The Writer's Room

At the beginning of the semester, I asked you to look at your relationship with the Internet and new media. You wrote about your earliest memories online, including a literacy narrative. Now, you’re working on your final project: a website that remediates that narrative.

We’ve discussed how to use the rhetorical situation with new media, how new media lends itself to different modes of communication, among a host of other topics. You’ve also learned how to build your own new media projects. As a class, you went above and beyond for your group projects, creating extensive media campaigns for your causes.

For your post this week, look back at your first blog post(s). What’s changed? What surprised you about new media? What have you done this semester that impresses you? What would you still like to learn or work on? What do you plan on doing with new media after the class? Have fun with this one!

 

#thankyouforagreatsemester

While riding on the train from London to Cardiff, Sherlock Holmes fans Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss decided to adapt the Arthur Conan Doyle stories into a television series. BBC’s Sherlock doesn’t just recreate the stories, but reimagines them for the 21st century.

Revision can, of course, mean changing dialogue so that the characters don’t sound the same. It can mean clearing up confusing passages or making more conscious choices about line breaks. But what happens when a story or poem isn’t working? One way to shake things up is to radically revise. Radical revision involves changing an aspect of the piece and changing it completely. You might switch point of view to one of the minor characters or write the poem in another form. Maybe you set your story in a completely different location–even outer space!

What Sherlock does so well is take the essence of the stories and radically revise them for television. Moffat explains, “Everything that matters about Holmes and Watson is the same. Conan Doyle’s stories were never about frock coats and gas light – they’re about brilliant detection, dreadful villains and blood curdling crimes and frankly, to hell with the crinoline.”

For your journal this week, write about the revisions you noticed in the episode. How did it change from the story? What was the result? You might look at the portrayal of Irene Adler, the relationship between Holmes and Watson, Holmes’ deductive abilities, the adaptation of the plot, or a topic of your own that relates to the elements of fiction. Use examples from both “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “A Scandal in Belgravia.” This should be one of your longer posts (think 500-750 words).

Building a new media project, often, begins with a pen and paper. You get an idea and jot it down.You create a mockup or storyboard. Planning it out makes the project easier to design, organize, and reorganize. It also makes it easier to check that you’ve addressed all aspects of your rhetorical situation.

For your blog this week, look at your mockup (or website, for those of you who’ve already started). Briefly explain how you have, or have not, addressed each element of the rhetorical situation: audience, purpose, context, genre, stance, delivery. Which modes of communication–linguistic, visual, spatial, aural, gestural–are you using? Why? If you haven’t thought about an element, yet, how might you revise your mockup to address it?

We’ve discussed how new media brings with it new expectations for writing. No matter what the medium, understanding the rhetorical situation is crucial to effective communication. Good writing begins with audience and purpose. Who are you writing for and why? Genre and context are also important. Are you trying to convince your audience, inform them, tell them a story? What are the social or cultural implications? New media, though, brings in a new element to the rhetorical situation–delivery.  Right now, Jay Bolter argues, “our literate culture is using the computer to refashion the printed book, which as the most recent dominate technology, is the most open to challenge” (23). A process he calls “remediation.”

For your blog post this week, review your notes on Bolter’s “Writing as Technology” essay. Pay careful attention to the section on remediation. Then, discuss what about your literacy narrative you want to remediate into your final project now that you’ve seen how Wix works. How might you use your website to address your original research question? How can you use new media to respond to your rhetorical situation? You aren’t limited to these questions, but they might help get you started.

Creative nonfiction demands the use of the full range of tools we wield as creative writers: imagery and figurative language, scene, character, sound, voice, and perspective.

— Nancy Pagh (Write Moves 174)

As you read personal essays, it’s important to remember the technical skill that goes into writing them. The nonfiction that you’re mot used to writing, academic essays, require presenting evidence, analysis, and argument. They don’t require that you tell a story. They ask you to convince your reader of your authority, but not to give them an experience. Like fiction, creative nonfiction brings the reader into the world of the writer.

For your journal entry, look back at one of the personal essays we read for today, Sedaris or Harjo. How does the writer use “the full range of tools” of creative writers? Use specific examples from the text. Find the creative.

After lots of careful planning, your group projects are almost due. Before you turn in any work, though, it’s good to review the guidelines of the assignment and the rubric for new media projects. For your blog post this week, reflect on where your project stands now, what you need to do to finish, and how it does (or does not) meet the requirements. Both the assignment and the grading can be found in the syllabus.

I can’t wait to see your finish projects!

Instead of a blog post this week, make sure to prepare for your writing conference. Read over your literacy narrative and the “Remediation” section in “Writing as Technology.” Who was your original audience? How will this differ from your new media audience (or will it)? What was the purpose of your paper? How will this differ from the purpose of your website? How can you use multiple modes of communication, now that you’re not limited to one, to support your original research question?