I'm tired of the fearful look in people's eyes, the tensing of their shoulders, the pursing of their lips when I tell them I am an English professor. Why the visible shift? Because the dreaded word "English" has been spoken. To them, I am a grammarian. Their grade-school teacher, ruler in hand, counting misspelled words, misplaced modifiers, and mixed metaphors. A critic of every verbal utterance. People stop talking to me because they fear I will correct their usage. I try to reassure them that grammar is a specialized knowledge of the academic elite. Grammar, after all, is not the whole of what English studies is comprised and is certainly not "the" thing of which my teaching and research consist. This article isn't about grammar. It is about what writing scholars should be teaching in general-education "writing" classes like first-year composition. In order to answer that question, we have to ask what kinds of academic literacy, if any, we should be valuing and teaching. My co-author addresses this issue from the perspective of "How can we use what we know from rhetoric to understand new media arguments?"; I ask: 'Can teaching new media composition instead of, say, research papers accomplish the goals of teaching critical literacy?'
Shared Introduction

This webtext is an experiment of sorts. It is our attempt at explaining how argument might look and act differently if not bound primarily to textual literacy in the most narrow of senses. We propose that if new media replaced written text as the primary means of communication within the university, then the theoretical base would shift from linear, alphabetic texts to aesthetically designed texts that require several forms of literacy to negotiate and understand. That is, the texts that a university produces—from faculty and students—would be more reliant on the meaning-making strategies from all modes of communication, rather than being stiffly situated within the domain and logistics of written text. Because of this, audiences would value the aesthetic qualities and effects of an argument instead of just the efferent, informational logics in place in today's university.