| 1 | 8/30 | Introduction to the class | |
| 2 | 9/4 | Everyone’s an Author “Rhetorical Situations” and “Reading Rhetorically” | |
| 9/6 | Scott McCloud Understanding Comics, chpt 1 | Create WordPress site | |
| 9/9 | Sunday sketch due –> | Sketch 1: Avatar |
Once again, welcome to the class! At the end of each week, I plan to publish a post like this one that pulls out the relevant piece from our class schedule to remind you of what’s on the immediate horizon. Usually, I’ll chat a bit further in that post about the sorts of things we’ll do with those readings in class.
When you come to class on Tuesday, you should have already read the two chapters from Everyone’s an Author linked above. Rhetorical situation is a key term for us in this class and you’ll be repeatedly putting the tools described in those two chapters to use over the entire semester, so please read them carefully. You might think about how the sort of reading and analyzing that Andrea Lunsford describes differs, if it does, from how you usually read and understand texts. We’ll continue to get situated for the work ahead of us as we discuss this reading on Tuesday.
On Thursday, we’ll discuss Scott McCloud’s very fine introduction to comics and begin to develop our vocabulary for carrying out the sorts of visual rhetorical analyses that we’ll be doing this semester. By the time you come to class on Thursday you should have not only read that chapter but have created a WordPress site that you will be using to publish all of your work for this class — you don’t need to have done anything elaborate with the site yet, but get it created and provide the URL for your site in a comment you leave on the welcome post on this site. (Your first comment might not be visible immediately because the first time you leave a comment it goes to moderation, but once I approve it, then it will publish.)
Your first Sunday Sketch assignment is due on Sunday, so by the end of Sunday night, you should have published a post on your new WordPress site with a square image that includes your name, which will be your avatar for the rest of the semester. You can hand draw that image or you can create something with a photo editor.
How will we be incorporating Maus and the other graphic novels into our posts?
There will be specific assignments, some low stakes, where I’ll ask you to analyze or react to the texts you read. You’ll also have a few larger projects that will include writing about specific texts.
Will learning through comics help our ability to write formal essays?
That’s a really good question, and one that we’ll certainly explore over the course of the semester. I don’t want to write a long essay in response, but suffice to say that I believe that there are lots of ways in which it will and I’m interested in hearing from you as we go how the sorts of writing and discussion we have in this class affects the way you think about writing more generally.