Course Syllabus

Digital Composing

Required Texts

• Nick Bantock’s Griffin & Sabine
  
  
• Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin’s Remediation: Understanding New Media
  
  
• Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
  
  
• Edward R. Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint
  
• Additional works (available online or on reserve)
  
  

Course Overview

This course examines the ways that digital technology is having an impact on writing. We will be exploring the new spaces that technology opens up for us as composers, experimenting with written forms, incorporating a wide range of media in our compositions, and participating in the global conversations taking place online.

When I talk about digital composing, I mean “composing” in the traditional sense usually employed in the label for that dreaded first-year college class: “freshman composition.” That is, composition is the act of writing. However, composition also describes a wide variety of activities that may or may not have much apparent relevance to writing. Composition, for instance, is the process of putting musical notation on paper. It is also the act of arranging objects to achieve certain aesthetic effects, as in the composition of a painting, a flower arrangement, or a photograph.

When I talk about digital composing, I mean composing in all of these senses. In this course, we will be experimenting with combinations of each of these meanings of “composition,” studying the rhetorical strengths and weaknesses of each, producing compositions that could not easily or cheaply be created solely with paper and pen. This is the state of composition today. Blogs, IM, SMS, web pages, ubiquitous computing, MMORPGs… all of these have already changed what we mean by “writing.”

Digital Composing is designed to challenge you to push beyond what we understand composition and writing to be today. Doing this will require you to experiment, to use digital technology in ways and for purposes that may be new to you. It will also require you to engage your creativity, to begin to think and to act as composers outside of the boxes constructed by software companies and common practice. There is no one “right answer” in this course, no single best way to succeed at a particular project – if you can imagine it, and if you think it will work, do it.

The present of composition is already passé. Welcome to the future.

Assignments

There will be four major projects in this course:

• Power Blogging
  
• A Visual/Verbal Composition
  
• A Subversive PowerPoint Presentation
  
• A Narrative Web
  

Each of these projects will be yours to customize and individualize to maximize your own strengths and interests as a digital composer. Each will contribute 20% toward your final grade in this course. More detailed descriptions of each follow. Each project begins with a proposal in which you will set forth your plans and goals for the project. The four proposals will, together, count for 10% of your final grade. If you complete all four satisfactorily, you will receive full points for your proposals. The final 10% of your grade will come from attendance and class participation. A lengthy explanation of which follows.

Power Blogging

Blogs – the harsh abbreviation for “web logs” – are everywhere, and everyone, it seems, either has one or reads them. If you don’t have one yet, and if you don’t read them yet, that’s about to change. In many writing classes, the hard work and effort that students put into their writing goes unnoticed and unappreciated by all but the professor, and possibly the few people in the students’ particular class. In this course you will be writing weekly (at least) posts for your blog – mini-compositions that may be read/heard/seen by anyone with an Internet connection. You’ll be writing for an audience, and without a net. No one said being a new media superstar would be easy…

The blogosphere (a.k.a. blogtopia, blogistan, and blogrovia) is a vast (estimates peg the number of active blogs at over 8 million in this country alone) network of inter-linked web sites, each of which presents information, opinion, and references to other sites. Blogs originated as simple lists of interesting web page URLs. Today, there are full-text blogs, audio blogs (known as “podcasts”), video blogs (known as “vlogs” or “vogs”), and every possible combination of these three types.

You will be required to publish a new post to your blog and comment on at least 2 posts by your classmates at least once each week, starting on September 1st. (You will be posting at least once on the long Labor Day weekend, and then at least once each Monday-Sunday week.) Your mission in this assignment is to create a blog that is popular and/or respected. Popularity and respect are the coin of the realm in the blogosphere, and you’re going to study the ‘sphere to divine how that coin can be gained. You’ll use these insights to make your blog a force to be reckoned with.

I suggest that you use Blogger as your blogging software, but you may use any of the extant blog packages. UVM also offers free Movable Type blogging software and hosting, though it takes some time to get your MT blog created. In the first two class meetings we will discuss these options, and you and I will assist your group in setting up your group blog.

This project consists of four elements: a blogging proposal, in which you explain your plans to achieve world-wide blog dominance; your weekly blogging and commenting requirement (5% of your final grade); a mid-semester evaluation of your blog progress (5% of your final grade); and an end-of-the-semester analysis and reflection on your efforts (10% of your final grade).

Visualizing the Verbal, and Vice Versa

Good public speakers know that words have sounds, and that the sounds of the words they choose have an important influence on their listeners. Good graphic designers know that words also have looks, and those looks can similarly influence readers. This project asks you to think about the visual aspects of written language and to design a piece of writing that will communicate both through your word choice and usage and through the appearance of those words.

By this point in your academic career, you already know which fonts take up the most space (and thus require you to write the least to satisfy page-length requirements), and which fonts look the “coolest” to you. This project requires you to move beyond mere font choices to think about the effect that style, size, position, arrangement, and even the color of words can have on readers. You will be composing a piece of visual writing that will achieve a purpose you will set forth in your proposal for this project through its carefully chosen and constructed prose as well as its look.

You will get to choose the topic of your visual/verbal project, as well as its ultimate purpose. Once you have chosen your topic and goal, you will need to research that topic to gain knowledge and insight into what may be effective strategies to achieve your goals.

The Visual/Verbal project consists of four elements: a proposal, in which you explain your rhetorical goal and the research that will inform your project; a draft version of your visual/verbal project (5% of your final grade); an analysis of your project, examining what worked, what didn’t, what you would do to improve it, and why you think that would (5% of your final grade); and a revised form of your project (10% of your final grade).

Riding the Bullet(Point): Subverting PowerPoint

Microsoft’s PowerPoint has become the default presentation medium for business and for many disciplines in the academy as well. As such, it is incumbent upon us to expose the rich potential and serious drawbacks of this program. PowerPoint is a shockingly powerful application, which makes the staggeringly bad presentations that come from it all the more distressing. This project asks us to discover what may lie beyond the bullet-point list, to what other uses we can put PowerPoint.

Many readings this semester will point out the manifest failures and easy pitfalls of PowerPoint. Some will also suggest new, possibly subversive uses for the software. Might PowerPoint, for all its buttoned-down business primness, actually be an ideal mode for artistic self-expression? Could this program, an instrument of torture in some hands, become an artistic and emotional playground?

This project will ask you to reject the Default Template and use PowerPoint to compose a genuinely interesting and affecting presentation. You will have free reign to choose your presentation topic.

The Subversive PowerPoint project consists of four elements: a proposal, in which you explain your topic and a broad schematic of your presentation that explains your planned rhetorical and artistic moves; a draft version of your PowerPoint presentation (5% of your final grade); an analysis of your project, examining what worked, what didn’t, what you would do to improve it, and why you think that would (5% of your final grade); and a revised form of your project (10% of your final grade).

Spinning Narrative Webs

Stories start, go somewhere interesting (in the best case), and end. They are linear, in other words. Our entire narrative framework presumes that linearity, even when (as in flashbacks and multiple plot lines) we try to work against the long line of the story.

The Internet, however, works on a different model – instead of the line, we have a web of hyperlinked pages spreading out in all virtual directions. Readers/viewers/listeners are free to move across the nodes of Web pages as they want, in whatever order seems to make the most sense.

For this project, you will combine everything you have learned this semester about networked communication (the blogging project), multi-media rhetorics (the visual/verbal project), and the effective presentation of information and experiences (the PowerPoint project), to compose a narrative web. The narrative may be entirely your own invention, or taken from an already-existing narrative, but the material in the web must be composed by you. (In other words, it’s not enough to copy several web pages into your web. You need to do the bulk of the composing, and what doesn’t spring forth from your fertile mind must be identified by proper citation.)

This is the capstone project for Digital Composing, which means that we will discuss it throughout the semester. By the end of the semester, this project will make a great deal more sense.

The Subversive PowerPoint project consists of four elements: a proposal, in which you explain your topic and a broad schematic of your web that explains the rhetorical and artistic moves you plan to make; a draft version of your narrative web (5% of your final grade); an analysis of your project, examining what worked, what didn’t, what you would do to improve it, and why you think that would (5% of your final grade); and a revised form of your project (10% of your final grade).

Workshop Schedule

Every week we will explore the compositions of our classmates, reading and experiencing the work your fellow students have constructed for this course. We will discuss the works, focusing on the strengths we notice and providing constructive suggestions for improving the areas we feel are not realizing their full potential. In this way, we will all learn from each others’ efforts, both as composers and as critics. Each student will be required to sign up for one workshop day on the workshop signup schedule. Students whose work is scheduled to be workshopped are required to submit their work to me no later than 5pm on the Wednesday of the week in which we will be examining the work.

Class Participation

Attendance is mandatory. Since composition courses focus primarily not on a textbook but on the work of students themselves, whose writing and reading are central to class discussion, this course is designed to function as a seminar – which means that your participation in class discussion is necessary for the success of the course. Because of this, students who miss three or more classes risk failing the course. We have a lot of material to create and work with in a short amount of time. Be prepared for the heavy commitment that the time spent writing and reading for this course will require. As you can see from the Course Calendar, we will be quite busy. Come to class on time and prepared to take part in conversation about the materials under study. If you cannot come to class, it is your responsibility to communicate directly with me, to arrange to turn in written work on time, and to find out about subsequent assignments. You will be considered absent if you do not turn in a written assignment the day it is due. Students who miss more than two classes should consider withdrawing from the course and taking it again under better circumstances.

Students who feel that they are too shy to participate in class discussions must meet with me during my office hours to receive full credit for class participation. If you would feel more comfortable sharing your comments with me than with the entire class, I am willing to discuss your ideas with you and then bring your comments (anonymously reported) to the class’ attention for further exploration. This may be your first university seminar, so if you have any questions about class participation in a seminar course, or about my attendance policy, I encourage you to ask me.

Academic Integrity

According to University policies, plagiarism:

consists of offering as one's own work the words, ideas, or arguments of another. Appropriate attribution by quotation, reference, or footnote is required when using another's work. It is the responsibility of all University of Vermont students to understand the methods of proper attribution and to apply those principles in all written submissions. Plagiarism consists of, but is not limited to, copying portions of the writings of others with only minor changes in wording, with (a) inadequate footnotes, quotes, or other reference forms of citation or (b) only a list of references. Paraphrasing without appropriate citation is also plagiarism. (emphasis added)

Plagiarism will not be tolerated in this course. For further discussion of what constitutes a violation of academic integrity, please see the University Academic Honesty Policy at: [http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmppg/ppg/student/honesty.html].

AN IMPORTANT NOTE:

If you have (or suspect that you may have) a disability for which you are or may be requesting an accommodation, I encourage you to contact both myself and UVM’s Office of Accommodation, Consultation, Collaboration & Educational Support Services (ACCESS), A-170 Living & Learning Center, 656-7753 (http://www.uvm.edu/~access) as early as possible in the term. The ACCESS Office will verify your disability and determine reasonable accommodation for this course.