I plugged the following prompt into ChatGPT: “write a four-sentence introduction to a blog post weighing the pros and cons of chat gpt and its implications for academia, including the impacts on academic integrity, how professors can detect plagiarism, and the potential for inaccurate results. ”

Here is ChatGPT’s result: “In the rapidly evolving landscape of academic discourse, the integration of ChatGPT into educational settings has sparked both excitement and concern. This blog post delves into the dichotomy of the pros and cons surrounding the use of ChatGPT in academia, scrutinizing its implications for academic integrity. As educators increasingly grapple with the challenge of detecting plagiarism in a world where advanced language models can generate content, we explore the tools and methods professors can employ to uphold academic honesty. Additionally, we scrutinize the potential for inaccuracies in results generated by ChatGPT, shedding light on the delicate balance between technological advancement and the reliability of academic inquiry.”

It doesn’t say exactly what I’d like it to, but I think that may be a good thing. We can see the almost confusing style of writing that ChatGPT uses with long, wordy sentences and 25 cent words where 5 cent words would be more accurate. We can also see how my voice does not come through in the writing, and we can see that ChatGPT does not churn out an entirely accurate interpretation of prompts. I plugged in “how professors can detect plagiarism,” which ChatGPT interpreted as “the tools and methods professors can employ to uphold academic honesty,” which is a similar concept but seems more scientific than I am in this blog post. Still, it’s a fairly decent piece of writing for a computer and a huge technological feat.

Certainly, as ChatGPT itself generated, there is “both excitement and concern” regarding AI, especially in regard to academia. In my experience as a student, I have used ChatGPT to summarize difficult articles to make sure I caught all the major points, only to find ChatGPT did not summarize the right article or just made something up entirely. I have also used ChatGPT to generate a list of relevant sources for me to look into, and then, after a very frustrating half hour searching for these sources, I realized ChatGPT literally generated them– They did not actually exist. However, ChatGPT has been exceptionally helpful in generating discussion questions for me to make sure I comprehended difficult articles, and it has also been helpful in my language learning endeavors as a kind of digital pen pal to write to in French. (I also think it generated a pretty good introduction paragraph for this blog post!)

In my experience as a professor, ChatGPT has been incredibly terrifying. As I’ve only been teaching for a few years, I don’t have the experience that other professors do to catch that kind of uncanny style of writing that ChatGPT uses, and there have been times when the phrasing in student essays were cyclical, repetitive, and strange, yet I cannot prove that ChatGPT (or another AI program) generated their essay. In “ChatGPT and the Rise of Generative AI: Threat to Academic Integrity,” Damian Okaibedi Eke notes that “for universities to preserve the current assessment methods based on written essays, there is a need to create a reliable tool that can detect AI generated texts. However, designing such a tool and incorporating it into effective or reliable assessment approaches will require a lot of funding and the support or buy-in of OpenAI or other creators of these language models. It may also take time to develop.” There are clearly these major restraints on us as educators and us as humans. Eke suggests rethinking essays as assessment anyway, but in freshmen writing courses, it seems difficult to do anything at all. Setting the learning agenda based on a student’s sample essays is absolutely useless if the essays are not a reflection of students’ abilities but of AI’s abilities.

Nina Begus works on developing technology and the humanities, and she said once (or probably many times, but I heard her say it once) that technology is developing rapidly whether the humanities are involved or not, so the humanities better get involved. That stuck with me. We can talk about how these forms of technology shouldn’t exist, but they do. So we had better come up with a way to face these technologies in a way that maintains integrity. I’m not sure how we can stress the importance of academic integrity to our students in a way that feels real when there is still no highly accurate way of detecting AI-written texts. Perhaps we could do what Val O’Bryan suggests: “instructors can have [students] use the tool at different stages of the writing process, stopping them along the way to discuss and think critically about the generated content and searching through databases to try to find credible sources that support the generated content.” This is an interesting idea, but I’m still not sure it would prevent  undergraduate students with essays due in five courses from using an AI-generated essay when deadlines got tight. However, it seems to be a good idea to speak openly about AI in classrooms to help to explain the limitations to students.

Several tools have been created to try to catch AI-generated instances of plagiarism, so it is, hopefully, only a matter of time before these tools grow more and more accurate. In the meantime, it seems to me that the best we can do is aim for open communication about AI in our classrooms.

This summer, for the first time ever, I watched the movie Jaws. In all honesty, I was underwhelmed by the film, but that didn’t prevent me from getting absolutely covered in goosebumps when someone told me that the technology wasn’t there yet in 1978 to create a convincing shark, which forced Spielberg to improvise— The shark appeared in the film in small, dramatic glimpses; we see attacks from the shark’s point of view; sound, that famous music, indicates that the shark is near rather than a visual; and later, when the mechanical shark was malfunctioning, Spielberg had the idea to use barrels from the set. In the film, the barrels are attached to the shark so that they can see when it’s coming. Steve Korb notes that “These would then be used to show the presence of the shark when the actual shark wasn’t available” due to its frequent malfunctions. My goosebumps, though, were a product of the power of limitations: the limitations that filmmakers faced led to an even more mysterious, suspenseful film than if they had been able to render a CGI shark in 1978, or if their mechanical shark simply functioned a bit more regularly. Their limitations became a strength. (Goosebumps!)

The same idea is at play in Gabe Cohn’s New York Times piece, “How Slender Man Became Legend.” Cohan opens his article by saying that “Slender Man is scary not because of what you know about him but because of what you don’t know.” Like the shark in Jaws, the mystery surrounding Slender Man is precisely what creates the suspense, discomfort, and ultimately fear. Slender Man, though, has been created through different means than Jaws. Steven Spielberg deliberately created a flickering image (leaning heavily into multimodality, I might add) of the shark. Slender Man, on the other hand, was created through the flickering signifiers created and built upon by many different individuals, all contributing to the lore on their own.

I feel the need to add the disclaimer here that I am still working on my theory knowledge, but when we apply structuralism here, things get pretty interesting. The signifiers in each of these situations are constantly changing— or, as N. Katherine Hayles termed them, flickering signifiers. These signifiers in Jaws include the music, the barrels, and, occasionally, a glimpse of the actual shark. For Slender Man, Gabe Cohn explains that the signifiers are photoshopped images, “hieroglyphs and faux 16th-century German woodcuts,” and even fake newspaper articles. These signifiers are flickering, ever-changing, but all seem to point to the same signified, which is the concept or idea of the shark or Slender Man. In the case of Slender Man, the signified is altered with ever signifier. That may be the case for Jaws, too, as the concept of the shark grows more ominous with each signifier, but this is a much smaller change than Slender Man-as-signified undergoes. Neither of these “signifieds” really have referents; that is, neither the shark from Jaws nor Slender Man really exists in reality, which gives the changing signifier even more power over the signified. As Hayles writes, ““demateriality . . . affects human and textual bodies on two levels at once as a change in the body . . . and a change in the message” (73–76). There certainly seems to be a change in both body and message as a result of the flickering signifiers, but more broadly as a result of the demateriality of both signifieds.

Hayles applies this concept to many other signifiers, including writing and bodies and speech. In Jaws and in Slender Man, though, we see flickering signifiers emphasized.

In 2022, I published my first collection of free verse confessional poetry, The Dust Settles: Grieving through Poetry and Prose. I published the book myself, under my publishing company, Lightning Tower Press, so I was the one who chose the font, the alignment, the format, and the way every single poem appears on each page. I worked on this for months, and every little decision (margin size, font size, spacing, etc.) was agonizing. This, I see now, is because I was aware (subconsciously) that rhetoric and communication is always multimodal, as Arola, Ball and Shepherd argue in our Module 2 readings: “Even the font choice is an important but often subtle visual signal to the audience” (4). Everything, even something as simple as a serif font versus a sans serif font, portrays very different tones to the reader, and when I was formatting my own book, I was aware of this somewhere in my brain.

All of this is just to say that I believe all texts are multimodal, and the way a piece of writing appears on a page is incredibly important, especially in poetry where the visual arrangement of words impacts their reading. But this week, after viewing Welcome to Pine Point, I immediately wanted to tell my own multimodal, interactive story with images, interviews, music, and more. I’ve never heard of Pine Point (like a majority of the world, as it existed for one generation), but clicking through its story, I felt nostalgic and sentimental. I think effective multimodality does that. It’s not much like a videogame, and the viewer knows they are not and never were a part of the Pine Point community, and its not unfiction because (as far as I could find on the internet) Pine Point really existed. But there is an element of ARG in its full immersion. Hearing the voices, seeing the faces, reading the stories of this community was very moving. I immediately set out to create my own interactive website just like Welcome to Pine Point (and my final project idea for a grief archive stemmed from this mission), but I found it is a lot harder than I had anticipated. So, for the time being, while I figure out how to use different internet resources, I decided to try something a bit different: I made some of my (already multimodal?) poetry into digital, multimodal videos and images.

Years ago, I got a polaroid camera and my first “test photo” was of the rocks at Wading River beach. I look at this photo often (I have it tucked into my bedroom mirror frame), and I’m always struck by the one rock way out in the water, sticking up out of the water, though barely. About a year ago, I wrote a poem about that rock. For this project, I used Canva to superimpose the poem I wrote about the rock directly over the image. I used colors from the image for the text for visual coherence, and I positioned the word “under” directly over the rock the poem was written about in the hopes of pointing it out to readers who may not see the rock. All in all, I wasn’t particularly pleased with this. I felt the image gave the poem some context, perhaps added an element of aesthetic, but it didn’t magnify the emotion of the poem in the same way that the Pine Point website did for me. 

So I tried something else. I used a movie maker program, Filmora, to create a sort of slideshow of videos and added a voiceover of me reading some of my poetry. The first I created was “The Infallibility Myth of the Mother”. I wrote this bit of prose for my mom about six months ago, and then I found some videos I already had of her from a Disney trip we went on about two years ago. I thought the videos enhanced the meaning of the video somewhat– they created a more lighthearted tone than the words could have accomplished on their own. But still, I wasn’t happy with the Disney videos. I wanted realer, more authentic clips. So I turned to grief and home videos to create “Death Preceding Denouement”. This one, of the three, felt the realest to me. The clips are real, the emotions in the poetry are real. Including sound in the first video also added a lot (for me, at least) because hearing my dad’s voice has become very powerful and moving since his death six years ago. It’s still no Welcome to Pine Point, but I’m happy with this product and the multimodality of the visuals, sounds, and poem itself– for now.

Hi all, and welcome to another post in which I can’t seem to make up my mind. For this module, I focused on the concept of eportfolios. Klein’s “The Social EPortfolio” and Yancey’s “Circulation, Ecology, and the Development of Literacy” addressed the educational benefits to assigning eportfolios in composition courses. They do a great job explaining the benefits and using specific case studies, but I suppose I am stubborn: I’m intrigued, but not yet sold.

Klein and Yancey both discuss eportfolios as a kind of running class assignment and an opportunity for students to connect with each other (and potentially the rest of the world) as well as refine their technological skillset and make connections between course content and their lives outside of the classroom. Klein refers to these eportfolios in terms of a “cabinet of curiosities” in which students are encouraged to curate their own assortment of digital artifacts. I am intrigued by this terminology, and I think it could be really fun and encourage introspection for students.

More than the fun aspect, I think the social side of an eportfolio is not to be overlooked. Klein refers to these eportfolios as a derivative of social media, and Yancey’s whole argument is centered on an ecology concept. My master’s thesis is kind of related to this idea. I studied student writers and their writing processes, and I found that the writing process is much more social than I had previously thought. My whole thesis centered on the social side of writing, and I argued for the fostering of a sense of ecology in the writing classroom. Certainly, I think eportfolios, especially as Klein describes them as a form of classroom social media, can help to foster this sense of ecology, or at least community, for students to thrive within.

I also like the idea of eportfolios as a “real world” writing assignment. In Dr. Dunn’s class on teaching writing, which I took last fall, we read several different studies that showed that students are more invested and more successful when the assignments in a class are authentic. Eportfolios, especially social eportfolios, allow students to interract with each other and potentially the rest of the internet world. Certainly, this is a more authentic rhetorical situation than writing an essay for an instructor’s eyes alone. An eportfolio, in this sense, would foster greater investment and potentially garner greater excitement from students.

But how real is this rhetorical situation? Students know their instructors are monitoring and grading these “authentic” eportfolios, and even on a blog like this one, the content is predetermined by a course syllabus. And, let’s face it, if I were to maintain this blog of my own volition, I would have posted every single day for about a week and then never logged back in again. Yes, even these “authentic” writing environments are contrived, and students are essentially performing authenticity, just in a different way than they perform authenticity in formal essays. But, even if these assignments are not entirely authentic, isn’t some level of authenticity preferable to an entirely inauthentic assignment like a print portfolio that only instructors see at the end of the semester?

My only real hesitation in assigning an eportfolio is whether the benefits justify the workload. I’ve taught first year writing courses at a four-year private college for a few years, and I have to assign three essays throughout the semester. Of course, in a writing class, students should be writing a lot. An eportfolio to maintain throughout the semester could distract from the essays, or could burden students unnecessarily as they try to learn the grammar and rhetoric content. I think in a course like that, where students already have a big workload, an eportfolio would be a nice supplement, as long as it doesn’t overburden students and cause the essay quality to diminish. The social benefits and authentic elements would be helpful. Perhaps when I teach first year writing again, I’ll use a low-stakes eportfolio assignment for students to contribute to each week to synthesize the content . . . But can an authentic project that exists on the internet be low-stakes?

To summarize: the jury is still out on eportfolios.

I’ve deliberately waited almost two weeks to process this information before writing my own blog post, but I find that even two weeks’ worth of thinking has not been enough to fully process my own understanding of what exactly constitutes a text. This is not a new problem for me: I have been trying, lately, to include more popular culture artifacts, such as film, music, and other media, into my own research, and in the process I have been fighting—and sometimes embracing—my urge to refer to an episode of a television series as “the text.” After this module’s readings, I think I will stop fighting that urge.

Eyman refers to the criteria of a text as defined by DeBeaugrande and Dressler: a text, according to these two, is a “communication event” (qtd. in Eyman, 21), that has “cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality.” Eyman makes a point of noting, however, that DeBeaugrande and Dressler “are working in the discipline of linguistics rather than rhetoric” (21). I think this distinction makes all the difference. These criteria are all great, and they can help us differentiate what exactly we mean by text, but there is one criterion that I personally am not sold on just yet: intentionality.

This feature of intentionality seems to stem back to DeBeaugrande and Dressler’s earlier definition of a text being a “communication event.” In the field of linguistics, I suppose a communication event must be intentional to count. Eyman explains this criteria by quoting DeBeaugrande and Dressler’s example: “talking in one’s sleep would not count as a text” (21). I would agree with that assessment, but what about an unintentional expletive? When someone accidentally, unintentionally, drops the f-bomb, isn’t that a communication event? Aren’t they communicating, unintentionally, that they are angry or frustrated or startled? This question of an unintentional communication event is more obvious when we consider non-linguistic communication events. Facial expressions are an especially easy way to see unintentional communication. Raised eyebrows or a smile are not always intentional—in fact, I might argue that genuine facial expressions are never intentional—yet they are communication events that meet all the other criteria listed by DeBeaugrande and Dressler. The opposite end of intentionality, “acceptability,” is the only thing that matters in a communication event as far as I am concerned. The receiver of the communication has the right—and the responsibility—to read into all of the information they can receive, whether it was intentional or not. I’m thinking also here about an activity we did my first year of college in an English literature class (and I think it’s a fairly popular activity for professors to do). We performed a rhetorical analysis of the classroom. The ways the desks were arranged with the professor’s desk, the size differences between desks, the lack of any lefty desks, the board at the front of the room, all communicated to us what the expectations are for students. Now, the classroom was built and designed intentionally. But it wasn’t designed to communicate anything. So does this count as intentionality? I’m not so sure, but I’m leaning toward no. Anyway, I suppose my grapple with intentionality as a criteria of a text is all just to say that I think anything and everything is a text, or could be considered a text if it falls into hands marked by acceptability.

I want to also (quickly, hopefully) talk about Arola, Ball, and Sheppard’s discussion of multimodal texts. By defining a text as any communicative thing (linguistic, physical, artwork, etc.), it has become a lot harder for me to broadly say that I agree that all texts are multimodal— but I am still inclined to agree. I’ve taught a first year writing class for several years, and we always spend a bit of time talking about MLA format. Many students come into college with an inclination to turn in essays in “fun” fonts, “fun” colors, or any formatting they want. When we talk about using size 12, Times New Roman font with one-inch margins all around, one of the reasons I give for this seemingly arbitrary guideline is that it helps your reader take you seriously— it adds to the authority of both the text itself and the writer. Honestly, I always felt that I was making that up a bit (I believed it, but had never seen anyone else give that reason), so I was thrilled to see Arola, Ball, and Sheppard say something similar: “Even the font choice is an important but often subtle visual signal to the audience” (4). Certainly, I believe linguistic texts are always multimodal; if the words are typed, what font is used? If the words are spoken, how are they spoken? How does the speaker hold themselves? Is the speaker dressed professionally or casually? I am inclined to extend this to nonlinguistic texts, too—works of visual art, for example, can use multimodal techniques, or can incorporate multimodal elements depending on how they are framed or displayed, or what the little write up beneath the displayed artwork says.

One more note on multimodal texts— I’m wondering how multimodality might apply to social media in my area of study. Most social media posts are multimodal, combining photos and videos with written text, and paired with a profile picture to help your audience read you as a rhetor. But I’m wondering whether the multimodality of social media posts can help me/us to understand the grieving process or the experience of grieving. What kinds of texts are paired with what kinds of images? The words, very often, are sad in tone, but the images generally seem more happy: smiling pictures of the deceased, or peaceful stock photos of nature. Does multimodality, here, simply contribute to a “vibe,” or is the multimodality seeking to convey a larger message about happy and sad feelings being inherently woven together? Or conveying a larger message about hope? I don’t have answers to this, but it’s something I’d like to think more about, and if you have any feedback or ideas on this, please let me know in the comments!

Hello all, and welcome to my multimodal rhetoric blog!

My name is Gina Mingoia, and I’m beginning my second year of the English PhD program at Stony Brook. I earned my BA in English from St. Joseph’s College (now St. Joseph’s University!) in Patchogue, NY, and my MA in English from Long Island University Post in Brookville, NY. My MA focused mostly on writing and rhetoric– I worked in the LIU Writing Center, and my MA thesis was a study of students in the writing center and their writing processes. I am still very interested in writing and pedagogy, so I am also pursuing the Writing and Rhetoric certificate here at Stony Brook. 

I study grief and  trauma in both writing/composition and popular culture, which are actually way more different than I thought at first, but both ways of looking at grief and trauma are relevant to our multimodal rhetoric course. When studying grief and trauma in writing, I’m particularly interested in the ways that grievers or trauma-experiencers use writing as a way to cope with or heal from loss as a form of (intentional or unintentional) scriptotherapy. This leads me to life writing like autobiography, but I also find myself time and time again looking at the types of writing that are not as polished, especially comments on the internet. For example, if you listen to a song about loss or grief on YouTube and scroll through the comments, a majority of comments are different users sharing their stories and experiences with grief. Their audience is made up of strangers, but strangers who have also sought out this particular video on YouTube, so there is an element of kinship and community. Then, in terms of popular culture, I’m interested in examining the stigma surrounding grievers and trauma-experiencers: the ways that TV series or films, popular novels or even music, explore, combat, confront, or perpetuate certain stereotypes and stigmas surrounding grief and trauma. Both of these ideas seem, to me, to be linked to multimodal rhetoric, and I’m hoping that this course can give me a lens and the vocabulary to continue to study these “alt-lit” forms of expression.

Aside from all of that, I’m also interested in many, many other things, too, and I tend to hop from project to project, losing interest quickly. I started a publishing company, Lightning Tower Press, in 2020, and we’ve since published two books and have a third coming out on Sept. 29. I also completely threw myself into cooking, pickleball, and embroidery this past summer (already started embroidering Christmas presents . . .), and I’ve purchased everything I need to start quilting, but have yet to even touch a sewing machine (like, in my whole life). I did the same with gardening, too: I have packets of seeds and a hydroponic growing system in a nice neat pile, but I’ve yet to open the hydroponic growing system box– and I’ve had it for about ten months. Here’s to hoping this is the month I actually set it up and plant some seeds!

Thanks for visiting my blog, and I am really looking forward to learning and discussing multimodal rhetoric with you all this semester!