Syllabus

Eng101.12      Experiments in Visual Writing David Morgen MWF 9:00 to 9:50am Callaway N204

Welcome to the course site for ENG101.12: Experiments in Visual Writing.

When you think about taking a class described in the Emory course catalog as “expository writing,” listed as part of the first-year composition curriculum, you might expect to spend the semester reading some traditional books and then composing a series of analytical explanations of those books in Microsoft Word. However writing, traditionally conceived as stringing words on paper, is only one mode employed in effective communication. The writing you do in this class will include not only words on paper but also oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal communication. We’ll engage our multimodal critical thinking and reading skills through the analysis, discussion, and production of the ultimate in multimodal texts: comics.

In this course, we’ll read and discuss a number of nonfiction comics–all of the major texts for this course (Persepolis, Fun Home, and Vietnamerica) are memoirs where the authors use the techniques of the comic to analyze their complex relationships with memory, family, and place. We’ll also read some nonfiction webcomics and discuss other genres that combine word and image in interesting ways, including infographics and internet memes. As students in this class, you will write analytical essays in response to these texts, which will be published on your own websites, and you will also produce your own comics and other sorts of multimodal and multimedia works over the course of the semester. No particular preexisting drawing talent or expertise is required for successful completion of this course.

This course is part of Domain of One’s Own @ Emory, and as such you will author and administrate a personal website, close read multimodal texts for form and theme, and compose with a variety of digital tools. No prior experience with web design or digital authoring is required for successful completion of course work. Please note that a significant portion of your work for this course will be published to the web and available to reading publics beyond the class and university. Once you have completed the course, the site you build is yours to continue to develop into a personal cyberinfastructure that may include, but is not limited to, course projects, a professional portfolio, resume/CV, social media feeds, and blogs.

You can access a more complete description of the course through the menu above. Some important pages include:

• Learning Objetives
• Policies
• Grading