MALAS Fall 2018 Course Description: RWS 543/MALAS 600D: Rhetoric of Visual Composing with Professor Jennie Sheppard

RWS 543/MALAS 600D
Rhetoric of Visual Composing

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, complex data, and specialized information through visual and multimodal means. 

The course readings will introduce students 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 and support 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 and written strategies to create user-friendly, informative, and persuasive texts for professional audiences. 

Jennifer Sheppard, Ph.D. (Michigan Technological University 2003) is a scholar of multimodal rhetorics and literacies, digital communication, and writing/professional communication. She is interested in how emerging communication technologies can be used to help students and professionals develop critical, rhetorical, and technological literacy practices necessary for success in the 21st Century. Among other publications, she is co-author of Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects, (2nd ed.) published by Bedford/St. Martin’s in 2018. She is currently beginning a new project examining tactical communication practices in social media medical support groups that help users to assert greater agency in navigating their treatment.