Context

The Editing, Writing, and Media Major at Florida State University

The EWM major is designed for students with career interests in writing, publishing, and electronic media who want a thorough grounding in the history and theoretical bases for both composing and editing texts in a variety of media. Students in the EWM major come from a variety of academic backgrounds, and often double major in English Literature, English Education, Communication, and Advertising and Marketing.

While preserving the traditional core of English studies, Florida State University’s Editing, Writing, and Media (EWM) major foregrounds the creation and interpretation of texts by combining practice in writing and editing with the study of cultural history and criticism. Both writing practice and critical study confront the challenges of digital technology, visual culture, and the circulation of texts via the Internet. The EWM track aims to prepare students for leadership roles, whether as intellectuals pursuing advanced degrees in book history, rhetoric, or critical theory or as tech-savvy professionals equipped with editorial expertise and a variety of writing proficiencies.

The two courses described below emphasize different aspects of the EWM major: one focuses on the composition of texts, while the other focuses on the historical contexts in which texts were produced and interpreted. A required core course in the EWM track, Writing and Editing in Print and Online (WEPO) introduces students to the principles of composing and editing within page, screen and network environments, emphasizing how each environment requires different writing strategies. History of Illustrated Texts (HoIT) is an upper-level elective course that focuses on the technologies used to produce illustrated texts over the past millennium, from medieval manuscripts to hypertext, and the cultural and social environments that influenced the production of illustrated texts. Finally, although we acknowledge both the uniqueness of the EWM major and its formation through very specific, local circumstances, at root, both WEPO and HoIT, like most English courses, are text-based, aiming to provide students with the experience of creating, editing, and responding to texts in a variety of media.

For more information, see the main EWM description.

Writing and Editing in Print and Online (WEPO) taught by Josh Mehler

The version of the course that Josh taught was a condensed, six-week summer course. Considering the aims of the WEPO course, Josh sought to give students experience with a variety of writing tools as a way to highlight how writing tools and associated writing strategies are both situated and historical. He designed each week to give students hands-on experience with a different, to use Katherine Halyes’ term, “inscription technology.” In the first week, the class performed an exercise borrowed from Dennis Baron’s exercise in A Better Pencil, in which students composed using molding clay and a stylus as a way to establish the relationship between physical writing tools and approaches to writing. The class followed this exercise with a week devoted to a body of key terms that would serve as lenses to help students articulate their experiences, including a working definition of writing developed together by the class. During week three, students composed exclusively with a pencil, during week four, a typewriter, during week five, students composed using template-based website design software, and the course concluded with basic HTML and CSS coding. Each week, students were tasked with creating a project with the week’s technology and each of these experiences was complemented by two short writings composed by students. First, students submitted a “rhetorical rationale” alongside their completed projects, which provided them with the opportunity to elaborate on their composing process, to articulate and justify their rhetorical strategies, and to explain their approach to composition. Second, students composed weekly short journal assignments, in which they were asked to consider their experiences with different inscription technologies in light of course readings and to explore how such experiences might influence their thinking about “writing.”

Syllabus for WEPO [PDF]

Assignment for WEPO [PDF]

History of Illustrated Texts (HoIT) taught by Meaghan Brown

A full semester course, this version of HoIT was designed in units based on a specific illustration technology or form: manuscripts, woodcuts and letterpress printing, intaglio, wood engravings, graphic novels, and hypertext. For most of the units, the students practiced an element of the relevant major technology or illustration technique and studied historical examples. In the unit on medieval manuscripts, students designed a manuscript page with a decorated initial and miniature; for relief printing, the class spent time pulling prints from linoleum blocks. Other exercises, both in-class and take home assignments, focused on specific kinds of imagery or illustrative techniques, such as designing symbols for maps, constructing volvelles, or creating a comic book strip to explore the possibilities of sequential art. These assignments aimed to demonstrate the mechanics and challenges of different media through practical application. In order to produce their own versions, the hands-on experience required students to critically analyze examples provided to the class to determine the significant properties of specific illustrated texts and then work out how to produce those properties themselves. In most cases, the hands-on component was combined with a reflection exercise in which students explained what they were attempting to do, described the technique they used in concrete language, or reflected on how a reader might encounter their creation.

Syllabus for HoIT [PDF]

Assignment for HoIT [PDF]