English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

Amy and I have been working, and here are some points of our discussions:

Our tentative title is "Visual Rhetoric and Professional Texts: Designing Professional and Technical Texts at Purdue University."

We will be sending out an email to the PW listserv requesting samples of visually aesthetic documents (white papers, reports, memos, proposals, resumes, and cover letters). We will be attaching a permission slip to use student work to this email.

Nathaniel and I are interested in working with the Introductory Writing Committee to produce some promotional materials for the 106 program. The conferencing subcommittee of IWC, which I am a member of, feels that incoming instructions may not get enough information or persuasion about the merits of the 106 program. Therefore, we would like to create a short but snazzy document that informs and excites people about the program.

Wouldn't it be great to do a short film that discussed what goes into common trailers? There's a profound selfishness at work in this, of course, since my final project is interested in similar issues, but it could still be fun to explore genre trailers, script snippets of movies and spurious reviews, and experiment with camera angles to make a fun composition all the while embracing/mocking trialer conventions.

I continue to be really interested in bridging the gap that exists between professional communication, the academic discipline, and professional communication, the profession. To this end, I have been thinking about a couple different areas I would be interested in researching. At present, the one that I find most compelling is to create a book that acts as a companion to Purdue’s technical writing course textbooks and highlights key aspects of visual rhetoric for students in professional writing and technical writing courses. It could take the form of a coursepak to supplement the reading and examples in traditional textbooks for several sections of English 420 or 421. Perhaps, it could even reach larger-scale publication.

So Morgan, Karen, and I have a grand master plan of someday building a visual rhetoric exploratorium display in second life. due to cost and time, it's not really feasible for this project. So here's what we're probably doing:

We're gonna make a Second Life machinima movie that partly takes a tour of second life educational spots, and visually shows how education is being done in Second Life right now.

What about getting together and creating a myspace network of great rhetoricians? I know plenty of philosophers ahve myspace pages, we could work fairly independently, each taking on a rhetorician and then ensure they have the same spacial format so they are visually identifyable as a group.

So what if we make a movie to summarize what we learned inthis class for the Youtube public?

My idea for Gladwell: Show someone (with full facial expressions) enjoying the book and then ask them to explain thier experience and watch them critique it bitterly.

C'mon, it's a start. And we could do the Youtube most watched video and discuss our inability to have sovreignty over it.

I'd like to make a movie and I think that it would be good to combine this with something for Public Rhetorics. Any other Pub Rhet folks interested in making a movie? (Others are welcome. Just a thought that combining the two might be nice)