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Proposal Assignment

You will write a persuasive argument proposing a course of action to address your chosen local controversy. This essay should acknowledge different viewpoints and recommend a solution that could convince multiple stakeholders. The project could be a more practical proposal, like one that would be aimed at the city council or...

Student Essay AI Co-Writing Public Demonstration

This is a small public demonstration of artificial intelligence (AI) co-writing in classroom contexts. The essays collected here respond to a proposal writing assignment assigned as part of the first-year composition course at the University of Texas at Austin. Each sample essay includes the final revised essay and all prompts...

Lesson Plan: Teaching Context with Video Creation

Undergraduate students sometimes have trouble leveraging historical context to the end of persuasion. Reasons for this include that they may not see contextualizing (including the use of historical context) as a discrete and substantial task worthy of the same creative intellectual effort given the construction of arguments. That contextualizing is...

Lesson Plan: Analyzing and (Re)Performing Vocality

As rhetoric and composition instructors, we typically have students work with written texts, both in analysis and in production. While we might ask students to answer questions about tone and prosody in written texts, often their analyses remained confined to stylistic concerns without attending to questions of delivery. What gets...

Lesson Plan: Soundscape Narration

With audio technology becoming both more advanced and also more affordable, the options for understanding and exploring the ways in which sound and image interact with one another are becoming ever more practically available. Historically, many film directors have been fascinated with the possibilities of different approaches to the use...

Sounding Images and Imaging Sound

Image and code from wired.com Ferdinand Saussure provided a framework and vocabulary that can be applied in composition classrooms to understand the "arbitrary" nature of representational forms including sound and image. He famously gave us the vocabulary of semiotics including the “signifier" and "signified" within a framework that leaves meaning...

Lesson Plan: Visualizing Sound by Captioning Nonspeech Sounds

Although closed-captioning is usually thought of in terms of accessibility, it also highlights the larger rhetorical significance of sound—a significance which is most notably taken up in sound studies. The convergence of rhetoric with sound studies has become increasingly salient to rhetorical theory as noted in the review essay “Auscultating...

Lesson Plan: Advanced Piktochart

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