MALAS Fall 2019 Seminar! MALAS 600D: Rhetoric of Visual Composing with Professor Jennifer Sheppard

 























Rhetoric of Visual Composing
RWS 543/MALAS 600D
Professor Jennifer Sheppard

Shepard Fairey (source)

Visual messages are a powerful way to inform, persuade and educate. Within professional settings, the ability to communicate effectively with supervisors, co-workers, clients, and public audiences through combinations of visual, textual, and technological elements is an invaluable skill. This course takes a rhetorical and professionally-oriented approach to analyzing, organizing, and communicating ideas, educational content, and specialized information through visual and multimodal means. The course readings will introduce you to research on visual communication, basic design and layout strategies for print, presentational, and online contexts, and the use of images and data visualization to convey specialized content. Research and practitioner materials will be used as a basis for evaluating the rhetorical choices in the visual communication work of others and for learning how to apply these concepts to visual composing projects common to the workplace (e.g. a proposal and an infographic/visual data display). The focus throughout the course will be on learning to evaluate and craft texts that integrate effective visual strategies to create user-friendly, informative, and persuasive texts for professional audiences. In addition to focusing specifically on the visual, this course will also consider these affordances and constraints in relation to other modalities, including textual, spatial, gestural, and auditory. Being better aware of how multimodal rhetorical choices influence an audience can help you to be more critical of what others are saying to you, as well as to make use of these strategies in your own communication.

Biography

Jennifer Sheppard is an Assistant Professor in the Rhetoric and Writing Studies Department. Her research focuses on the intersection of theory, practice, and pedagogy in digital writing, visual and multimodal rhetoric, and professional communication. Her work has appeared in Computers and Composition, Journal of Literacy and Technology, Hybrid Pedagogy, and several edited collections, including Designing Texts: Teaching Visual Communication. She is also co-author of Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects, published in its second edition by Bedford/St. Martin’s in 2018. Dr. Sheppard has been at SDSU since 2014 and is the winner of the 2018-2019 College of Arts and Letters Excellence in Teaching Award. As San Diego State, she has taught a wide range of courses, including everything from first-year writing to upper division courses in visual and popular culture rhetorics and professional writing to graduate seminars in rhetoric, literacy, and technology. She has also served as the Associate Director of the Lower Division Writing Program where she collaborated in curriculum development and the training and mentoring of new graduate teaching assistants. Dr. Sheppard holds a B.A. in Liberal Studies and an M.A. in English from California State University Chico and a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Michigan Technological University. 

Jennifer Sheppard, PhD 
Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetoric 
Dept. of Rhetoric and Writing Studies 
San Diego State University 
619.594.2696 
jsheppard@sdsu.edu  

Section Details:

Course	MALAS-600D
Course Title	RHETORIC OF VISUAL COMPOSITION
Section	02
Schedule #	22248
Units	3.0
Session	FALL CAMPUS
Seats	7/10
Meetings	Seminar 1400-1515 MW SH-126 J. SHEPPARD
Full Title	Seminar: Media Studies, Fine Arts, Transformative Arts
Description	MALAS seminars are divided into four general areas with content that varies semester to semester. Each course may be repeated once with new content. See Class Schedule for specific content. Maximum credit six units for each of the following courses: MALAS 600A, 600B, 600C, 600D.
Prerequisite	Graduate standing.
Footnotes	05 Stacked with RWS 543. Not open to students concurrently enrolled in or with credit in RWS 543 (Rhetoric of Visual Composition). ZL The following student levels are allowed: Graduate.