Brandt's Accumulating Literacy

I was intrigued by the concept of accumulating literacy as a synchronic/vertical phenomenon, not simply one of diachronic addition of skills. I think that notion is especially important when approaching and assessing digital composing practices. In a recent class that co-taught, students were assigned to create photo or imagistic arguments in GIMP or Photoshop. I delivered the Photoshop tutorial. The students availed themselves on the features of Photoshop and GIMP, but, as one would expect, marshaled an assortment of rhetorical strategies imported from classical, linear argumentation, the associative strategies of hypertext, the recursive scanning of comic book layouts, and the production conventions of television advertising.

I also found the concept of "surplus literacy" (drawn from The Importance of Illiteracy) tantalyzing--something that I would love to study further, especially given our circumstances in the academy; our status, as Bradt briefly alludes as the dominant dominated class whose attainment of distinction relies on a surplus of literacy, or at least, a surplus of interesting stories that are refinely told.