Reading Response 13

In her article, "The Sticky Embrace of Beauty,"Anne Frances Wysocki discuss the subject of beauty and the human perception of it. She argues that we can find a visual layout both pleasure and unpleasure. This is because people is used to see beauty as a real thing, something present and familiar, but beauty can also be abstract. So maybe we can find an advertisement with a picture in it that we don't find beautiful and yet its "consistency" achieved by "contrast," "repetition," "alignment," and "proximity" makes us take pleasure from it.

I think we can relate this article to Stephen Bernhardt's "Seen the text" where he explains how the visual organization of the text can contribute to the rhetorical aspect of it. So what Bernhardt attributes to size and font of the text, graphics, and distribution of it; is what Wysocki attributes to contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity.

Personally, I didn't like this text so much because even though the topic is interesting, I found it really hard to follow and understand it. The author takes for granted that the reader has already certain knowledge about the subject in discussion-which I don't- and her vocabulary is really complex for me.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION AND JOURNALING

2. I believe it is a low visual text because, other than the picture of the ad and a couple of graphics there's no visual organization and it looks just like the rest of the scholarly articles we've been reading for this class.

3. Actually, it didn't interested me at all. I didn't even realize that it was about a bookstore until I read this question and went back to the ad picture to read what was written in it. I guess it didn't really caught my attention.

APPLYING AND EXPLORING IDEAS 

2. I believe beauty is in the eye on the beholder. Maybe there's is a picture that I find incredibly beautiful and other people won't like it. Of course there are some social preconceptions about what is or not beautiful but I think that the final say about it it's always in the beholder.

META MOMENT

I'm not sure if it applies to her article because it's not that much visually-structured but I think it certainly applies to every visual art. Art has a skill, beauty and a meaning. Beauty and meaning can be achieved by the author's skill to use tools like color, line, and shape to push against the conventions and make their own sense.

Reading Response 12

In  his article, "From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies," Dennis Baron illustrates how literacy technologies have been developing through time. He argues that new technologies have always been rejected at first because they were unknown by people and that even writing itself was rejected too. People also had to adjust to these technologies. For instance, they had to learn how to talk the phone. These technologies become, as Deborah Brant would call them, literacy sponsors because they influence the way people communicate. He also explains how literacy has changed due to the new technologies, starting with the invention of writing itself which "was once an innovation strongly resisted by traditionalists because it was unnatural and untrustworthy" (426).


GETTING READY TO READ
1. Technology is everything people create to satisfy their needs and improve his well-being. For example, a house is a kind of technology created to protect people from the environment.


APPLYING AND EXPLORING IDEAS
2. I think it would be really helpful to improve grammar checking in writing technology. I don't even know if that exists but, being a ESL student, I know it would help me a lot in my writing processes.

I believe the article was interesting until certain point. The topic is good and well developed but I think that there's no need to spend that much time to explain the history of pencils. On the other hand I like the way he explains that we never know what technology is going to come out with in the future just like years ago people didn't know computers would ever exist.