Assignment Author
CWRL Assignment DatabasePedagogical Goals of the Assignment
RATIONALE:
This assignment is a good one for the following reasons:
• It fosters collaboration.
• It provides students with an opportunity to learn about usability by both analyzing usability problems and by providing solutions in their re-design.
• It provides students with an opportunity to develop a skill that they could use in their profession (95% of all large scale web design is now web re-design).
• It asks students to consider the relationship between graphics and content on a web page.
• It challenges student’s critical thinking skills.
• It provides a clear reason for learning HTML code instead of relying on Dreamweaver.

Assignment Author
CWRL Assignment DatabasePedagogical Goals of the Assignment
Skill
Students will be introduced to principles of ecocomposition vis-à-vis an exercise in evaluating visual rhetoric and web site design. Most rhetoric textbooks cover both of the latter two skills. (I use Faigley and Selzer’s text Good Reasons, which devotes a chapter each to Visual Design (Chapter 12) and Web Site Design (Chapter 13).)
Rationale
The assignment aims to i) encourage students to think about the differences between digital spaces and physical (so-called real) spaces or the advantages and disadvantages associated with each; ii) give students the opportunity to think about digital environments in the larger context of a local, physical environment that these digital spaces represent or stand in for or are supported by, iii) encourage students to learn more about and make use of a campus site or institution or organization that they wouldn’t otherwise know about or visit.

Assignment Author
Emily BloomPedagogical Goals of the Assignment
Moving from rhetorical analysis to argumentation, this assignment aims to shift class discussion so that students can begin looking critically at rhetorical techniques and make good choices for their argument paper. They will analyze, critique, reconstruct and rebut a bad argument from the movie "Clueless."

Assignment Author
Stephanie Odom-RobertsonPedagogical Goals of the Assignment
For students to apply the rhetorical analysis skills they have been applying to verbal texts to visual ones.

Attribution
Posted to the Feminist Pedagogy website by Amanda MoulderPedagogical Goals of the Assignment
The close reading assignments you will write in this class allow you to practice the skills of analysis that you will need to prepare for your final project and for other English classes; and they help you prepare for class discussion by allowing you to think in critical terms about the reading you are doing.

Attribution
Visual Rhetoric WorkgroupPedagogical Goals of the Assignment
The goal of this assignment is to give students the opportunity to think critically and carefully about the presentation of arguments in samples of visual rhetoric. The end result will be an essay in which the student performs a “close-reading” of the image just as one might read or write about a written text. The purpose of this paper is to convince your audience of your assessment of what argument is being made in this piece, and how it succeeds or fails.

Attribution
Visual Rhetoric WorkgroupPedagogical Goals of the Assignment
The goals of this assignment are 1) to teach students how to argue both sides of an issue (an exercise known in classical Greek rhetoric as antilogia), 2) to teach them to infer contextual information from a given text/image/film without help from outside sources, 3) to teach them how to recognize rhetorical strategy and first amplify it, then steer against it.

Attribution
Visual Rhetoric WorkgroupPedagogical Goals of the Assignment
This assignment has several goals: a) to give the students the opportunity to realize that successful arguments about rhetorical effect can be quite complex and require much research, b) to give them a chance to revise and incorporate some of their own writing into longer pieces of text with different goals, c) to help them realize that no description or comparison is “neutral;” all descriptions/comparisons have a particular rhetorical goal and audience, and their language and selection of elements is important.

Attribution
Andrew JonesPedagogical Goals of the Assignment
This assignment is used to introduce students to the concept of context, as well as provide practice performing contextual analysis.

Pedagogical Goals of the Assignment
Help students begin to distinguish ethos, pathos and logos, as well as how evidence, is used in making an argument.