August 18, 2014
Poster and Brochure Analysis
This activity is intended for a 50-minute session of an English 150 class. To be successful in this exercise, students should have had some practice in genre analysis as outlined in John Trimbur’s “The Call to Write,” as well as a familiarity with the visual and design strategies outlined in excerpts from Molly Bang’s “Picture This” (provided). By this point in the semester, students are continuing to develop their understanding of genre by both analyzing and composing writing projects that conform and combine different genres of formal and informal writing. Assignment #5 asks them to take the content from either Assignment #3 or Assignment #4, and translate that content into the genre of a poster or brochure. To this end, this exercise challenges student to think critically about posters and brochures as a genre. They will collect “artifacts,” or genre samples, that they will then analyze for their conventions and rhetorical styles. They will complete an assignment worksheet that asks them to identify genre conventions while also analyzing design choices. Through an instructor facilitated class discussion, the students will develop an understanding of these genres in their own words, so that they may later develop a how may compose their own posters and brochures in ways that are rhetorically effective. The instructor will need the following materials for this exercise: The worksheets provided, a laptop, a classroom with both a digital projector and a document camera (both included in all classrooms in Ross hall).