At 4Cs a couple of years ago, Warren and I attended a session which showcased the work of FYC students who were asked to take a completed academic argumentative essay and translate it into a “cartoon” strip. The work required a represenation of the argument, showing the relationship of the ideas to the argument and making use of visual metaphors.
I’ve asked students to attach an illustration to their research paper, awarding them an extra point if the illustration was a visual metaphor rather than just a literal illustration of something mentioned in their research.
The English 101 class I taught during the Fall incorporated a tremendous amount of visual rhetoric. In fact, I made constant use of resources on the web (particularly flickr and YouTube) to reinforce the discussion and frame writing prompts for the readings. One example can be found here. I found the videos that Susan Douglass discusses in her “Narcissim as Liberation” essay on YouTube and embedded them into the class blog for discussion. It made for a really focused and provocative means of framing some of the cultural history she was talking about in her essay. Moreover, (if you look around the blog and wiki a bit) you’ll see that many of the students integrated a discussion of images and videos into their final research papers, making visual rhetoric a key component of the writing process. I’ll try and hand pick some examples and post more comments. Great topic to get me reminiscing.
It is interesting to note that only one of the four videos I linked to in that post is still available on YouTube, the sole survivor is the famous Enjoli commercial -the other three were as follows: a Virginia Slims cigarette commercial (from the 60s), a Cybil Sheppard make-up commercial from the 70s, and a Buns of Steel exercise video scene. Increasingly, some of these resources are becoming harder and harder to access online.