What does writing afford that other media doesn’t? In other words, in a multimedia world why still write? Aren’t we moving toward a more oral and visual culture of communication?

This line of questioning feels like it is coming from the same place that an earlier—and on-going—set of questions was coming from. The earlier set of questions had to do with literature. What is it? Why do we still teach it? So I suppose that is one question, also: Why do we still teach writing? Or what is it now — when so many other forms of communication are available to us?

One way I’ve been thinking about this question of what a particular communication tool affords is to see how close to thought the products tend to be. PowerPoint, for example is a good propositional tool. It’s a good pulpit to preach from, it seems to me. When we coach students to make better power point presentations, we teach them how to be more clear about their main points, concise, single-voiced.

Writing on the other-hand is more multivoiced, meandering, conflicting, discursive… It dances around subjects. Allows more complex, confused thinking in.