Remix

Teach revisions and the infinite possibilities of rewriting the same paragraph with this exercise, adopted from Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style. 

Kinetic typography is an animation technique that allows writers to mix text and motion. Students will take part of a speech or a piece of dialogue and animate it, carefully considering how they might visually enforce and/or subvert the text's underlying themes.

In this activity, students will use Amazon reviews of the Women's Sexy PhD Halloween costume to identify places where the authors concede, refute and rebut the idea behind the costume. They will then come up with their own Amazon reviews for a product, real or imagined, of their choice.

The assignment introduces students to some very basic video editing techniques (cutting clips, detaching audio, inserting new audio) and gets them thinking about how the visual and sound channel in a video composition play together to create rhetorical effect. It's also fun as hell.

Like many things, visual rhetoric is often best learnt by doing. This lesson plan introduces students to video editing using Popcorn Maker, a web-based tool for mashing up online texts.

In this lesson, students in my visual rhetoric class, "The Rhetoric of Photography," look at internet memes in multiple contexts as part of our unit on kairos. 

During the workshop-style lesson, students will learn about the literary and rhetorical aspects of selection and juxtaposition. This assignment introduces students to ways of finding public domain music and audio clips of literary and rhetorical value.