Reflections

The evaluative essay students are asked to write for this assignment has been adapted from a more generalized evaluative essay form, presented in undergraduate rhetoric texts such as The Structure of Argument (Rottenberg), Writing Arguments (Ramage and Bean) and Everything's An Argument (Lunsford and Ruszkiewicz). While teaching composition classes in the Computer Writing and Research Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, I developed and refined the web site evaluation assignment over the course of several semesters.

The assignment helps students understand the rhetorical import of web design. Education technology experts talk about the Internet as a source of information to be mined by students and teachers, and they express concerns about students' inability to discriminate between reliable and unreliable sources for information found on the Internet. At the same time, educators tend to ignore the interventions of web design when critiquing the Internet as an educational tool.

On the Internet, web design mediates the presentation of information. Web design packages information to the extent that the design is an integral aspect of the information. What students most need to learn when making forays on the Internet is how information is sold as such on web sites, and for what purposes. Students need to learn about how the fascinations and protocols of web design hail them as users, because after all, most sites on the Internet do not exist to provide information to users, but to make money off of them.

The success of this assignment depends upon the instructor's ability to coax students beyond their Internet surfer's response of "That's cool" to a state of articulate self-awareness as users. In order to achieve this state, students must first learn to identify the rhetorical purpose of a given site--does it work to make money? To build community? To further a political cause? To recruit volunteers? To build the ethos of a company or organization? To empower users with information? Some strategic combination of these ends?

Students then need to develop the taste and knack for answering some challenging "how" and "why" questions with regard to design choices, for example: How does the site work to build community? Why has each particular aspect been chosen? How well does each particular design and copy choice serve to meet the site's overall rhetorical goals? An excellent site will capitalize on the medium to maximize its rhetorical potential with respect to targeted users. Excellent evaluative essays maximize on the resources of descriptive writing to dramatize how.

Sometimes when students are themselves targeted users for a site, it is difficult for them to gain a critical perspective on how the site's address implicates their own subjectivity. This is why I use the site www.hooters.com in a close-reading exercise which leads students to make inferences about target audience: inevitably some of the young women in the class adeptly describe the psychology of the married guy who needs the flimsy excuse of good food to go to Hooters and have some safely contained, chauvinistic "fun."

Writing the essay in teams of two, I have found, can also prevent some students from lapsing into mute and complacent appreciation for a particular site: with this arrangement they have to explain their responses to a peer, and the effort becomes part of the writing process. Meeting with individual students to discuss their chosen sites may also help them to realize the means by which a site hails users. At the same time, you may find yourself giving mini-lectures on aesthetics. For example, a student may be wholly unfamiliar with the '50s kitsch Americana aesthetic that pervades the site for Old Navy clothing stores. It might be fruitful to bring home the rhetorical force of aesthetic style with auxiliary assignments on particular aesthetic movements.

Two model essays are featured on the assignment site: "Styling www.bebe.com" by Din Ironkwe with Marjon Dean, and "Under the Influence of Jose Cuervo" by Alison Hall and Manjeri Krishna. These essays represent two different approaches to the assignment. "Under the Influence of Jose Cuervo" offers a cultural critique about how www.cuervo.com effectively cultivates and recruits college-age alcoholics. "Styling www.bebe.com" promotes that designer clothing site and endorses its purposes. In that case, the student writers adopt the voice of an in-house web-designer showcasing the site for colleagues in their company.

Both of these essays analyze what they posit as an excellent site of a particular genre. It would in fact be far more challenging for students to analyze a mediocre site, because in order to pinpoint weaknesses, they would have to imagine potential for specific improvements in the design. Perhaps this would be an appropriate approach for students who knew html, or for students preparing for a career in graphic design or IT.

Given the right chemistry in the classroom, students may well benefit from giving presentations on sites under analysis. The resulting feelings of ownership and enthusiasm are excellent motivators for the project. In a class presentation on www.cuervo.com, student writers Krishna and Hall dressed as the likely target audience for the site--college students on spring break. Krishna dramatized how specific features on the site might induce the target audience to consume "mass amounts" of Cuervo by periodically swilling from a bottle of Cuervo filled with apple juice. Needless to say, this demonstration of the site's rhetorical power was a crowd pleaser. One recommendation: the presentation format should be prescribed and guide students to do the hard work of analysis.

Instructional Challenges

  • Websites are continually changed and updated. You will have to update worksheets and keep current on sites you showcase for class analysis. However, you might use an outdated analysis as a prompt for students to describe the rhetorical effect of updated features on a site.
  • The rhetoric of web designs frequently involves manipulation and indoctrination of the target audience. Because this assignment verges on cultural critique of sites, there are no direct links from the web version of the assignment to sites suggested for analysis (www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~grover/e306/essay3.html). The ethical issues raised in this assignment could well serve as the matter of class discussion, or as the topical focus for another essay assignment. For example, a definitional essay might argue,"Site X is/is not racist, sexist," etc.
  • Because students chose their own sites, most often those which reflect their own intellectual and social interests, they are usually well-informed on the subject matter of sites and have a familiarity with the semiotics peculiar to say, professional wrestling, alternative bands, or Japanese anime. At the same time, precisely because they closely identify with the target audience for a site, students may ironically have trouble articulating the needs, desires and values of the target audience. Students can be strategically grouped to showcase their sites and help each other better interrogate issues of audience–to "defamiliarize" the rhetorical address of sites for each other. A student who never wears make-up, for example, may well perceive how a make-up company makes the purchase of make-up seem important, while a student who always wears make-up may never question the value of wearing it.
  • Students may have some difficulty articulating how the interactive aspect of websites serves rhetorical functions. To help students develop this ability, an instructor might voice the thoughts and impulses of an ideal target user while clicking and scrolling through a site. Imaginative students readily dramatize the projected mindset of ideal target audiences for the rhetoric of websites by providing scenarios showing how a hypothetical user is moved, through interaction with a website, to buy items on line, affiliate with a group, etc. For example, one of my students framed an analysis of a website marketing women's lingerie by introducing two shoppers in her introductory paragraph: a harried business woman looking to put some spice into her marriage but wanting to avoid the crowds at the mall, and a timid, older gentlemen looking to buy a Valentine's day gift for his wife but wanting to avoid making an appearance in a women's lingerie store. The student writer then touched upon the impulses and responses of these shoppers throughout her analysis.

For the Non-Electronic Classroom

Students may review websites outside of the classroom and then discuss them in the traditional classroom, but since this arrangement would require more active recall of site content, it would be helpful to 1) print out images from websites for use during practice analyses 2) ensure that students carefully study sites under analysis and discussion, perhaps by administering quizzes on the content of sites under study or by assigning worksheets which prompt students to give descriptive accounts of site content.

My colleagues have adapted this assignment to the conventional classroom by downloading material from web sites and making color Xeroxes to distribute for in-class analyses. With regard to teaching in the computer classroom, I will alert instructors to two forces that tend to counter students' ability to achieve insights about web design during in-class analysis exercises. First, when the room is darkened and you project a web site onto a screen, students have a tendency to become passive spectators and relinquish their responsibility for participation in discussion. I have also found that even during workshops with instructors, the impulse to make smart remarks about the content of sites sometimes detracts from the productivity of a group analysis. Needless to say, quick-thinking educators can undoubtedly turn that impulse to their instructional advantage.

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