Course Description
Theory and practice of written and oral exposition and research in traditional and electronic environments; rhetorical principles and organization in practice. Prerequisites: ENG 1003 or a passing score on, or exemption from, placement exam. Three lecture hours a week.
Credits: 3
Semester: Fall 2018
Videos
The videos showcased below were created as remix projects at the end of the semester. The video on the left was created by Esther Choi, who remixed her paper investigating Korean beauty standards. The video on the right was created by Hunter Hall, who focused on an analysis of a TED Talk speaker.
Art
For my more artistically inclined students, I give them as much creative license as possible to develop visual compositions that reflect their written work. The piece you see below, titled "Trust," was created by Mallory Fowlkes for her essay exploring the topic of sexual assault and rape.
For her Reporting Information paper, Mariah Salas explored the topic of intersectional feminism: what the concept means, represents, and promises to women and men from all walks of life. She chose to create a collage to represent this paper--which makes for a fitting material metaphor--and she clipped and drew meaningful quotes in select places. This student chose to keep her art, and she said she was planning to hang up the piece in her dorm room.
Below is another collage art representation created by one of my students, Meleydis Villatoro. Using two small canvases, she created a side-by-side diptych to depict her Reporting Information paper, which explored inadequate and oppressive representations of women's bodies. In areas where she had negative space, she added dots to increase the overall visual flow (along with some touches of color in certain places.
For her TED Talk analysis, Destiny Mills wrote about Cheyenne Cochrane's "A Celebration of Natural Hair." Ms. Mills decided to illustrate Cochrane's most poignant points by 1) illustrating an image of a woman embracing her natural hair, and 2) inserting important quotations. By centering her piece on the speaker and the speaker's most rhetorically impactful moments, Ms. Mills kept her viewers' attention focused on the central topic of her essay.
Cartoons + Youth Literature
Several students expressed interest in sketching out stories in different forms. The cartoon (the set of images toward the top of what you see below) was created by Vy Tran. Ms. Tran remixed her Reporting Information paper, and this meant she transformed an objective, straightforward style of writing into an animated, playful narrative that exposes the ethical issues of beef and dairy consumption in the United States. Click the white area on the right to see how this story ends.
To remix her Narrative, Dana Jung chose to create a children's book about her life. Click the areas at the right and left to scroll through her story. What the pictures can't reveal is the way she creatively used materials to make pop-out art on different pages.
Ads + Infographics
Using Canva or Piktochart, many of my students created advertisements or infographics as data visualizations. For these, I've also shared the creators' astute reflections in order to offer greater insight into their design processes.
The first ad seen below was created by Forrest Bernal. Mr. Bernal remixed his Reporting Information paper into an advertisement for his personal business as a physical trainer. To read his reflection paper, click here.
In another section, Mercy Obanigba wrote a report on the body image issues that Barbie and Disney princesses can inflict on the mental health of adolescent girls. For her remix, she created two infographics and asked me which one she should use. I asked her to submit both because each piece makes a powerful visual argument. To read about her design process, check out here reflection paper here.
Finally, Marissa Maxwell created a thorough treatment of her report using an infographic template in Piktochart. Please admire her consistent use of color and her works cited list at the end of the piece. To read about her design process, click here.
