Welcome

Welcome to the course site for ENGL 302: Technical Writing and New Media. I am your professor, Nathaniel Rivers, and I am looking forward to an engaging and productive semester. Students are asked to review the syllabus (pdf), the calendar (pdf), and the course communication guidelines (pdf). Other documents are available by selecting “Documents” from the top menu bar.

ENGL 302 is grounded in the critical methodology of rhetoric, which students will hopefully come to value as a productive method for negotiating, constructing, maintaining, and reshaping their personal, professional, and technological lives.

The Rhetoric of the City Museum

This documentary was created by students in ENGL 302 New Media and Technical Writing at Saint Louis University. The film both documents the class’s trip to The City Museum in Saint Louis, MO, and explores the relationship between people and things, which it sees as rhetorical. The film explores elements of intentional design and those aspects of things that exceed a designer or maker’s intentions. Following work such as the journalist Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants and rhetoric scholars Jennifer Bay and Thomas Rickert’s Heideggerian treatment of new media technologies, the film, like the class, explores the possibility that things are their own rhetorical agents.

We worked with two Flip UltraHD video cameras, a Sony Cyber-shot digital camera, and iMovie in making this documentary.

Day 26

Thursday, December 1

• Distance Enhancement Project Postmortem
• Discussion of “New Media and the Fourfold”

For Next Time

• Documentary Work
• Status Check on 2.0 Projects

Day 25

Day 24

Day 23

Thursday, November 17

The City Museum Documentary: Work Day #2

• Negotiate narrative
• Storyboard
• Revisit quotes
• Develop soundtrack
• Edit video and stills
• Consider narration

For Next Time

The City Museum Documentary: Work Day #3

Day 22

Tuesday, November 15

The City Museum Documentary: Work Day #1

• Review and organize video and stills (30 minutes)
• Storyboard (25 minutes)
• Revisit quotes (20 minutes)
• Develop soundtrack (~)
• Edit video and stills (~)
• Consider narration (~)

For Next Time

The City Museum Documentary: Work Day #2

The City Museum: Documentary Trailer

We got a lot of great footage and photographs! We got our work cut out for us next week.