visual/multimodal rhetorics

Getting Burned or Becoming Toast?: Problem-Exploring the Game “I Am Bread” as a Tool for Teaching Growth Mindset in First Year Writing

Laura E. Decker Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description First-year writers often struggle to take risks on projects, especially as they move from their composition courses to projects within new disciplines and contexts (Robertson et al.). However, taking risks by diving into new discourse communities, as Bartholomae argued, is required to participate effectively in the […]

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Our Sonically-Composed Worlds

Matt Hill Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description The activity is meant to encourage thinking about sonic pollution in our world and about the rhetorical nature of such pollution. It could also move into other sonic topics: effects of noise on hospital care, effects of anthropogenic noise on the natural world, how military sonic technologies

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Personal and Cultural Identity Through Food: A Multimodal Cultural Cookbook

Andrea Janelle Dickens Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description The first year of college offers ample opportunities for students to think about identity. Students are in a new school, and sometimes in a new city or country. They are meeting new people. This gives them the chance to think about who they are, and the

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Writing Like a Game Designer

Elizabeth Caravella & Rich Shivener Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description As students turn to composing more multimodal and digital pieces in their writing courses, a number of writing instructors have employed the process known as gamification, or, the application of game-like elements, to their classrooms. Through this activity, students will learn to also utilize

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Engaging Podcasts as a Dynamic Genre for Invention

Charles Woods & Devon Ralston Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description Instructors who maintain a robust definition of text “connect our students so much more with the real world of writing. We prepare them for the world […] so that they can participate in that conversation” (Marchetti & O’Dell). Podcasts represent a digital genre that

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Multimodal Proposal

Charles McGregor Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description This assignment is intended to be used as a proposal for a big multimodal composition project. The goal of this assignment is to help students articulate their topic, think through their intended audience and where they exist, and practice composing through a non-linguistic mode of communication they

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How to Write a _____ Like a _____

Keri Epps Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description As a writing instructor dedicated to researching and teaching rhetorical genres, I often struggle with how to facilitate students’ learning of what makes a genre, how it circulates, and who it matters to. In short, designing scaffolded assignments around “genre” has seemed difficult in writing courses at

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“Lend Ears!”: Creating Audio Recordings of Final Drafts to Develop Rhetorical Awareness

Heather Shearer Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description Many composition instructors ask students to read drafts aloud during writing workshops because doing so helps writers identify logical gaps, stylistic mishaps, or localized errors they overlook when reading drafts silently. To amplify the writerly knowledge gained from reading drafts aloud, we can extend the read-aloud practice

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Thinking Across Modes and Media (and Baking Cake): Two Techniques for Writing with Video, Audio, and Images

Crystal VanKooten Volume 5 Chapter Description Using the metaphor of baking a cake, this chapter offers students in college writing courses two techniques for writing with video, audio, and images: integration and juxtaposition.1 Knowing more about these techniques enables students to approach the analysis and composition of their own and others’ multimodal texts with more

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Strategies for Analyzing and Composing Data Stories

Angela M. Laflen   Volume 5 Chapter Description Data stories are multimodal texts that combine data with words and images to tell a story to or make an argument for a particular audience. They are increasingly common in everyday life as technology has resulted in an information explosion. Data often do not make sense unless

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