Mary Laughlin Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description This assignment reflects my ongoing attempts to build transfer-oriented reflective opportunities into first-year writing projects. It was inspired in part by pedagogical advice in John C. Bean’s Engaging Ideas; specifically, his emphasis on giving students opportunities to consider purpose and audience. For example, Bean suggests an imagined […]
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Jackie Mohan Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description In this major assignment, students conduct a rhetorical analysis of one text (an advertisement, speech, essay, article, book, film, album or song, social media post, etc.) of their choice from within the last ten years. “Text” here is defined as an instance of communication, with a speaker,
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Sarah Moon Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description This activity is inspired by work done at the Parrhesia Program for Public Discourse Faculty Seminar and the National Issues Forum approach to deliberative discourse. The activity goal is to provide opportunities to channel research and rhetorical education toward live, extemporaneous speech, not in a debate format
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Lisa Parzefall Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description The purpose of this activity is to introduce students to rhetorical moves analysis as a way to approach and respond to a variety of genres as well as better understand rhetorical concepts such as audience and purpose. To do so, students begin by reviewing an example analysis
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Stephen Paur Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description This assignment invites students to critically analyze the rhetorical and emotional effects of images. The project is basically an exercise in contextualizing a news photo. It would work well as the culminating assignment for a unit on visual rhetoric, digital literacy, multimodality, mass media, or the public
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Madeleine Sorapure Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description The Brand Style Guide (BSG) is a common genre for organizations both large and small. It establishes a verbal and visual style that employees can apply in print and digital communications, yielding consistency across different expressions of the brand. Creating a BSG is therefore a good fit
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Sarah Swofford Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description The purpose of this assignment is to help students develop a process for learning unfamiliar genres successfully. This assignment is the first part of a two-assignment sequence (the second part is “A Proposal for Change on Campus,” also found in Writing Spaces’ Assignment and Activities Archive) in
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Megan Von Bergen Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description Designed as a major assignment in a general education professional writing course, the Instructions & Accessibility/User Analysis (IAUA) assignment asks students to create a multimodal set of instructions for a simple task, while making design choices that improve accessibility. Students also conduct a user analysis of
Joseph S. Vuletich Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description In today’s media ecosystem, politicians dismiss unflattering news stories as “hoaxes” and AI-generated deep-fakes concern us because of their increasingly realistic qualities. Scholars teaching information literacy have responded by developing sophisticated methods for sorting fact from fiction, promoting credibility, and dismissing falsehood. Yet falsehood is not
Impersonation Podcast: Understanding Untruth in Uncertain Times Read More »
Kevin E. DePew Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description As instructors across the disciplines know, most incoming college students struggle to read academic texts. While there is an array of reasons that students might not be reading their assigned texts—from limited time to neurodivergent challenges to failure to see the assigned reading’s relevance—this series of
