Use 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 to create and publish your own blog posts. These posts will be public, and you are expected to read and engage directly with the writing your classmates publish by commenting on their work. You will compose 4 blog posts this semester (during weeks 2, 5, 9, and 13), and each post should be approximately 500-600 words. During the weeks that blog posts are due, you should read and respond to at least 4 other posts. In other words, at least 4 substantive, constructive comments.
In your posts, briefly summarize and cite the purpose and argument of the assigned readings for that week and offer your own developed critique and questions by applying what you learned to a specific 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 you can use to help jumpstart conversation in your blog post's comments section.
You should also use and explore 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).
Deadlines
You will complete a blog post (and peer comments) during weeks 2, 5, 9, and 13. Check our course calendar for specific dates. During the weeks that blog posts are due, you can use the following benchmarks:
Your blog post is due on Wednesday.
Your comments should be completed by Friday.
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 Design Blog work will be evaluated, carefully read the Design Blog 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 where 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 (blog posts of 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 Design Blog 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 discussions).
I also expect graduate students to expend considerable effort to keep blog conversation moving. You should post a minimum of 6 peer comments during weeks when we're publishing blog posts, and your comments should highlight interesting insights, offer constructive criticism, and guide conversation.
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?