Teaching Writing in the Age of Digital Content

Hi everyone, 

I have talked a lot on this blog about my goals regarding preparing my students for their futures in my FYC classroom. With social media and digital content being a pivotal vehicle for relaying information, I believe it is important to teach my students the idea of writing being a form of content and how students might create this content in various forms throughout their future.

Theory

In her article, "When Writing Becomes Content," Lisa Dush highlights how writing serves as a form of content, all while describing content as being conditional, computable, networked, and commodified. When taking into account modern globalization and the way writing will be taken apart and put back together in order to best serve audiences, Bush calls attention to the way students could one day lack control over their writing once it is shared with their audiences. Take this blog post for example. If I were to share this blog post on social media, audiences would likely only be able to see the blog post's title, the first view sentences, and the cartoon shown above in the social media post, potentially altering their perception of this blog’s purpose. While I do expect many of my students will become content writers or create blogs of their own one day, the way in which one's work can be taken apart is important for students to learn, especially if students want to ensure that no meaning is lost. 

This prevalence in globalization and writing being a form of digital content means it is more important than ever to teach students the rhetorical situation and how to revise their work for various audiences and contexts. In her article, "Trailblazing in the Frontier Zone: Advice for Multimodal Frontiers," Dr. Kim Haimes-Korn discusses various ways to prepare students for our new digitized workplace. While teaching students the rhetorical situation in FYC, Dr. Haimes-Korn states that simply teaching students about audience, context, and genre are not enough and that instructors "now have to think more broadly about these concepts and include digital audiences and genres as one of these rhetorical choices," (171). I really like Dr. Haimes-Korn's ideas on how instructors can expand their lessons surrounding the rhetorical situation to fit digital media, such as allowing students to academic blogs so students can practice presenting their work in front of a global audience. 

Practice

I have witnessed a trend of professors having students create memes summarizing and informing the public material that these students learned during the semester. I think this could be an interesting assignment to teach students how the relationship between the rhetoric and the audience is a bit different in the digital landscape. Dr. Haimes-Korn describes this difference as digital rhetoric involving more participation from audiences, stating that audiences are giving multiple opportunities to engage and participate in discussion, such as "clicking on links for additional sources, “liking” an article or image, commenting on a blog post or social media site and entering the narrative through role playing," (171). In addition to simply creating and uploading memes and videos onto digitized spaces, I have also seen assignments where students were graded on how many followers and engagement they could receive during a single semester. While I will not personally be having students compete for who can have the most followers by the end of the semester (I will leave that to the communications and marketing professors), I do think giving students opportunities to create content that will face digitized audiences is important for students to learn how to edit their work and navigate rhetor-audience relationships. 

In the ENGL 1102 class I am shadowing, students are expected to present their findings for their research project via a poster presentation and a website. Students are expected to think of audience while creating both their poster presentation and their website, thinking of the best way to relay information through images and text so audiences are best able to understand their research, as well as navigation and accessibility. I think this is a great project to teach students how to present their writing in a digitized space, as they will be editing their work for various audiences and contexts, as well as learning first-hand how to navigate various relationships with audiences.

Works Cited

Dush, Lisa. “When Writing Becomes Content.” College Composition & Communication, vol. 67, no. 2, 1 Dec. 2015, pp. 173–196, https://doi.org/10.58680/ccc201527641.

Haimes-Korn, Kim. “Trailblazing the Frontier Zone: Advice for Multimodal Pioneers.” Beyond the Frontier: Innovations in First-year Composition, Volume 2, edited by Dahlman, Selden, & Winner. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018. pp. 168-182.

Shipka, Jody. Toward a Composition Made Whole, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kennesaw/detail.action?docID=2039340.

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