Writing for Electronic Media

Overview:

English 407 is designed to help you become more productive and critical at reading and writing in digital spaces. (Of course, “reading” and “writing” might be more accurately termed “producing” and “consuming” to account for the multimodal texts that now comprise most online discourse, such as video assemblages, podcasts, and digital compositions.)

This course examines online discourse communities and the ways in which people can write to them, in them, and for them. Students will enhance their understandings by reading and discussing critical theories of technology and contemporary rhetoric, and by analyzing and engaging in communicative practices online.

The course is designed for technophobes as well as technophiles, newbies as well as seasoned experts. So long as you know what the World Wide Web is, how to use email, and how to compose in a word-processing program, you will be able to succeed.  In the past, this course has been very popular among majors in English, education, CIS, journalism, and business.

Assignments:

Students in the course will learn its content by engaging in a mix of individual work and a sustained team project–one in which teams develop a working website around a specific theme and within a context decided upon collectively.  More specifically, students will be evaluated on (1) a series of short written responses to the readings in the course; (2) a collaborative template for a website; (3) individual contributions to your their own team’s website; and (4) contributions to another team’s website. (Students will have the option to be anonymous in all website contributions.)

Required Texts:

readings made available via PDF by instructor.