I was selected to help pilot a newly designed ENG 101 online course and, as part of that process, chose to complete the entire course alongside the students. While working through the material, I took notes intended to provide extra guidance and context. To make them easier to navigate, I have organized these notes by module and assignment type. You may notice some repetition—for example, many entries begin with “Hello Everyone!” or refer to the same assignments multiple times. This is because the notes were originally drafted as weekly announcements and reminders rather than compiled into a single document. I am sharing them here exactly as they were written, with minimal editing or revision.

Module 1

The Annotation Readings for this week are:

• Four Things Social Media Can Teach You about College Writing—and One Thing It Can’t by Ann N. Amicucci
• So You’ve Got a Writing Assignment. Now What? by Corrine E. Hinton
• What Is Rhetoric? A “Choose Your Own Adventure” Primer by William Duffy

My advice here is don’t let the instructions fool you. The Duffy reading is the most important reading here in my opinion. I read the first two and attempted the quiz, and it wasn’t until I read the Duffy reading in its entirety did everything ‘click’ to me.

Ann N. Amicucci’s Essay uses Social Media to reveal a few things about rhetorical choices we make online and how they can relate to work done in academia. In this article we touch on concepts such as:

• Intertextuality – can be thought of as an explicit borrowing of ideas or material from other sources like infographics, memes and other data.
• Interdiscursivity – can be thought of as a rhetorical choice that is influenced by another other writer(s). For Example, the way we format citations, or even the way in which we start an essay with a statistic may have been implicitly learned from someone other source. 

Ann does a good job explaining what rhetorical choices are without actually diving into what the word ‘Rhetorical’ actually means, which I think is hilarious.

William Duffy’s Essay is probably the best introduction to the question of “What is Rhetoric” that I’ve seen so far. I didn’t buy into the whole “Choose you own adventure” vibe so I just read the whole thing start to finish and it was Worth it! Personally, I don’t know why this one is last in the instructions queue personally I think we should have all read this one first.

Corrine E. Hinton’s Essay really shines in the context of deconstructing writing assignments into smaller action items, which makes them more manageable both emotionally and intellectually. I really like this one and wish I had something similar in high school.

Module 2

Happy Sunday Everyone! I hope you are all adequately relaxed and chill. I found this gif on Tenor.com and I thought I’d share it with you all. 

Today is May 25, 2025. By now, we should be finishing up;

Sunday, May 25, 2025

Assignment Module 1: Invention Activity: Brainstorming

Earlier this week, I posted an announcement containing a video of me doing the brainstorming activity in a web app called mind meister, to help some of you get the Brainstorm juices flowing. It’s time to start considering the following assignments, if you have not already done so: 

Tuesday, May 27, 2025	Quiz Module 2: Quiz
Thursday, May 29, 2025	Assignment Module 2: Annotation Activity

Once again, the Quiz is somewhat dependent on the readings in the Annotation Activity, I’d advise everyone to at least read those, then go breeze through the quiz.  The Annotation readings for this week are:

• “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott
• “Storytelling, Narration, and the “Who I Am” Story” By Catherine Ramsdell
• “Reflection as a Rhetorical Genre”, Handout. 

“Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott is my absolute favorite and I literally can’t Interact with the annotations enough here. The Rhetorical purpose here is to entertain and inspire budding authors with the sentiment that “Everyone writes shitty first Drafts”, the goal here is to get the audience (Newbie writers like us) to be less ashamed of our first drafts and just dive right in. Anne Lamott makes some really endearing rhetorical choices in this essay, Rhetorical choices that frankly, I didn’t think I could get away with before now. Can you imagine the stress of being a full time writer? The stress she describes here is understated in my opinion. Writers live and die by public opinion. The more of yourself that you share, the more that you need to share. Does anyone understand what I mean here? Let me know in the comments.

“Storytelling, Narration, and the “Who I Am” Story” By Catherine Ramsdell was a rough read for me, i’m curious if anyone out there considers this reading to be there favorite for this week, so if it is, let me know in the comments. What did you like most about this story? If I had to summarize this one it would be difficult because of the many different layers of meaning her Rhetorical choices could and should have, but one way to summarize it’s rhetorical purpose is to remind us that while storytelling is primarily seen as a form of entertainment nowadays, storytelling serves a more important function of conveying, expressing, and generating meaning. The “Who I am” story is kind of like a form of personal disclosure whose rhetorical purpose is to entertain and convey rhetorical messaging about the author. In my opinion, she implicitly gives us an example of how “Who I am” stories can backfire. 

“Reflection as a Rhetorical Genre”, Handout didn’t have an author and i’m somewhat puzzled why this is an annotation document. We go from the rhetorical rich readings by Catherine Ramsdell & Ann Lamott into this? Why? This annotation is essentially just some notes about the Personal Reflection genre of writing. Who knows? Maybe some of you found this annotation document to be the most helpful. Let me know in the comments. 

Happy Writing Everyone!

-Karl

ENG101 – Just a reminder

Today is May 27, 2025. By now, we should be finishing up;

Quiz Module 2: Quiz

That’s all folks! Check out this YouTube video I found!

ENG101 – Incoming!

Thursday, May 29, 2025

Assignment Module 2: Annotation Activity

Today is May 29, 2025. By now,we should be finishing up;

It’s time to start considering the following assignments, if you have not already done so: 

Sunday, June 1, 2025

Assignment Writing Project 1: Literacy Narrative Draft

Module 3

By now, we’ve learnt that rhetoric can be thought of as a critical area of communication. The components of this area are:

• What is the purpose of the writing?
• Who is the intended audience?
• What strategies are used to persuade or connect?
• How do cultural, historical, or social contexts affect what a text means?

You may already be able to guess  this even if you haven’t reviewed the learning materials yet, but Rhetoric is a survival skill. Learning Rhetoric “isn’t limited to formal arguments; it is something we engage with constantly, from social media to advertising”

It’s the act of attempting to shape beliefs, objectives, communities and ideals. Rhetoric relates to: child rearing, project management, theater club, bed buying, propaganda, board meetings and politics. It is the art and practice of communication and/or persuasion.

This week’s quiz relates to the YouTube course “Rhetoric and Composition by the YouTube Channel Study Hall, I highly Recommend watching the entire series when you have the time, or even just leave the whole playlist playing in the background while you do something else. This weeks videos are

• https://youtu.be/i6LM33d6b2k?si=vIt_ydSwdiznoCCd
• https://youtu.be/ngrR1UhedpM?si=rnF9iNPsMeia4K-x
• https://youtu.be/zUGGsyUTmis?si=hhlVmAj_dp2DLzyo

My summary of these videos is that:

• Prof Zarka sums this all and says that this skill is “transferable”. She introduces the concept of the rhetorical lens and builds on the analogy for us to arrive at the conclusion that rhetoric involves critical thinking.
• We revisit the concept that “Rhetorical Analyses essentially means looking through a piece of writing carefully to determine what it means for it’s specific audience, and how it’s accomplishing its purpose or how it may even be accidentally doing something else”.
• Rhetorical analyses includes the act of Annotating and note taking in order to identify key details that help us evaluate a text more appropriately.
• Katie Azevedo goes over what annotation vs note-taking is and when they can be useful. They both require a purpose and the both aid in comprehension.
• Annotating is when you mark the text with a highlighter or pen. This means your notes remain in the book and this can impact on the brevity of these notes. Annotations are good if you own the book as a physical or copyable file.
• Note-taking, better for processing ideas and can be thought of as an extension of the highlighting process. Note taking is an extractive process. If you don’t own the hard copy, or the file, or whatever it is can’t be copied, then you need to take notes.

Also, if you like Study Hall, you’ll LOVE Crash Course. Let me know if you like Crash Course in the comments. My favorite was Crash Course Philosophy.

I’ll make a video of the annotation process for this incoming assignment tomorrow.

You’re All doing Good! Keep up the good work, and I hope this helps.

-Karl

Module 4

This week we took a longer look at invention strategies in the context of performing a rhetorical analysis. Last time we used these invention strategies, it was in order to complete a reflective assignment, the first draft of our literacy narrative.

This time we’ll kick things up a notch and begin to focus on using these invention strategies with a specific rhetorical purpose in mind. What do I mean by this? For example, sometimes when I write, I tend to wait for a “Flash of inspiration” and a stream of consciousness just sort of flows from fingertips into the keyboard and then, unto the screen. Almost like a wizard.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not sustainable. What I’ve noticed; is that sometimes, I’ll address one audience and then halfway through the essay I’ll end up addressing another audience entirely. We saw this playing out in the video I posted in my last announcement. I realize now how this hurts my Rhetorical purpose and makes me ineffectual as a writer. This week’s study hall videos were designed to help us in this regard.

If I had to sum up what these videos were about, I’d say that they introduced:

• The “Timed Freewriting” Strategy. This is when we set a timer and write for a predetermined amount of time without too much worry about punctuation or anything like that. The trick here is to do many shorter free writes and pull the best stuff from each free write and use that in the next free write.
• The “List making” Strategy which is kind of like a “To-do list”, which is kind of like an even rougher free-write. Instead of writing complete sentences we can use a list!
• The “Mind mapping” Strategy, which is useful when your list making goes to far and your lists start having their own lists. 
• The “Outlining” strategy, which to me feels like the final form of a mind map since outlines will start to have a chronological order to them.
• Writing is like going to the gym. The more we do it, the more “writing muscles” we build, and the better writing we are able to produce good writing. The same is true for rhetorical analysis.
• Rhetorical analysis is essentially when we try to uncover what the goal of the writer of the piece is trying to accomplish. This “Goal” can be distilled into a thesis statement.
• Example Thesis Statement:

• Rhetorical Analysis can be done without writing. I did this back when I was working as a graphic designer in the printing industry, and this week’s video provides an example of how one can perform rhetorical analysis in the context of being a DJ. I think some of my friends here in this class who already do customer-facing work may call just this “PTSD” but no, it’s actually just a fear induced, impromptu rhetorical analysis.

I Hope my notes were helpful! Happy writing!

-Karl

Annotation Materials

This week’s annotation materials were:

• Understanding Visual Rhetoric – By Jenae Cohn
• An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing – by Melanie Gagich
• Developing Projects that Analyze – “Rethinking your Writing: Rhetoric for Reflective Writers”, Chapter 16: Developing Projects that Analyze” – by Shelley Reid

As usual I’ll try to provide a rough summary of each text, if you’d like to add or append to my summary, please feel free to drop your notes in a comment!

Understanding Visual Rhetoric – By Jenae Cohn

This reading reminded me a lot of my Visual Communications class (MCO 450). As Cohn points out, “In a writing class, students do not always think that they will need to be attentive to visuals,” but visuals are a critical aspect of communication, meaning-making, and rhetorical purpose.

Think about the menu example: the items are laid out uniformly to guide the eye through the document. The implied lines create a structure that helps readers organize information and pull meaning from the menu so they can order with greater ease and efficiency. Part of designing things this way is understanding that, as writers and designers, we must be mindful of the cognitive load we place on our readers and reduce it wherever possible. Instead of wordsmithing together verbally nuanced reviews, we often snap photos and post them on Yelp or Google Reviews; likewise, we use color to influence emotion, and space and size to augment meaning.

As writers and designers, our minds are purpose-built for deconstructing the connotative and denotative meanings of the writing and design choices in our environment, and for using that unique perspective to create new meaning through those rhetorical choices. It’s like awakening to the fact that you are bi-lingual.

An Introduction to and Strategies for Multimodal Composing – by Melanie Gagich

This reading shifts focus from analyzing multimodal texts to composing them for our own purposes, and it offers advice on defining our rhetorical situation, outlining multimodal invention strategies, and explaining why multimodalities matter.

We learned how to tailor messages to a specific audience, genre, and medium (print versus web), and how redefining “text” to include any medium boosts our rhetorical success. That’s the heart of “multimodal”: moving from a single mode; “words”, to several wherever possible.

Put plainly, we’re increasingly visual communicators, and mastering tech that lets us mix pictures, audio, and text is now essential. Some messages can only land through a multimodal approach. That’s why I started a YouTube channel, and why many of us will work the same way online, both professionally and personally.

Developing Projects that Analyze – “Rethinking your Writing: Rhetoric for Reflective Writers”, Chapter 16: Developing Projects that Analyze” – by Shelley Reid

By the time I started reading this portion of the annotation documents, I began to think that multimodality and visual communications might be the theme for this week—and I was right, at least somewhat.

Module 5

This week is all about revising to suit your intended audience and goals.

Learning Material Notes

Kill your Darlings

This is a metaphor that was constructed with the intended rhetorical purpose of reminding us that, even though we may love the delivery of a sentence or story, sometimes we still need to change that story to better suit our rhetorical purpose or intended audience. In my opinion, it’s a metaphor that only artists and writers typically even know about—let alone care about. This is because these kinds of people tend to become attached to their work and may also have the tendency to view the commodification of their work as “damaging” or as a threat to their creative voice as a whole.

Killing your darlings, in plain speech, means doing what you’ve got to do to get paid. It means letting the philistines have their way with your work, as long as it gets you paid. If you want to get political, it’s a form of alienation that we must learn to accept if we wish to continue our commercial endeavors as writers and artists.

Editing vs Revising

If you’ve never been to college, it’s easy to see how one could have the connotative and denotative meanings of such words mixed up.

• Editing, in this context, can be thought of as minor changes that fix things like punctuation and spelling.
• Revision, in this context, are major changes to a text, think entire paragraphs being re-written or omitted.

Discovery and Alignment

The goal of revision is typically to ensure that the text is aligned with its purpose and audience. Revisions also usually occur as a result of discovery, which means new information has been uncovered and needs to be included in the text to ensure it contains the most accurate information available. Finally, if you’re like me, you may also revise in order to restructure a draft to improve its clarity, which often means reorganizing the draft.

Audience

This is just my personal understanding, but the study of rhetoric is the study of how we adjust our messaging for a given audience. The goal of any kind of rhetoric is to improve the persuasiveness of the given message. We use the word “rhetoric” because it’s simply a more all-encompassing word than a words like “persuasiveness” or “vibe” but can be expanded to include such words. The second video in this weeks learning materials covers all of this in a super cerebral way.

Annotation Material Notes

This week’s reading annotations are:

• “Why visit your campus writing center” by Ben Rafoth
• Rethinking your Writing: Rhetoric for Reflective writers by Shelley Reid,  Chapter 10, “Revising from Feedback and Reflection”

“Why visit your campus writing center” by Ben Rafoth

• It feels good to be social, doesn’t it?

Rethinking your Writing: Rhetoric for Reflective writers by Shelley Reid,  Chapter 10, “Revising from Feedback and Reflection

• We are asked to enter into “Experimental Mode”, first drafts are prototypes aren’t they?

Module 6

My Notes:

Moving forward we are going to apply all the skills we’ve learnt so far. Using our newly acquired pre-writing process, our newfound rhetorical awareness and visual communication strategies, we will re-imagine a reflective writing project into a COMPLETELY different project for a separate rhetorical audience and objective.

Personal Thoughts and Reflections:

Some of you may wonder; “Why the hell would we structure the class this way?”, the answer to that question is equally bewildering. 

“Conquering others is strength, but conquering yourself is true power” -Lao Tzu

This saying embodies our approach to intellectual cultivation at ASU. Every ASU student is a reflective writer, and every single class you will take henceforth will require you to dig deep within yourself in order to understand the world around you.

In my opinion, the philosophical tradition that underpins the logic behind the structure of this class, is Rationalism. My references may need some double checking, but at its core, I think rationalism is the belief that knowledge can be gained through introspection and reason. It’s the idea that truth is not just something we observe in the outside world, but something we can uncover through self-reflection and introspection. Thinkers like Plato and Descartes argued that the most reliable insights come not from experience, but from reflection. In this way, your reflective writing isn’t just a personal exercise, it’s a philosophical one. The point is: you’re doing more than just telling your story; you’re practicing a mode of inquiry that philosophers have relied on for centuries to make sense of the world.

That’s enough of me yapping about how philosophical this school is. Time to move on to this week’s video summary.

Learning Materials Notes:

In these weeks study hall video we are introduced to some Practical Strategies that can be used to influence the trajectory of your revision process.

• The “Talk To” method is a kind of like talking to yourself as though you actually were someone else. I’ve been doing this since elementary school, and it really fills me with joy to see this being taught as a viable revision strategy. The gist here is that “talking to yourself” isn’t just something crazy people do, it’s something that highly creative people may need to do in order to stay organized and move their writing projects in the direction that they want it to go in. The key here is learning to change your perspective and see yourself, outside yourself.
• The Triage Method is the less eclectic revision strategy.  By taking notes about the objectives of a given writing project, we can quickly satisfy those goals and complete said writing project more quickly and effectively than the other strategy.

Module 7

This is the end of the course. During our time together, you’ve been asked repeatedly to reflect on your personal experiences.

Was it difficult? If so, why?
Have you changed at all as a result of any of the reflections you’ve written—or even just thought about—during this class?
Was it worth it?

Be honest. If you believe you’ve undergone any changes, try to find evidence that supports them.

Learning Materials:

Reflection is one path to self-improvement. That’s why reflective essays are how we “use evidence, personal experience, and intentional commentary to tell the story of your growth.”

Based on this week’s video, we learned that:

• According to Dr. Zarka, we can use reflective essays to take the time to contemplate how we use our time and the effects that our use of time has on our work. (Evidence and Explanation) For example, I used to spend two hours a day watching YouTube videos. As a result, I had a ton of ideas for conversations. But when I spent just 30 minutes writing each day instead, I found myself asking deeper questions that actually pushed my agenda forward.
• Reflection aids in knowledge transfer. For example, “A person learns how to ride a bicycle. Later, when learning to ride a motorcycle, they already understand how to balance on two wheels.” That earlier knowledge helps them learn the new skill faster.
• We can transfer knowledge from one area to another in almost every field of study.
• Reflective essays are based on our lives. Our primary audience is ourselves—then any external readers who may have a stake in our growth, like teachers or mentors.

Personal note:

Once we finish that, we’ve finished this class. How does it feel? What classes are some of you taking next? Do you feel like you’ve changed at all as a person? Let me know in the comments.