Assignment Author
CWRL Assignment DatabasePedagogical Goals of the Assignment
Throughout the semester, my class has considered how letters in anthologies are “packaged” and “framed.” I have challenged my students to go beyond thinking of letter writing as a private act or one that strictly involves pen and paper. Now that many letters are archived online and many more will be scanned and transcribed, technology provides an ideal way for looking at the many different ways to archive material.
I have consistently found that students produce lively and creative work when they design their own project assignments. After a semester of discussing writers and readers in relation to letter writing, I gave my students a final assignment that would not only examine the relationship between readers and writers but would also challenge them to look at communication in their own lives.

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.

Attribution
Visual Rhetoric WorkgroupPedagogical Goals of the Assignment
The goals of this assignment are 1) to introduce them to the difficult issue of causality and images, 2) to get them to think in abstract terms first, i.e., to argue an issue in general terms, before they apply those terms to more specific situations and test their validity, and 3) to help them decide for themselves how much evidence is “enough” for a given type of paper and what level of abstraction they need to employ in a given argumentative situation.

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
Visual Rhetoric WorkgroupPedagogical Goals of the Assignment
This project is designed to introduce students to Microsoft’s PowerPoint software and give them practice in using it by producing an organized presentation to be given in class.