Thinking about Style, Genre, and Audience in Public Writing with your White Paper (30-45 min)
Questions:
- On the sentence level: how does it communicate a problem? Pick a few examples. How does it communicate a solution? Ditto. How does it project expertise? Is it convincing? Credible? …want to focus on sentences here.
- Who is the audience for this? Who are the decision-makers? What kind of “public” here?
- What might be some revisions to make going forward?
- What makes this a white paper compared to ULI and USDA? Where are there similarities and where are there differences? Why might there be differences? What action is it performing in the linguistic moves on the page?
Campaign Planning Logistics (25-40 min)
-Updates on interview: Who are you thinking about interviewing? Scheduling? Who is doing what labor? Tech picked out?
-Collaborative writing approach and the campaign plan due 10/4
-First campaign piece ideas for 10/17?
Unit 1 Reflections (10-15 min)
Unit 1 reflections. We talked about some foundations of rhetoric, publics, and particular attention to style and genre. One question that grabbed me was the one I emailed you with: A lot of you mentioned having a specific audience in mind in your Unit 1 reflections. Is this always true? What about that NASA webpage about climate change. Was there a specific audience there? What was it do you think? What happens when public writing is for, well, anybody? Or, is that not true. Or, is it the case that only poor public writers write for anybody? Perhaps anybody always comes with a secondary audience of some kind?? https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
Break (15 min)
Kicking off Unit 2: Visual Rhetoric (30-45 min)
How do we make meaning out of images? Let’s look at the “same” image in two different contexts. This first one is the very first image of Captain America for the cover of the first issue of the comic. What meaning does this image convey?
http://www.mutantfrog.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/10/captainamerica1.jpg
How about this next one?
Here is an article that talks about the recent reactions to the plot twist in the Captain America saga:
How do you make an image mean something? How can the very “same” image mean different things at different moments in different combinations/assemblages with other images?
What does image of Captain America argue? In both images? How do they relate to one another? What effects could they have? Think of possible ones.
How can you call upon meanings in your audience by way of images? How can you also avoid unwanted associations like what is currently going on with Captain America?
Activity: Look at your white paper draft. Ok, throw it all away. Let’s draw it. No words. Scratch that, you get as many as four words if you absolutely need them, but try not to use any. How can you convey as much as the “same” message as you possibly can of your first campaign piece? Get out some paper, and pretend you can add color (forgot by colored pencils tonight!!)
Let’s share. Explain. Any images doing “double” work at all?
Possible to fit this image back into your white paper? What do you think?
Let’s check out some visual rhetoric in some documents we already looked at. How do they make meaning here? How do they contribute to the overall rhetoric of the entire piece?
http://www.eldercare.gov/Public/Resources/Brochures/docs/N4a-transportation-brochure-access.pdf
Return to your image. How might you go about using it or an adaptation of it? Why?
Admin (5-15 min)
Blog due 10/2, comments due 10/4. Collaborative campaign plan is due *end of class* on 10/4. Campaign piece 10/17. Also, get those interviews going.