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Index to ENGL 4320: Writing for Social Media materials

Course last taught Spring 2020 by Christopher Andrews

Writing Studies @ Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi

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About 4320

ENGL 4320 is “Professional writing workshop” and varies by topic. This is a common starting place for new courses, where we can try them out before adding to the catalog. Largely geared towards:

• jr/sr Technical & Professional Writing minors (who come from communication, graphic design & journalism programs, and a variety of social and natural sciences) or Comm/Graphic Design majors who take them as upper-level electives.
• jr/sr English majors, mostly Writing Studies track, some Lit Studies track

About THIS Course

This course explores social media from the perspective of technical and professional writing: both how companies, organizations, and professionals adapt social media to their own ends and how user-generated content has changed the meaning and activities of technical and professional writers more generally.

We will study knowledge work, ethics of networked identities and organizations, and how social media complicate traditional models of audience, delivery, and the rhetorical situation. We’ll learn about content strategy and research how organizations adopt social media to their purposes and contexts. Most importantly, we will practice strategies for developing focused, accessible, rhetorical, and afterlife-conscious web content.

Course Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Apply rhetorical skills relevant to digital composing and social media, including:
  • Planning, composing, and revising accessible, rhetorical content
  • Repurposing content for different delivery media
  • Working with governance and content strategy
• Explain ethical, social, and technological issues relevant to professional and personal uses of social media
• Evaluate distinctive social media practices in professions, organizations, or communities relevant to their academic interests or career field

Course syllabus

The course syllabus sans university boilerplate and some policy stuff

Week-to-week docs

Spring 2020. We shut down halfway through and went online for the pandemic, so the second half of the semester was a weird transition with some really great outcomes.

Big shift relevant to this page: change to from slideshows (weeks 1-8) to docs (weeks 9-15) for delivery. Was also mediated with short, nonrequired, 1/weekly Slack sessions to talk about work that was due/upcoming and discuss that week’s topics.

• Week 1: intro to course stuff, multimodality, medium, social media, scalable sociality
• Week 2: continuation of last week, esp scalable sociality
• Week 3: intro to rhetoric, rhetorical situations, audience, exigence, immediacy, rhetorical ecology, concatenation
• Week 4: rhetorical velocity and implications of digital distribution, participatory culture, fitting response accessibility
• Week 5: continued work with material from weeks 3-4, frameworks and rhetorical analysis
• Week 6 (in-class presentations of rhetorical analyses and takeaways)
• Week 7: networked publics, Areopagitica, media ecosystems, strong/weak ties and passionate affinity spaces, the commons, intro to mis/dis/mal-information
• Week 8 (continues from previous week)

Switch to online. Thanks, COVID-19.

• Week 9: soft restart on affordances and dynamics of networked publics; mis/dis/mal-information
• Week 10: gentle wind-down on misinformation
• Week 11: social media at work; also social media and knowledge work
• Week 12: social media and small orgs
• Week 13: social media and small orgs 2
• Week 14: writing and the responsive workplace, continued work on social media and small orgs project
• Week 15: tying up final projects

Projects

This slideshow is the template/instructions for the final project, which asked students to examine six principles from the World Health Organization (WHO) communication strategy, analyzing and evaluating how WHO applied it on their social media streams. They also selected a Coastal Bend local or regional nonprofit organization and evaluated that org’s social media, providing kudos or recommendations. Students then were to connect their analysis back to key course concepts (rhetorical situation, ecology, velocity, publics) as well as forecast what they might take with them from the assignment in future work or personal social media use. Instructions and commentary included in the slideshow template.

Reading list

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