Part of Your Process & Participation Grade
Purpose & Audience
Participate in “Design Conversations” by using our course WordPress Design Blog to compose critical and creative responses to course concepts and texts. You will have author access to our course blog, which will allow you to create and publish your own blog posts. You will compose 3 blog posts this semester (during weeks 2, 5, and 9), and each post should be approximately 500–600 words. These posts will be public, and you are expected to read and think critically about the ideas your classmates share in their blog posts. Commenting is not required, but we will use ideas and examples shared on our blogs to jumpstart and focus our classroom discussions and activities.
In your posts, briefly summarize and cite the purpose and argument of the assigned readings for that week (and perhaps the previous week, if you find them helpful and relevant) and offer your own developed critique and questions by applying what you learned to a specific, interesting document—an example document that you find on your own. In other words, think about what the readings are teaching you, and apply those thoughts to a document we can all examine and think about (something you find through internet research, something you created in a previous class or at work, something you found while wandering around town, etc.). Additionally, end each blog post by offering a question or two that we can use to help jumpstart our class discussions.
You should also experiment and play with the multimodal composing features of the blogging tool: design your blog posts with color, type, image, video, etc. Finally, we should all be able to see the sample document you discuss in your post, so be sure to include an image (quick snapshots from your smartphone are fine).
Check the course calendar for specific blog deadlines.
Grading Criteria
Effective and creative blog posts will help us unpack specific readings, engage larger design issues, analyze well-chosen examples, understand why good design matters, and initiate conversation through meaningful questions. For a more detailed explanation of how your Blog Writing work will be evaluated, carefully read the Blog Writing Scoring Guide.
Graduate Student Requirements
In addition to regular weekly readings, graduate students must complete additional readings during the weeks indicated on our course calendar. During the weeks when graduate student readings are indicated, I will provide at least two reading options. You only have to read one of them; select the reading that is most appealing to you. Graduate student Design Blog posts should fully incorporate this additional reading, and blog posts should be approximately 700–800 words. The Design Blog—combined with the additional readings—will help you develop a more nuanced understanding of document design scholarship in rhetoric, composition, and technical communication.
I will use the same grading scale (see the Blog Writing Scoring Guide) to evaluate graduate student work, but with the understanding that graduate-level work is held to a higher standard: precise attention to and engagement with the argument of texts (claims, reasons, evidence), and, perhaps most importantly, attention to how the texts work together in conversations. In other words, A-level work will tell us more about what texts mean in relation to each other rather than as isolated, discrete discussions.
Finally, as you work through your blog posts this semester, I want to see attention to how course topics articulate with scholarly research questions in rhetoric, composition, and technical communication: What issues and concerns have developed in recent years? What kinds of questions should rhetoricians, compositionists, and/or technical communicators be asking about the current state / future of our engagement with and understanding of effective document design theories and practices?
