Category: David’s Posts

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Week Ahead: 3

3 9/9
9/11
  • note: 9/10 College add/drop/swap deadline
  • Individual conferences begin

For Tuesday, you should have published your Literacy Narrative essay as a page on your site. You should also have published your reflection post and sketch 2.

In class on Tuesday, we’ll spend a lot of class time on Randy Olson’s ABT thesis structure. You should be able to skim the Olson essay fairly quickly — the key idea is understanding the (bad) deductive structure that Olson describes and then his suggestion for improving it by utilizing a (good) inductive structure instead. I’ll post a student essay that I received in the past and we’ll spend a chunk of time in class with a hands-on activity restructuring that student’s argument into the ABT structure.

We’ll also look at two chapters from Unflattening by Nick Sousanis, who drew the book as his dissertation for Teachers College at Columbia University — it was the first comics dissertation ever and has since been published by Harvard UP and has won a bunch of awards. Sousanis took a job at San Francisco State University a couple of years ago and is building a comics studies program there.

Unflattening will serve as one of the theoretical frameworks for our analyses of comics. Be aware that this comic is quite a bit more dense reading than Brosh’s web comic or than you’ll find Stitches to be, so give yourself a little extra time to work through those 20 pages carefully. I’ll start off our discussion of Sousanis by asking you to consider how effective Unflattening is as an academic, philosophical argument. (Soon we’ll read another theoretical framing text, but in the form of a more traditional essay by Hillary Chute and I’ll ask you to consider how the two pieces are similar and different.) How do the words and images in Unflattening interact together?

We’ll spend most of our time in class on Thursday discussing the reading from Stitches, starting with the following questions:

  • Pick the single page that you find the most compelling or interesting or that you think is the most important in today’s reading. Describe the page in a few sentences. Why is it interesting or important?
  • How does Small establish character and setting in the introduction?
  • This chapter all takes place while David is 6 years old. What are the major subdivisions of the chapter though? You’ll probably decide that there are three (maybe four) major sections in these pages — what is the primary idea being conveyed by each section?
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Resources for editing your website

If you haven’t already, you should change the front page of your site so that it’s a static front page instead of your posts page. Here is a support document that explains how to create a static front page (if your theme hasn’t disabled the Customizer menu, I recommend you follow the instructions for “Set the Homepage from the Customizer”). Note that you will likely need to create a new posts page along with the static page. In the screenshot of the menu below, you can just click on “+ Add New Page” and then create a page called “Posts” or something like that.

Your reflection essay should go in the static front page, so that it’s the first thing a reader sees if they just go to your sites URL. You can link from the reflection essay to specific works as needed.

You should also create a menu with links to all the major assignments for the course. Here is a help page on creating a menu in WordPress. Again, if the Customizer is available in your dashboard, I’d recommend using the Customizer to create your menu. You can organize the sketches using categories or tags in the menu, or you can just have a link to your posts page in the menu so that your reader can find them there. Make sure that your reader can easily find the three parts of your literacy narrative, your Tracing Pages essay, and the Halfa Kucha slides and reflection.

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Start on your literacy narratives

Looking ahead to next week, you should be thinking about the fact that you have two assignments due on 9/9: sketch 2 and the first part of the literacy narrative.

The literacy narrative asks that you begin with a pre-writing exercise called “X-pages.” I’d recommend that you go ahead and begin doing that freewriting as soon as possible. The steps are clearly outlined:

  • Make a list of ten memories that you associate with reading and/or writing
  • Circle the memory that is most vivid
  • Answer 20 questions about that memory (I’ve even included audio of me reading the questions with pauses between them, so you can just jot down thoughts while you listen)
  • Do a brief freewrite about that memory, responding to some questions listed in the post

None of that is actually the literacy narrative itself. It’s writing you will do before you actually write the literacy narrative. Your literacy narrative might be directly about the subject you focused on for the X-page exercise, but it does not have to be. The pre-writing is to get you thinking and writing so that when you turn to the assignment itself, you are primed and ready to write.

Once you’ve written your 3-5 page (750-1250 words) literacy narrative essay, you will publish it as a new page to your site. Then you will write a reflection post about the writing process.

I’m happy to answer questions about the assignment in class on Thursday.

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Week Ahead: 2

2 9/2
9/4

If you are looking for the welcome post, where you’ll find your homework discussed and where you’re supposed to leave a comment, you should click on the link earlier in this sentence to go there.

(Note: I fixed the error on the schedule page around the Labor Day holiday. My apologies for the confusion. I spend a lot of time planning out the syllabus, the schedule of readings, and the assignments and they are all interlinked with each other, so sometimes I make mistakes as I am shifting and rearranging all of that during the planning phase. If you catch mistakes around dates or whatever, always feel free to let me know and ask for clarification.)

I will not publish a post like this one every week, but generally on Thursdays or Fridays I will try to look ahead to what’s on the schedule for next week. I’ll copy & paste in the relevant cells from our schedule table, as I’ve done at the top of this post, and then I’ll try to briefly point out things you might overlook or questions I want you to consider as you read. I might also preview how the class discussions will go in the coming week.

Tuesday

The Andrea Lunsford reading about Rhetorical Situations provides a good introduction of some of the key terms we will use in our analyses this semester. It should be a relatively quick read for you and will probably go over terms like genre, audience, and purpose, that you are already familiar with but might do so in a slightly different way than you’re used to. We’ll apply some of those rhetorical terms to the reading by Allie Brosh and then see how that helps us to think about what she’s doing in her comic. Note that “Adventures in Depression” is a webcomic, which includes some prose writing along with drawings. You might think about whether this even is a comic, as I began to define the medium in our first class, or whether it’s something else.

I meant to spend a little more time on the first day showing you how this class website works and pointing you towards starting your own sites and why I want you to do that. We’ll circle back to that some in class on Tuesday — which is also my way of letting you know that if you’re confused by the website sign up stuff or the instructions on making an Avatar, don’t get too worried about it. You won’t really be behind if that’s something you complete after that discussion.

Also critical note: do not pay anything to WordPress for your site! WordPress is a free, open-source software but when you’re hosting the site on their servers (as you will) it follows a “freemium” model where the basic website is free but they will try to upsell you on “premium” features. For this class, you do not need any of those premium features. In the last couple of years, they have made it a little extra confusing during sign up so that if you’re not paying attention you end up on a screen that makes it look like you have to pay to launch a site. You do not need to pay anything for a basic website. If it looks like you do, look again more carefully and somewhere there will be a button to just proceed with the free service.

Thursday

Scott McCloud‘s Understanding Comics was an extremely important early critical examination of the medium of comics. I’ve assigned you the first chapter of his book, written in comic form, that attempts to understand what comics are and how they work. Note that you only need to read chapter 1, which ends at page 23, but chapter 2 is also included on the PDF that I uploaded to the library. Consider chapter 2 as optional additional reading — there’s a really good discussion in it of the ways in which we identify with the characters in a comic because of the ways they are simplified in drawing that might be useful in later discussions. We’ll discuss more of McCloud’s work later this semester.

We’ll also finish our discussion of Brosh as we turn to the second half of “Adventures in Depression.”

 

 

 

Open post

Welcome to The Secret Language of Comics

I look forward to working with you this semester.

Your homework to complete before we meet the next time, on Tuesday, September 2:

  • Read over this website very carefully as it constitutes the syllabus for this course. Note that the Syllabus page includes a number of subpages, covering such topics as: the course learning outcomes; the texts you need for the class; attendance, participation, and other policies; and how you will be graded. There is also a calendar of readings and assignments; and posts describing the three major assignments (literacy narrative in three parts, tracing pages, and halfa kucha) and minor assignments this semester.
  • Add this site to your bookmarks. Make certain that you can find your way back here, because you’ll be spending a lot of time visiting these pages over the course of this semester.
  • Sign up for a basic, free WordPress site. (See further information below about choosing a name for your site.) Do not pay anything for this site; choose the free version with an address ending in .wordpress.com. Make sure to hit the “Launch” button to publish your site to the web.
  • Leave a comment on this post asking a question about the syllabus. (Note that you need to be on the post page itself in order to leave a comment.) Put the URL for the WordPress site you created in the “website” line on the comment form. If you want to receive an email every time a new post goes up on this site, check the “Subscribe to site” box before you submit your comment. The first time you comment, it will not show up publicly until I’ve approved it.
  • Reply to the survey form at the bottom of this post, which both asks some basic information I’ll need in order to manage communications with you and also asks some questions that will help me get to know you a little bit better.
  • Read the following two texts: Andrea Lunsford, “Rhetorical Situations” and “Reading Rhetorically” from Everyone’s an Author and Allie Brosh’s, “Adventures in Depression, Part One” from Hyperbole and a Half. (Note that first link will take you to a PDF that I’ve uploaded to our electronic course reserves, so you will need to login with your Emory netid and password to access the document. The other link goes to Hyperbole and a Half on blogger. Allie Brosh has since published the story in her book, Hyperbole and a Half, which is excellent, but we can use this version on the web for this course.)

A little more on naming your WordPress site

You can choose a URL based on some version of your name (i.e., janestudent.wordpress.com or johndoe.wordpress.com) if you’d like. Using a version of your name has the advantage that you will be building a digital identity on the web based on your name, which can be really helpful. On the other hand, it also means that this site that you’re building will likely come up near the top of web searches for your name, so consider whether that is something you would like.

If you don’t want to publish your coursework on a site with a version of your name, you can also use some sort of pseudonym for your domain name.

It is also perfectly acceptable for your domain name to be a short word or phrase that is easy to remember and spell, and which speaks to some interest of yours or an aspect of your character (for example: my friend Audrey Watters, a noted educational technology scholar and researcher publishes a site called hackeducation.com or one of my favorite art and design blogs is called thisiscolossal.com). If you’re going to choose a title or phrase as your domain name, make sure you think about it very carefully so you don’t show up on one of those lists of the most unfortunate domain names ever, like the design firm called Speed of Art that ended up with a domain name that sounds like it’s about flatulence in a swimsuit. Note that in the case of your site, you’ll be publishing a page that’s a subdomain of WordPress.com, so if Audrey Watters were in this class her site might be called hackeducation.wordpress.com.

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