This week, I want you to think about using audio for particular rhetorical situations by creating a mix playlist with a group of songs.
Rules (all of which are breakable, if you have a good justification for why):
I usually think of a mix tape as about an hour of music, but for our purposes let’s aim for 45 minutes or so
Preferably no more than one song by a single artist
Create some kind of consistency and an audio progression as someone listens from beginning to end
Just as giving a speech, writing an essay, or publishing a photograph are rhetorical acts, choosing particular pieces of music in particular situations can also be a rhetorical act — and choosing to curate a specific list of songs that you put together in a particular order, with a particular emotional or intellectual affect in mind, is certainly a rhetorical act. In the case of the music mix you are producing for this assignment, the rhetor is you, the medium is your playlist, and the audience is probably your peers in the class (though you can decide to address some other, fairly specific, audience if you would like).
There is a lot of music in the world, and there are lots of ways to combine music together and lots of people doing so. If you are struggling to come up with ways to craft your mix, I encourage you to either respond to a very specific rhetorical situation (“a mix for my good friend who just went through a bad breakup,” for example, or “a mix to apologize to my friend for not locking up his bicycle when I borrowed it so it get stolen”); come up with a very specific narrative or emotional hook that you want from the songs you include in your list (“songs about the summer” or “songs to prepare for exams to” might work well as hooks that are topical right now); and/or to make up some specific rules for yourself to spur greater creativity (“My Halloween mix can only include songs with the word ‘pumpkin’ in the title” or “all the songs need to include the words ‘new’ or ‘old’” or “every song must be 2 minutes and 42 seconds long“). As Robert Frost once said, “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down,” so creating rules for yourself about choosing songs might help you to structure the game that you’re playing to make it more fun.
What do you have to turn in?
Create your playlist however makes sense for you — it can be a Spotify playlist that you share via a link; you can use Mixcloud (which will also import Spotify playlists) or Soundcloud; or you can record your vinyl onto MP3s and upload those files to Google Drive or send them to me to host on my server, then embed them on your site from there. Publish a post on your site with the link(s) to the playlist and a numbered track listing that names the songs and artists.
Your mix tape needs an image to serve as the album cover. If you were recording your mix onto cassette tapes, I’d ask you to use gel pens to draw a cover that you’d stick into the little plastic case, but you’re not, so instead create a square image that has the title of your playlist and that serves as a compelling visual representation of your mix. Do not just use the image that Spotify automatically creates from the album covers included in the mix — design your own album cover.
Finally, write a reflection to accompany your mix — explain the rhetorical situation you are addressing, what rules you established for yourself, and how you went about solving the problem your rhetorical situation presents. Articulate the choices you made and why you made them. Finally, think about your mix as an argument (even though it’s not a direct, academic argument) — what are you conveying in your mix and how?
Now that you’ve completed your Literacy Narrative Comic, publish a reflective blog post of about 500 words about the writing process, paying special attention to how the work you have done has helped you to meet the Learning Outcomes for this class. That post should link to the page with your literacy comic.
Some other questions you might respond to: How was it different to write your literacy narrative as a comic? How did you think differently once the visual component was added? How did that help you to see the story you were trying to tell in different terms? Was your analytical thinking process any different? How have your thoughts about your alphabetic literacy narrative changed in the process of transforming it into a comic?
I’d also like you to discuss choices you made in creating your comic and to explain why you chose the way you did. Especially if there’s something you were really trying to do in your comic which you felt you couldn’t realize as perfectly as you would if you had a lot more time, more resources, or if you could have hired an illustrator to turn your vision into exactly what you wanted. If there are aspects of your comic where you have a clear sense of what you were trying to accomplish and how you would have done so if some things were different, then explain that in your reflection. Doing so allows you to demonstrate that you have the knowledge you need about this sort of writing even if you have not yet developed all the skills necessary to make that knowledge visible in the final artifact you’ve produced
Export your halfa kucha slideshow as a set of images (in Powerpoint: File > Export… and then in File Format select jpeg and “save every slide.” Powerpoint will create a subfolder where you tell it to and save each of your ten slides as images). Then in your WordPress dashboard create a new post and upload those images to a Slideshow block.
If you used Google Slides, you can embed the slideshow by going to File > Publish to the web and then selecting settings. It will give you an embed code that you can paste into an HTML block in your post.
Then write a couple of paragraphs reflecting on the process of writing and then giving the presentation. How was it different to construct an argument that you were giving to the class as a presentation than to write an essay? How did you make choices about the structure of your argument? If you made a choice to organize your presentation in a certain way so that your audience would follow it more clearly, is that something that you could also make use of in your written work? Was your analytical thinking process any different?
What decisions did you make about the visuals for your presentation? How did you go about creating an impact for the slides that accompany your spoken words?
What did you learn by giving this type of presentation, where you had no control of the timing of the slides and couldn’t put much in the way of text on your slides, as compared to other presentations you have given? What did you notice about your classmates’ presentations that you might think about incorporating into your own presentations in the future?
What do you think you could have done better in your presentation?
Once you have completed your Tracing project and published the pages to your site, you need to publish a reflection post as well. The post serves to turn the project in when it syndicates to the class site, and is also an opportunity for you to explain your process in the work you just completed.
Your reflection post should link to the main page for your project and also to the assignment prompt. Tell us in the post what the thesis of your essay is and give a one or two sentence preview of your argument.
You should also address the following questions:
Before writing your essay, you went through a pretty involved process of tracing and annotating two pages from the books. Briefly explain what that process was like for you — probably this was very different from most other writing you’ve done, so try to explain what was useful about the process for you. What productive thoughts or analysis occurred through the act of tracing and annotating?
For this assignment, I asked you to be very conscious of writing an inductive essay with an ABT thesis at the end, which is probably a pretty foreign way to structure an essay for you. How did your writing process change to address this assignment?
This assignment is a close reading exercise focused on identifying aspects of the “secret language of comics,” the series of choices the authors make in crafting comics that probably pass by many readers with little or no conscious notice. Do you feel that this assignment helped you to get in on this secret language? Do you understand Stitches and Fun Home better after having written this project? What’s the single biggest insight you gained about the two books during the process of tracing, annotating, and analyzing these pages (maybe something you “knew” on some level before you started but that you really get now, or maybe something you hadn’t really noticed until you worked on the project)?
Now that you’ve completed your Literacy Narrative Comic, publish a reflective blog post of about 500 words about the writing process, paying special attention to how the work you have done has helped you to meet the Learning Outcomes for this class. That post should link to the page with your literacy comic.
Some other questions you might respond to: How was it different to write your literacy narrative as a comic? How did you think differently once the visual component was added? How did that help you to see the story you were trying to tell in different terms? Was your analytical thinking process any different? How have your thoughts about your alphabetic literacy narrative changed in the process of transforming it into a comic?
I’d also like you to discuss choices you made in creating your comic and to explain why you chose the way you did. Especially if there’s something you were really trying to do in your comic which you felt you couldn’t realize as perfectly as you would if you had a lot more time, more resources, or if you could have hired an illustrator to turn your vision into exactly what you wanted. If there are aspects of your comic where you have a clear sense of what you were trying to accomplish and how you would have done so if some things were different, then explain that in your reflection. Doing so allows you to demonstrate that you have the knowledge you need about this sort of writing even if you have not yet developed all the skills necessary to make that knowledge visible in the final artifact you’ve produced
Look back over the writing you’ve encountered and produced this semester, and then draft a cover letter for your portfolio that explains how you have met the learning outcomes for this course. This letter is an opportunity to think about your writing and clarify — for yourself and portfolio readers — how your skills and awareness of your writing processes have grown this semester. Think of each piece of writing included in your portfolio as an “exhibit” that you are analyzing and reflecting on in this letter.
What should your letter do?
Explicitly address the course outcomes and how you encountered them throughout the reading and writing for the course.
Guide your readers through the exhibits, discussing your writing while looking for larger patterns. What do you see about yourself as a writer when you step back and look at the work you’ve produced this semester?
Discuss at least one piece of writing in depth, considering the stages of the writing process as it developed. How did you think about audience, purpose, or genre while you wrote this piece?
Explain how you have applied (or will apply in the future) insights from this course in your other classes or other rhetorical situations. Use specific examples, if possible.
Employ evidence to support your claims. Just like in the other writing assignments you’ve completed this semester, you will need evidence to support of your argument; however, in this case, the evidence you will use is your own writing.
Remember that you need to incorporate quotes into your own writing with clear framing language.
Also remember that you always need your own interpretation and analysis of any quote you use in order for it work as evidence.
Forms of evidence from your writing exhibits could include, but are not limited to: quotes from your own finished writing (embedded in sentences or longer quotes in blocks); quotes from early drafts of your writing or notes; reported or quoted feedback from others; illustrations or quotations that show how a particular exhibit evolved; or screenshots or images from your work.
Publishing your cover letter
The reflection essay should become the new home (or index) page for your course site and should begin with a note indicating that the site is an archive of the work that you completed as part of ENG101 at Emory University during spring semester 2018. You should link to the course site, so that a reader who is going through your work can easily find out more information about the course you were in.
You should organize the work on your course site into a finished portfolio showing all the work you have done this semester. Make certain that your entire course subdomain looks complete, coherent, and like you’ve given some thought to its overall design and aesthetics.
Just like with any assignment you’ve completed this semester, your reflection letter should include at least one image (though you can certainly include more than one. You might consider using your Assemblies image as the primary or feature image for your letter — hopefully constructing that chart will help you to think about how the work you have completed this semester fits together, and hopefully it will help to communicate that understanding to your readers.
A pecha kucha is a particular style of oral and visual presentation where speakers present while showing 20 slides, each one timed to display for exactly 20 seconds. Hence, every pecha kucha presentation lasts for 6 minutes, 40 seconds.
Here’s a sample pecha kucha, which I chose almost at random from the pecha kucha site, called “Drawing to Document,” by Charis Loke:
For your third major project this semester, you’ll perform something akin to a pecha kucha, but in order to keep the scope of the assignment manageable and to have enough time for you to give your presentations to the class, we’re cutting the number of slides you’ll have in half — so you’ll have exactly 200 seconds, with 10 accompanying images, to present your argument.
The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.
Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.
The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.
The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called “doublethink,” and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call “dissociation.” It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms
And here’s another quote from the same book:
Recovery unfolds in three stages. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central focus of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life.
Assignment Fundamentals
Due: In class presentations on 4/5 and 4/7. (We’ll spend the first 45 minutes of each class on presentations. Please be sure to attend class on these days and be a good, attentive, respectful audience for your peers.)
Medium: This presentation will take the form of a “halfa kucha,” which means that you will create ten slides that will each stay on the screen for 20 seconds before automatically progressing to the next slide. Each slide should have a compelling visual image on it with no or very minimal text. Over the three minutes and twenty seconds of the slideshow you will explain your argument orally to the class. I will ask you afterwards to export the slideshow as a video or PDF to publish to your site along with a description of your argument.
Audience: The audience is your classmates, so they have read and thought about and discussed the books — you should not waste time summarizing the plot or giving basic background information that we’ve already discussed in class. But just like with other assignments this semester, assume that you are the smartest, most perceptive reader in the class and you have noticed things the rest of the class has not.
Tone: You can choose a tone ranging from casual to “academic casual” to very formal. Whatever fits your argument, personality, and presentation style the best. Remember, though, that you’re talking about trauma — so if you decide to be casual, still be respectful to the subject and to the sensibilities of your audience.
Title: You are required to have a really good, interesting title for your presentation.
Prompt
Thinking about the two quotes from Herman above and Hillary Chute’s “Introduction: Women, Comics, and the Risk of Representation” that we read earlier this semester, present to the class an argument about how two or three of the books we have read this semester investigate and represent trauma and healing.
Reflection Prompt
Once you have completed your presentation, I’ll ask you to either send me the slides or ask you to host them on your sites — the latter is preferable but might be too much of a pain with the WordPress.com sites you’ve got. Then you’ll write a reflection post and link to your presentation wherever it lives.
it provides a compelling preview of your narrative that summarizes your controlling idea in a sentence or two;
it reflects on what you have learned in the process of writing your literacy narrative;
when your post syndicates to the class site, that constitutes turning in your narrative.
Some questions to consider in your reflection:
What was your writing process for this narrative like? Did it feel strange for you to do the freewriting exercises first? How did the freewriting influence the essay you eventually wrote?
What did you learn about yourself by the end of writing your narrative? Was there anything that you found surprising, or something about yourself that you came to view differently in the process of writing this essay?
What sentence from your essay do you think someone else reading it would identify as the most interesting sentence?
This is a pre-writing exercise that is designed to help you prepare to complete your first quest, writing the literacy narrative. I’ve adapted this exercise from the Lynda Barry’s “x-page” warmup exercise in the book Syllabus. It should take you 45 minutes to an hour to complete this exercise.
I’m going to describe the steps in text below and I will also include an audio recording of me reading these instructions out loud and pausing for you to write in response. You might find it helpful to play the audio and simply write in a notebook or type on your laptop as you listen instead of having to come back and read text as we go — if nothing else, it might stop you from spending longer on the steps than you need to, so I suggest you try it. If the audio is not helpful for you, for any reason, then you can read the same instructions below.
Audio Prompt for this assignment
Ten Memories
Think back over the course of your life so far and make a list of ten memories that you associate with reading and/or writing. Just take about 3 minutes and make a numbered list of ten memories that come to mind.
Pick One
Then, read over your list and pick the one memory that seems the most vivid to you. Circle it. Then on a new page, write that memory at the top of the page as if it were the title of a story and draw a big X across the page. (If you’re typing on a laptop, the big X is optional)
Twenty Questions
Picture yourself in the memory that you are exploring and then write the answers to the following questions anywhere on the page. Pretend we are having a conversation, so you can see the image but I can’t so I’m going to be asking you these questions to help me “see” the image too. Keep writing until the next question is asked — no detail is too small or unimportant.
Where are you?
What time of day or night does it seem to be?
What season does it seem to be?
Where is the light coming from?
What kind of light is it?
What’s the temperature like?
What does the air smell like?
What are you doing?
Is there anyone else in that place with you?
What are they doing?
Why are you there?
What are some of the sounds you can hear?
What are some of the things you can see?
What’s directly in front of you?
If you turn your head to your right, what’s there?
If you turn your head to the left, what do you see?
What is behind you?
What’s below you and around your feet?
What’s above your head?
What emotions are you feeling in this space?
Once you have jotted answers to those 20 questions on your x-page turn to a new page and freewrite for 10 minutes about that memory. There are no wrong or right things to write about or ways to write about the memory. Just start by elaborating further about any of the details you jotted down on the x-page and then keep writing without stopping about whatever thoughts are coming to your head about that memory. Try not to censor yourself or worry about the quality of what you’re writing. At this stage, all you are doing is generating ideas — you will think about structure and wording later.
Now look back at your original list of ten memories. Are there any other memories that you’d really like to explore further? You don’t need to repeat the entire process described above for the memory (though you can, if it seems like it would be useful) but do jot down some thoughts about any of the other memories on your list that seem worth thinking more about right now.
Building from Memories, Asking Questions
Now that you’ve taken the time to write about one or more of those memories, pause to consider the following questions about your history with reading and writing. They may or may not directly connect with the freewriting you just completed. Jot down brief responses to these questions:
How did you feel about reading and writing as an adolescent — say, during middle and high school? What sorts of experiences did you have as a reader and writing in school?
What are your experiences with social networking sites like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, or others? What do you remember about your first experiences with such sites? Do you text on a smartphone? What sorts of experiences have you had writing to/for people with those sorts of technologies?
What are some of the biggest struggles you have had as a reader and/or writer?
