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 as an assignment for an introductory professional writing course, helping students become familiar with a genre that may significantly shape the communication they do throughout their career. Moreover, creating a personal BSG—that is, a style guide for their own “brand”—helps students develop and express their own professional style, which is useful for documents and websites they may create as they pursue internships, jobs, and other opportunities. The BSG assignment is also well suited to help students learn key components of visual rhetoric—specifically, color, typography, imagery, and page design—in lower-division courses that include a unit on multimodal composing or in upper-division courses that focus entirely on this topic. Creating a BSG helps students understand and practice the expression of style, rhetorically contextualized in terms of audience and purpose, through different modes. As they work on this assignment, students can examine elements of visual rhetoric and develop the vocabulary to justify or critique the particular choices of typeface and color, for instance, in documents that they author or for which they are the audience.