This assignment (minimum 1400 words, at least two outside sources, at least one visual element, posted on your website) asks you to build on your work from the Multimodal Formal Analysis. You should continue looking at the same text, and you can draw on the writing you produced for the earlier assignment as well. The prompts from that assignment will still be relevant here:
- What is the main purpose of the text? What does the writer/designer of the text hope to accomplish through their work?
- What specific details or aspects of the text help it accomplish its purpose or otherwise have this effect? How does the text incorporate different modes, media, and design choices (emphasis, contrast, color, organization, alignment)? How does it take advantage of the affordances of these modes, media, and design choices? Identify specific details and explain what makes them significant and how they contribute to the larger purpose.
- Offer your thoughts on what makes the text interesting, effective, or relevant in some way. This is an opportunity to offer a larger argument on why you think this text is worth analyzing.
This “cultural analysis” asks us to develop our thinking in a few ways as well, such that you should also consider some combination of the following prompts (you do not need to address all of them):
- The Formal Analysis asked you to focus on the purpose of the text and specific design choices; this extension gives you an opportunity to further address audience and context, particularly by drawing on sources from your research. How does your text respond to, draw on, or take up ideas, conversations, or other texts or contexts from our culture? How might different audiences engage with the text in different ways?
- What other connections can you make between your outside sources and your multimodal text? How else do these sources help you extend your analysis and gain new insights into the text?
- What do we learn about your text by comparing it or otherwise putting it into conversation with other, similar texts? What makes your text unique? More or less effective?
- How does this text fit in with our class readings and conversations? For example, does it help us think about Ennenga‘s attention to texts that reproduce cultural ideologies and texts that embody some sort of individual authenticity and expression? Does it help us think about Bogost‘s point about how digital recording technologies create new texts with their own reality rather than reproductions and representations of reality? Does it help us think about Ridolfo and DeVoss’s points about rhetorical velocity and remix and networked selves, or Roberts’s thinking on deceleration and immersive attention?
Again, you are welcome to draw on your previous writing, but you might need to make changes to your analysis, organization, argument, etc., to address the new prompts.
Matt King 