Analyzing the Rhetoric of WebsitesMary Grover Assignment SummaryThis writing assignment trains students to understand and articulate how web design works to manipulate Internet users' behavior and attitudes. The assignment guides students to analyze the web site as a special medium with its own peculiar protocols and idioms. To succeed in writing strong essays, students writers must 1) develop finely tuned evaluative criteria for a web site. 2) infer a psychological profile for target audience by analyzing modes of address on a site. 3) use dynamic and accurate descriptive writing to characterize the strengths of a particular site. The assignment, with all of its specifications, is itself a web site, which you can find at http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~grover/e306/essay3.html. This site invites student writers to imagine that they are interns working at a small web design outfit. Their supervisor wants to select one intern to hire as the assistant director of marketing, but first she needs to assess each candidate's ability to explain how web design serves to maximize results for clients: the interns must therefore demonstrate how well they can showcase the strengths of a particular web site. In this presentation of the assignment, you can read the assignment, look at some pre-writing activities and sample worksheets, and read some reflections on teaching the assignment. |
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