The concept of social memory helps us evaluate texts in several ways:
- “Different modes carry different academic weight on how they are vetted and this can influence how the information delivered by these modes is perceived in academic texts” (206). With this in mind, students can “be taught to assess what each community values in the building of memory and in the use of memory for invention” (211).
- Students can study the metadiscourse of the composition. This “metadiscourse creates cohesion and coherence of arrangement, allowing the reader to follow the points being made because overt connections through conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs, and punctuation” (212). “Each of the forms of media that the modes are represented by – film, audio, interface, text, image – all have an internal metadiscourse. And within each media various genres have their own set of metadiscursive practices…Even within traditional textual forms, metadiscourse conventions shift to suit audiences, genre conventions, and rhetorical situations” (213). Students can study an interface to learn how signposts guide the audience through the connections between textual parts (215).
- There are hierarchies that exist in social structures. “[Our] social arrangements lead to those who have the most access, inclination, and time to devote to the activity as being arbiters of what counts as social memory and what does not” (210). These kinds of hierarchies can be discovered by “looking up FAQs, rules for posting, and political, social, and scholarly associations as well as spending some time evaluating how conversations evolve and who is and is not legitimated as a participant” (219).