College Composition and Communication

CCC Thread:
Some thoughts on developing your own reading protocols, using the CCC comics article as an example.

If you find the content of an article relevant to your research interests, then please do talk about that content in your blog posts (in addition to taking good personal notes). For example, “Comics as Sponsors of Multimodal Literacy” provides a really fine rehearsal of key arguments/authors in media literacy (Kress, New London Group, selected authors) and plain literacy (Brandt). It offers key terms and concepts (literacy sponsorship; the three kinds of design). All of this is fair game for discussion, say, between Greg and Candice and Leslie, who work in this area and who may want to add on, clarify, question, etc. the content itself.

If, however, you are not particularly interested in multimodal literacies, you can still observe very important features of this article. Note especially how much time this author spends on general discussions of literacy - > multimodal literacy in relation to time spend on the case study itself. This is because editors know that readership for comics (the case study) is small, but that readership for issues in literacy and media literacy is large. So if you have a case study type of article in mind, you can begin noticing how other writers distribute the weight between examples and generalizations. (Case study at the end is not the only way to accomplish this weighting, so let’s look for other versions of distribution).

As an aside—note the insertion of the classical inheritance into a contemporary situation—also a common move.