UPDATE: 11 March 2010

Now that you completed a preliminary analysis of your primary text, do some research on the historical and cultural context from which the comic 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, 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 comic and re-examine it. How have your insights altered your perceptions? You may also want to consider how the medium allows to creator of the comic to write about or express certain views that other mediums might not effectively handle, or presents them in a certain manner that allows for a different understanding of the material. Furthermore, read Compose Design Advocate and the McCloud essay closely; they will provide you with both terminology and concepts that will be essential to your thorough understanding of how comics function within a rhetorical framework. Posts should be 500 words, contain 1 multi-medie element that is not your full comic, and 2 relevant hyperlinks. DUE: Monday, March 22nd @ 12:00PM.

UPDATE: 09 March 2010

For homework, please read CDA chapter 15 (pages 509-532) for our next class session. Additionally, you will also need to read the sections from chapter 9 that cover typography (pages 279-284 and 295-300). the selection from Scott McCloud's book The Vocabulary of Comics found on Blackboard and be prepared to dicuss the material in class on Thursday. Specifically, think about how the concepts and techniques McCloud employs within his comic-essay intersect with the rhetorical terms and concepts we have discussed in Compose Design Advocate. In what manner are they similar? How are they different? (You may also find it helpful to review CDA pages 301-311. These pages, as you may remember, discuss the confluence of text and image, as well as other means of visual representation.)

Furthermore, in preparation for WP2, I would like each of you to select a comic for analysis. While you may work with multi-paneled comic strips, be mindful that your audience must be able to view the entire strip. Therefore, make sure that whatever you select will fit into your blog post (i.e. don't select an entire comic book, etc). Also, option 2 for WP2 will be to create a comic strip of your own. Here is an example of a previous students' work.

Finally, for your next blog post, perform a cursory analysis and record any salient information about the comic you choose earlier. Begin by providing a very brief narrative of the content; afterward, think through some of the concepts found in chapter 15 of CDA. What follows is a list of possible questions to ask yourself, but do not feel that you need to limit your response to one or several of these prompts: How are the interactions between characters visually and textually developed? What conventions does the comic employ and how are they visually represented? If your comic is multi-paneled, how is the relationship between panels established? What effect does typography have on our overall understanding of the piece? The post should be 500 words, include the comic you selected, and 2 relevant hyperlinks. DUE: Thursday,March 11th @ 11:00AM.

WP2: Analyzuing Comics

Option 1

For your second major writing project of the semester, you will be asked to rhetorically analyze a comic or comic strip. While many of the parameters for this assignment will be similar to those of your first assignment, there will also be some important differences (particularly with the manner in which you will think through, analyze, and articulate the content of both the primary source, as well as your own writing). Your initial step will be to select a comic with which you will work; you may select a text from any of the following sites:

A Softer World
Achewood
American Elf
Beaver and Steve
Cat & Girl
Dinosaur Comics
Goats
Natalie Dee
Overcompensating

Pictures for Sad Children
Teaching Baby Paranoia
White Ninja


Of course, there are many more sites out there on the World Wild Web, but if you are having a difficult time finding a text with which you would like to work, these links should provide you with enough material to select something compelling. To save an image, drag your computer's cursor over it, right click and select "Save Image as..." At this point, you should also perform any necessary cropping functions, then transfer the image to your photobucket account.

Once you select, document, save, edit, and upload your comic, you will begin the process of writing in earnest. For starters, perform a cursory analysis and record any salient information about the comic you chose earlier. Begin by providing a very brief narrative of the content; afterward, think through some of the concepts found in chapter 15 of CDA. What follows is a list of possible questions to ask yourself, but do not feel that you need to limit your response to one or several of these prompts: How are the interactions between characters visually and textually developed? What conventions does the comic employ and how are they visually represented? If your comic is multi-paneled, how is the relationship between panels established? What effect does typography have on our overall understanding of the piece? These question are by no means exhaustive, so please do not feel limited by them.

After your preliminary analysis, do some research on the historical and cultural context from which the comic 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, 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 comic and re-examine it. How have your insights altered your perceptions? You may also want to consider how the medium allows to creator of the comic to write about or express certain views that other mediums might not effectively handle, or presents them in a certain manner that allows for a different understanding of the material. Furthermore, read Compose Design Advocate and the McCloud essay closely; they will provide you with both terminology and concepts that will be essential to your thorough understanding of how comics function within a rhetorical framework.

Once you have completed these steps, annotating and recording them as you proceed, you will begin crafting these observations into a statement purpose. As CDA 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. When writing your statement of purpose, please keep in mind the feedback I sent you earlier in the semester. Now that you have all written in this genre at least once, I will grade these documents much more rigorously than last time around. If any of the feedback I offered you last project cycle does not seem clear, do not hesitate to ask for clarification.

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 comic? 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.

After you have chosen an appropriate global pattern begin drafting your essay. While you are writing, keep in mind the feedback I provided for you on your previous writing project. Specifically, remember that the purpose of a rhetorical analysis is not an explanation of your thoughts, opinions, and arguments, but to demonstrate how a particular text constructs its argument through the implementation of rhetorical techniques and concepts. Therefore, your analysis needs to focus on how the comic specifically accomplishes this. To do so, you need to extract, describe, and relate particular elements from the text and articulate them through the idiom of rhetorical terminology and develop a direct association between those elements/terminology and the overall argument of the text. Furthermore, while drafting, ask yourself the following questions:

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? Does the introduction directly connect to the rhetorical concepts you address in the body of your essay?

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. I will be grading much more strictly with regard to grammar and typos, so be certain that you have properly edited your final draft.

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. If your final draft too closely resembles your rough drafts, this will adversely affect your grade. 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. Like the statement of purpose before, now that each of you has at least one instance of writing an author's note, I will be much more rigorous in my assessment of this document. If you are not inserting specific examples of your revision process, your grade will be adversely affected.

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: Tuesday, April 4th @ 7:00PM. 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

As an alternative to the standard essay, you may also design and compose a comic. If this option seems interesting to you, please set up a time in which we can discuss the parameters of the assignment. This is not optional. If you proceed on option 2 without meeting with me, you will not receive credit for the assignment. DUE: Tuesday, April 4th @ 7:00PM. No late assignments will be accepted.