ENG101.04
T/TH 10 – 11:15
Callaway N203
David Morgen
Contact: david.morgen@emory.edu
Office location: Callaway N201
Office hours: T/TH 9:00-10:00
Writing, traditionally conceived as stringing words on paper, is only one mode employed in effective communication. The writing you do in this class will include not only words on paper but also oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal communication. We will read and discuss a number of nonfiction comics – including graphic memoir, journalistic comics, and others forms of nonfiction comics. We’ll also look at the ways in which comics and other visual techniques can be used to visualize and analyze data. And you will write with both words and images as a method of further developing your critical thinking and communication skills. Students will write to explore concepts like genre, rhetoric, academic discourse, and critical thinking, while further developing and honing their own methods and styles of writing.
There are weekly “low-stakes” sketch assignments to encourage your exploration of different methods and techniques, along with some larger analytical writing assignments. These course assignments include a variety of formal and informal genres, all of them incorporating multiple modes of communication (Written, Aural, Nonverbal, Digital). You will write and design a nonfiction narrative comic as well as create your own data visualizations and other sorts of visual analyses over the course of the semester. No particular preexisting drawing talent or expertise is required for successful completion of this course.
If you want to think more clearly about an idea, draw it. If you want to be a more effective leader, think about how you might draw your vision so that other people see it as clearly as you do. If you want to innovate, think about how drawing might help you look at usual things in unusual ways.... The conversation today is visual. Draw like the world depends on it.
-- Dan Roam, Draw to Win
