilege some genres, media, and composition tools over others, I suggest collecting an interrelated network of texts of different genres produced within a particular community. In this way, we can ask our students to attend to the relations between these performances, rather than focusing on mastering whatever they think the intrinsic merits of each genre might be. Students can be asked to consider how one text is taken up by another, why one genre might have been chosen as a suitable response rather than another, what this choice makes possible, and what elements from one text seem most prone to being appropriated and redeployed by others. These questions can then be used to guide students in the creation of their own texts.

Through this case study of student accounts of their own literacy practices, I have traced how students crafted texts as part of remix assignments in which issues of circulation are emphasized. In each case, students’ accounts of their decisions indicate that their genre performances and use of semiotic resources emerged out of consideration of the community in which they chose to intervene and how they hoped to secure a particular uptake. RGS and Translingual approaches to composition classrooms have opened new possibilities for allowing students of diverse linguistic backgrounds to develop their rhetorical faculties. Scholars have indicated the important role that circulation and uptake can play in this work (Fraiberg; Ray), and the importance of developing a rhetorical disposition to it (Guerra). This article has sought to demonstrate how this can be usefully applied to the field of Multimodal Composition pedagogy by describing the experiences of students engaging in multimodal composition practices in a kairotic fashion, adapting and assembling practices as they are needed to meet their goals in a given writing situation.

Notes

1. The Institutional Review Board at the university approved the study, determining it exempt from internal review. (Return to text.)

2. By our second interview, Lijuan’s video had been viewed 29,000 times, but this number has increased to 33,000 at the time of this writing. (Return to text.)

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