Tag: 375

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

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.

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?

This week you will not be writing a blog post. Instead, work together to pitch your project. I suggest using Google Docs to work together. You need to define the purpose of the campaign, the
audience you’re attempting to reach, and the media you’ll be using, as well as each group
member’s role.

As we saw, arguments in new media are both liberating and challenging. Finding the right combination of modes is tricky. How do you know which image(s) to choose? Where should the words go? If you build a website, you have control over layout. If you write a blog, you can choose a theme. But what do you do when you can’t change the layout? How do you make an argument, then?

For your post this week, choose an Instagram account of a company. How do they make their argument? What do they do to entice followers (or just someone checking out their account) to buy their products or use their services? You can choose any company you want, just use a critical eye.

Narratives are an important genre in writing because they help us understand our experiences. They tell a story. Therefore, it’s important for you to be able to write a well-crafted narrative. In Everyone’s an Author, Andrea Lunsford et al. provide some elements to include when drafting a narrative: a clearly defined event; a clearly described setting; vivid, descriptive details; a consistent point-of-view; and a clear point.

For this week’s post, rewatch Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk. Discuss how she includes these elements in her narrative. Then, look over your draft and peer review notes. Does your narrative include them? How can you use them to make your experience come to life on the page?