This course is a face-to-face course; we meet in person once a week (every Monday), for 2.5 hours each meeting. It is workshop-oriented, which means you need to plan to be there for almost every weekly meeting; if your schedule suggests you cannot do so, please consider other courses to take. Because of the nature of the course, there will be an attendance policy that allows you only a few absences.
Course Goals:
This course is designed to introduce you to the theoretical and practical elements of composing arguments (engaging in rhetoric) for public audiences in the digital age using new technologies. You will examine foundational principles of classical rhetoric as they are enacted in traditional print media and as they are reconfigured in/by electronic media. You will apply those principles as you analyze and produce digital (or digitally enhanced) compositions that make use of a variety of currently popular software applications (including especially cloud-based computing sites), including AI content-generation tools.
Approach:
Because this is an introductory course that explores the intersections among rhetoric, composition, and new media technologies, you will not be expected to learn any particular digital composing applications in serious depth; nonetheless, you will be expected to learn about (and begin to make use of) a handful of contemporary applications that will facilitate electronic communications. In past courses, for example, students have learned to utilize programs like Audacity, Dall-E, Photoshop, Weebly, TikTok, ChatGPT, and various blogging platforms—all at an introductory level, and all through a lens of rhetorical theory and practice. This will be a highly collaborative class: you will learn through seminar-style discussions, through workshops in which you teach each other new software applications, and through shared processes of writing and revising.
Assignments:
The writings you produce for this class will primarily consist of the following:
*short essays in the form of class blog posts related to classical rhetorical theory;
*a 2.5-hour long workshop/presentation in which you teach the class members about a specific digital content creation technology, articulating both theory and practice;
*a series of “low stakes” mini digital compositions, and
*one substantive digital composition in which you make use of an array of digital tools in a rhetorically effective way.
Because of how collaborative and interactive this course will be, attendance will be mandatory: if this is a semester in which you cannot participate in basically every weekly class session, this is not a course you should take at this time.
Readings:
There will be no textbook for the course; a collection of readings in PDF form will be made available on the course website, free of charge.