Course overview
In this course, we will survey the rhetorical purposes, moves, and features of new media that use research writing. The presentation of research writing in public genres falls under the scope of public scholarship. While the idea of public scholarship covers a wide range of topics—from knowledge creation to evaluation and popularization — we will focus on how scholarship, i.e., research writing of the sort one finds in peer-reviewed research articles, is popularized or recontextualized in and for new media and new media audiences. In particular, this course examines the purposes, moves, rhetorical structures, and linguistic features of research writing in blogs, social media (e.g. Twitter), TED talks, Youtube, the three-minute thesis, and on newspaper websites. Given that text generation using artificial intelligence (AI) is the new trend in new media, you will also be given opportunities to explore how research writing can be manipulated in new media with AI-generated text. This course will be useful for students who want to know more about the research writing embedded in the new media genres they read and might produce themselves in professional contexts.
By the end of the course, engaged learners will be able to:
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- Identify the rhetorical moves and stylistic features that are commonly employed to present research foci and findings to the general public;
- Apply rhetorical genre studies methods of analysis to various new media genres that rely on research writing;
- Appraise how research is being presented in new media genres to achieve the goals of these genres; and
- Plan and produce a variety of genres in new media with research writing.