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 homogenous. Exploring its variations can reveal motives besides duplicity, and experimenting with its rhetorical conventions can empower students to consider their participation in the circulation of social values, including how to weigh evidence, who can claim authority, and even what constitutes a “fact.” In this assignment, students work in groups of 2 to create a 5–7-minute podcast in which a “host” and “guest expert” investigate a hoax to understand its rhetorical function(s). Working with the premise that “hoaxes effect or enact…some real result in the world in addition to telling constative untruths…by imitating authentic instances of the host genre” (Fredal 75), students research a scholar that helps them identify genre conventions in their hoax. Then, modeling their dialogue on podcasting interviews, students should “take on the approach” (Harris 74) of the scholar/expert and develop a claim about how the hoax’s falsehoods critique or complicate the cultural conventions they imitate. Finally, in separate written reflection (250 words), individual students offer a meta-analysis of their rhetorical choices. By reflecting on why they incorporated specific podcast conventions and how they imitated an expert, students can “examine the multiple modes and media used to deliver credible information” (Woods and Ralston) and, further, conceptualize credibility and falsehood as contextual and socially mediated. This assignment is especially well suited to first-year composition courses in which students often contend, sometimes for the first time, with media and information literacy (Artman, Frisicaro-Pawlowskica, & Monge 94). At the same time, it also lends itself to courses on journalism, media circulation, and political analysis. Studying hoaxes qua hoaxes may feel too limited in courses that are broadly concerned with more popular forms of news. Nevertheless, the hoax’s ability to emulate other genres makes it an especially salient way to study the genre conventions of many types of composition, ranging from press releases (see Google Nose, https://archive.google/nose/) to academic publishing itself (see Sokal).