WRITING PROJECT 1: Documentary Photography

Option 1

Your first major writing project of the semester will be to conduct a rhetorical analysis of a documentary photograph. As such, your initial step in the process of composition will be to select the image with which you will be working. To find an appropriate photograph, please visit the Compose, Design, Advocate website at www.ablongman.com/wysocki and click on the link for chapter 11. Here you will find sub-links to several sites that store and display digital versions of documentary photographs; peruse these sites until you find one that captures your attention. (If you find an interesting photography somewhere else online that you would like to use, email me the image as an attachment and a link to where you found it.) Once you locate an image you believe to be compelling, save it to your computer or flash drive and type or jot down any information the site offers about it: the name of the photographer, the subject matter, as well as the place and time the picture was taken.

Once you select a photograph and record any salient information about the text, you will perform a cursory analysis. Begin by making some initial inferences about the subject matter. If there are people in the photograph, what relationships might exist between them? What sort of lives do they live? etc. After developing your initial inferences, make some notes on the technical aspects of the photograph. How are the subjects arranged? Or, stated another way, what are the “vectors of attention” and how do they foster, or gesture towards the rhetorical appeal of logos, ethos, and pathos? Likewise, how does the photograph employ the techniques of framing, cropping, focus, lighting, and coloration (i.e. hue, saturation, and brightness) to produce a particular rhetorical appeal? Remember, the manner in which the photographer composed the text is based upon specific decisions intended to direct and shape the audience’s attention in a particular way. These techniques and their subsequent rhetorical effects are what we want to focus on.

After your preliminary analysis, do some research on the historical and cultural context from which the photograph derives. Your research will have a two-fold purpose: 1) it may provide you with new ways of envisioning and interpreting particular aesthetic and technical considerations of the photograph, and 2) it will provide you with material in which you may situate your introduction, conclusion, or possibly both. After you’ve completed your research, return to the photograph and re-examine it. How have your insights altered your perceptions?

Once you have completed these steps, annotating and recording them as you proceed, you will begin crafting these observations into a statement purpose. As Compose Design Advocate mentions, a statement of purpose offers a “clearer and more concrete…sense of purpose, and it explains your purpose by referring to audience and context…[it] should be detailed and specific enough to guide you through the steps of choosing a medium or mix of media, deciding strategies, and then arranging, producing, and testing what you compose” (40). For more information on composing a statement of purpose, reread pages 40-41 and 76-77 in CDA. Furthermore, you might want to reread and think through the statement of purpose model I provided you earlier this semester. Roughly speaking, these documents should be 500-600 words in length.

At this juncture, you should have completed several pre-writing exercises, as well as a statement of purpose. If there appears to be any conceptual incongruencies or problematic ideas, you will want to go back and think through what you have written so as to determine how you could think through these issues in a different manner. It may also be beneficial to visit me during office hours to discuss new strategies and approaches to the material.

With these preliminary steps addressed, you will want to compose a more structured argument. Therefore, your first task will be to ask yourself: what type of overall rhetorical structure best serves my analysis? To determine this, you will want to 1) revisit chapter 7 and look over the types of global patterns used to construct an argument (i.e. syllogism, narrative, problem-solution, etc.), and then 2) ask yourself what type of global patterns can be found in the photograph? Perhaps the most logical manner in which to develop your essay is to synthesize the structure of your writing with the structure of the photograph. For example, on page 349 in CDA there is a photograph of a man standing between two women. He is the focal point of the image, but his engagement with each woman is rather different. Perhaps an effective rhetorical strategy for the overall structure of an analysis of this photograph would be a compare-contrast model, using the two women as oppositional objects.

After you have chosen an appropriate global pattern begin drafting your essay. While you are writing, keep in mind the following rhetorical strategies and techniques from chapter 7:

Have you situated your essay in an informative and compelling manner with a well-crafted introduction? Does your introduction work to forward the audiences’ sense of ethos with regard to you as the writer? How could the historical, cultural, and aesthetic contexts you researched earlier aid in its development?

Have you constructed smaller arguments (both logical and relevant) inside your global argument? What type of reasoning functions best within the context of your essay, inductive or deductive? Furthermore, do the transitions between ideas serve to guide your audience so as to produce fluid and understandable argumentation? What types of transitions would be most helpful in this regard?

As CDA mentions, even attempts to avoid outward gestures toward pathos are a way of managing emotions; have you managed or directed the emotional arguments within your essay well? To wit, conclusions often foster a special relationship with pathos because, at this point, your essay generates a “complex emotional state that works with the more complex thinking” (211) you have developed. Does your conclusion allow your audience to emote in a constructive and acceptable manner? Or does it lack an appropriate appeal to pathos? Does it devolve into bathos (i.e. over emoting or sentimentalizing)?

Hopefully, at this juncture, you have a working draft which you can begin revising. Read over what you have written, preferably out loud. Does it make sense, or are the ideas scattered and confusing? Does it flow smoothly, or do certain portions trip you up? Go back through the essay and rewrite sections that do not meet both cases.

With these steps completed, you should be prepared to participate in peer-reviews. But be forewarned, regardless of how much time you have put into your essay up to this point, you should all be prepared to engage in a global revision process that requires you to make large-scale adjustments and deletions. The week before peer-reviews, I will post a series of questions that each one of you will use when conducting reviews. Not only will these provide you with guidance when examining your fellow students’ essay, but they should also offer you insight into the specific elements of composition, design, and content that I will use when assessing your writing.

Finally, when you post the version of your essay you intend to have graded, you will incorporate a 500 word author’s statement that 1) reflects on your writing process that focuses on the challenges and difficulties you encountered and how you managed to surmount them, and 2) provides a highly specific description of the global revisions you implemented when rewriting for your essay’s final draft, supporting the explanation with salient examples.

The essays specific parameters are as follows: 1200-1500 words (this does not include the statement of purpose or the author’s note), 5 multimedia elements, and 7-10 relevant hyperlinks. Essays should exhibit a clear and comprehensible aesthetic, offering your readers an accessible and professional presentation. DUE: October 18th @ 12:00PM. No late assignments will be accepted.

Attribution of Points (20 total):

Statement of Purpose: 2 points
Peer-reviews: 4 points
Author’s Note: 2 points
Final Draft: 12 points

Option 2

You may also choose to create a photographic essay consisting of 10-12 edited photographs that you captured yourself. The basic outline for the project be found on page 379 in CDA, but I will also require you to write a 1000 word artist’s statement that addresses the specific aesthetic decisions you made with regard to shooting the images and editing them, as well as how they manifest themselves rhetorically. Furthermore, you will need to provide a series of salient and informative captions for the photographs you incorporate into the essay. If this option sounds appealing to you, the two of us will need to meet during my office hours to discuss more specific parameters of the assignment and how best to carry them out. This meeting is not optional. If you decide to work on WP1, Option 2 and do not meet with me, you will not receive credit for this project. DUE: October 18th @ 12:00PM. No late assignments will be accepted.