English 645 Rhetoric and Composition

Formal Writing Assignment: Teaching Plan II

 

David Blakesley writes:

 

The rhetorical tradition is typically flavored by the interests of the day, like any complex historical account. While at any given moment we may have a “rhetorical tradition,” what comprises it (its character) will change with time and circumstance. A tradition is the collected and shared knowledge and practices passed from generation to generation, norms of knowing and experience that we share and act upon, that unify us in principle and spirit. Traditions are acts of socialization, in other words. In perhaps even less glamorous terms, traditions are also ritualized incantations, species of rationalization, the rehearsal of our capacity to identify with each other. Any field of study needs to assert this shared understanding of its past, but its practitioners also need to disassemble and rebuild tradition to explain new circumstances or to account for the unexplainable aspects of new experience...We have all noticed the attention devoted to visual rhetoric these days… What insights does [the traditional verbal] rhetorical tradition provide on the nature of visual rhetoric? On the nature of seeing and its relationship to verbal and rhetorical processes? Is there a visual component in identification? Analogy? Metaphor? The bending of the will? What is the tradition of visual rhetoric, and how will it change our understanding of the rhetorical tradition(s)?

 

Length (minimum): 6 pages, double-spaced, typed.

 

Format: the plan should include all the sections clearly marked (“Overview/Justification”, etc).

 

Description: You’re preparing a sequence of class activities, reading assignments and writing assignments that will give a class of 12th grade writing students an opportunity to realize the importance of both studying and producing visual “rhetoric.” The formal writing assignments in your plan should call on students to write a real world document (or documents) that contain(s) elements of visual rhetoric (graphic design, image editing and/or cut-outs), that solve some problem facing teenagers.

 

The first step, then, is to figure out what you want them to write. Consider public writing genre rather than school genre. So, for example: a website, a zine, a series of brochures, a newsletter….

 

Then, you have to decide what examples of visual rhetoric and/or software you want them to read/study before setting out to write. We’ll be working with Frontpage and Publisher in class, and you already have an introduction to Photoshop so you’ll know what you need to know to teach the software.

 

Sections of the Plan:

I.                   Overview/Theoretical Justification: (drawing explicitly on 3 or more of the readings we did for visual rhetoric, explain why you’re teaching “visual rhetoric” in a writing class. Be sure to bring up at least two possible objections and respond to them)

II.                Warm-Up: (some kind of question or scenario where students have to draw on their own experiences and make a judgment about a question or problem pertaining to the focus, “visual rhetoric: what is it & how does it function in the world?”)

III.             HW1: Visual Analysis Assignment: (informal writing assignment of 2 pages that provides students with some vocabulary for doing image analysis)

IV.           Class Activity One: (some kind of follow up exercise to the HW, perhaps collaborative, that students to do to show that they’ve gotten the reading)

V.              HW2: Visual Production Assignment:: (informal writing assignment of 2 pages that provides students with some vocabulary for doing the production of visual rhetoric)

VI.           Class Activity Two: (some kind of follow up exercise to the HW, perhaps collaborative, that students to do to show that they’ve gotten the reading)

VII.        Formal Assignment One: (a webpage, a zine, a series of brochures, a newsletter)

VIII.     Formal Assignment Two: (this one can be a reflection or it can be a strategic revision)

 

Grading Criteria for TP2

 

Objectives

Points

Your Notes/?’s

Warm-up is doable in the classroom and would stimulate interest in the analysis and/or production of visual rhetoric

15

 

Class Activities have clear objectives that relate to the kinds of learning that need to happen for students to prepare for the Formal Assignment)

15

 

HWs (Analysis and Production) explain in sufficient detail the heuristics students will need to analyze or produce visual rhetoric. There are clear goals and “deliverables”.

20

 

The formal writing assignment explicitly describes the rhetorical situation, what kinds of technology learning need to happen, how they happen (and who is responsible when/if they don’t happen), and what kinds of rhetorical thinking (and storyboarding) need to happen. Assignment should also provide grading criteria.

20

 

The document is mostly free of errors (so that they do not interfere with the reading; you might want to take your final draft to the Writing Center)

10

 

The teaching plan’s two central aspects—the Overview and the Detailed Plan—are coherent.

20

 

 

 

Appendix: 2 Methods of Image Analysis

 

 

Formal/Contextual Analysis

(Example: the foxhole)

“The Method”

(Example: the WW2 propaganda)

Details

Prompts: color, shapes, positioning

Details

Prompts: “I notice that…” or: “The feeling I get from this image is…and that’s caused by [such-in-such a detail]

Formal relationships

Prompts: contrast, unity, pov, balance, open vs. closed frame, etc.

Patterns or threads?

Prompt: do any of the details go together and “add up” to an emotional impact on the viewer? (patterns or threads might be described in single terms, adjectives or nouns)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Context(s)

Prompts: does the image belong to a particular genre of visual representation (i.e., hidden camrecorder, photojournalism, momento/Facebook jpeg, etc). What kinds of historical and/or cultural contexts are relevant to understanding 1. what the composer might have intended and 2. how it was interpreted by an audience?

Binary Oppositions

Prompt: looking at the patterns and also the details…what are the “opposites” of the terms I’ve used?

Rank them

Prompt: which are the most important binaries?

Anomaly (=something doesn’t “fit”)

Prompt: what detail doesn’t fit in with the other details or binaries?

So, what?

Prompt: what does the detail, pattern, binary or anomaly “mean” in terms of what the composer was trying to get across about the subject? (First, I guess, you’d have to speculate about what the subject is….there could be more than one)