1. Which of the three sections of this chapter resonated with you the most, and why? Which section was most confusing or surprising? What does your response tell you about who you are as a writer?
2. What role has writing played in your personal development so far as a student? How about outside of the classroom? What ideas in this chapter do you anticipate using in this course or semester?
3. One way to develop your writerly identity is to compare various writers’ reasons for writing and ideas about writing. To that end, read Sarah Allen’s “The Inspired Writer Vs. The Real Writer,” also found in Writing Spaces. Identify the common themes between that chapter and this chapter, as well as any differences in perspective.
4. Create a two-column chart. Label one column “writing for school” and the other “personal writing.” Then, use the chart to describe how your experience differs when you’re writing for school versus engaging in personal writing. (Remember that personal writing isn’t always poetry, diaries, or short stories!)

1. What are you most anxious about, when writing? For example, do you worry most about grammar and mechanics? About organization? About the deadline? About page length? Why?
2. No doubt most students are at least peripherally, if not entirely, concerned with what grade they get on a paper. Given that pressure and/or in addition to that pressure, what are you most anxious about, when sharing your writing with others—e.g. classmates and/or the teacher? For example, do you worry most about your audience thinking your ideas are stupid? About readers misunderstanding your argument? About your peers/ teacher judging you according to how well you write?
3. How are your answers to numbers 1 and 2 related? For example, does your anxiety about the deadline have anything to do with your anxiety about readers misunderstanding your argument? If so, how and/or why?
4. What, if any, strategies do you use to address these anxieties? Do they work?

1. Maxwell and Dickman believe that “a story is a fact, wrapped in an emotion that compels us to take an action that transforms our world.” How would you define the term story? What do you think are the most important elements of a good story? What examples help support your thoughts?
2. How could stories and storytelling fit into your major field of study? What types of stories do you think professionals in your field might find useful?

1. Can you remember a writing task during which you struggled to avoid using the first person? What about the nature of the content made “I” hard to avoid? Can you link the difficulty to one of the four values that first person “supports,” according to this essay?
2. McKinney Maddalena claims that scientists use “I” more often in research reports, nowadays. Find a scientific article in your school’s research databases that employs first person: “I” or “we.” In what section is first person used, and how? Does its usage reflect one of the values this essay points out?

1. What is your current understanding of “good writing” and “a good writer?” What does “good writing” sound, look, and feel to you? And what do you think has shaped your current understanding? How do you think your understanding influences the way you approach your writing assignments in our/other classes?
2. Reflect on your experiences across different languages (e.g., Englishes, Spanishes, Black Languages, etc.) How are your relationships, experiences, and practices of these languages similar or different? What do you think shapes these different relationships, experiences, and practices?
3. Think about your last writing assignment. What was your process like? Who did you think about? What did you pay attention to? What did you particularly consider throughout the process?
4. Think back to a time when writing felt good, when communicating with someone felt comforting. Who were you writing to or communicating with? You can go back as early as primary school.
5. Imagine if none of the writing assignments in college were ever graded or read by your instructor, what would you like to communicate to the world? As you think about the people in your life and the moments your communities might be facing now, what feels important for you to write?
6. Consider your experiences with writing. What feelings come up? Examine these writing feelings. What emotions and experiences do these feelings prompt for you about writing?
7. What stalls your writing? Is it internal or external? What if you could speak to that “stalling” force? What would you say?
8. Can you describe any moments when you experienced or recognized linguistic injustice? How would you explain what happened? How might it have affected

   your future attempts to write or communicate with others?

1. Write about some everyday non-school writing that you have done in the last week (like text messages, emails, social media posts or any writing). How much revision do you do on these pieces of writing. Why? Describe the kinds of changes you made?
2. What has been your approach to revising essays in school previous to this class? Describe what you have done in the past to “revise.” Talk about one instance of revising following your method.
3. What have been your greatest challenges when you have been asked to revise a draft? Talk about a past experience before this class and a more current experience from revising a draft in this class.
4. Why should your first draft of a college essay never be your last draft (even if you tidy it up)?
5. How is this concept of writing as an inquiry process founded upon revision different and foreign to what you have thought before?
6. How does this essay help you understand what you have been learning about writing and revision so far in this class? How do you think it will affect how you will go about revision in the future?

1. When reading this essay, could you think of any specific writing assignments from your past where you felt like there was a miscommunication of expectations? What happened? What was the teacher expecting, and what did you offer instead?
2. What should the writer of this essay have done with the problem he posed in the beginning? What would have been a fair way to grade all of these essays while still offering guidance on how to meet expectations?
3. Near the end of the essay, the writer suggests that you can set your own assessment standards for yourself. Think about a paper that you have coming up: what do you want to get out of it? How do you think you can use it to improve your writing?
4. How does hearing about the imprecision of grading methods make you feel?
5. How else can students get to know the expectations of a given writing assignment? What strategies have you used in the past?
6. Can you think of a time that your writing or speaking marked you as an outsider to a group, or where you noticed someone did not belong to a group you are part of because of the way they spoke or wrote? What was the marker of difference, and what happened?

1. How did you end up reading this essay? Go back and retrace your steps: What sections did you read and in what order? Spend a few minutes reflecting on what this experience says about you. Why did you skip certain sections? What sections were most interesting and why?
2. What is at stake in defining rhetoric as either a science, an art, or both? That is, why does it matter (or not matter) whether we identify rhetoric using these categories?
3. The definitions in each section of this essay are meant to highlight a specific aspect or quality of rhetoric, so the definitions in Section 4 relate to how rhetoric can mean effective communication, the definitions in Section 5 relate to how rhetoric can mean persuasion, etc. But many of these definitions could be classified under more than one section. Pick one definition from this essay that you think could be moved to at least two other sections and explain why.
4. Pick three of the most recent emails you have either received or sent. Thinking about the different approaches to understanding rhetoric outlined in this essay, how would you characterize each of these messages as examples of rhetoric?
5. Invent your own definition of rhetoric. You can make one up from scratch, or you can select ideas or phrases to patch together (this is call “patchwriting”) from any of the definitions included in this essay. Once you have a working definition, spend a few minutes freewriting about the choices you considered as you created this definition.

1. What are examples of rhetoric that you see or hear on a daily basis?
2. What are some ways that you create rhetoric? What kinds of messages are you trying to communicate?
3. What is an example of a rhetorical situation that you have found yourself in? Discuss exigence, audience, and constraints.

1. Which figures in this essay or elsewhere do you want to experiment with in your writing?
2. What figures in writing by others do you admire and wish to emulate? After reading this essay, can you better recognize figurative devices, if not necessarily by name?
3. What can you learn about writing as a craft from Erasmus’ exercise in copia? How could you push past 50, 100, or even 200 variations?
4. What rhetorical figures are appropriate for academic writing? What rhetorical figures are inappropriate for academic writing? What borderline cases can you identify for particular figures?
5. Now that you know a little more about rhetorical figures, can you identify any that seem to you to be part of your stylistic tool kit in your everyday writing, perhaps on social media?

1. Can you think of any other strategies for invoking exigency other than those listed above?
2. Have you ever struggled to think of a purpose behind your writing for a particular paper? What did you do to resolve this problem?
3. What nonfiction texts have you read that made you feel the text’s subject matter was absolutely essential to you?
4. Find and read an academic article, political speech, or magazine article that employs one of these strategies. Which strategy does it employ, and how effective is the text at invoking exigency?
5. What genres can you think of that are not mentioned in this article? In what ways do authors typically use exigency in those genres?

1. Exploring Rhetoric. Find three uses of the term rhetoric in the news, then explain what these uses reveal about the nature and function of rhetoric. What do these uses of rhetoric have in common? How do they differ?
2. Elaborating Ambiguity. Find an important ambiguous term in public life, one people refer to often but that may have multiple or uncertain meanings, then elaborate that ambiguity.
   • The word ambiguous derives from the Latin prefix ambi (“both, around”) and the root aġere (“drive, lead”). Ambiguous, according to the Dictionary of Word Origins by John Ayto, carries the etymological notion of “wandering around uncertainly” (22; Arcade, 1990). Its relatives include ambivalent, ambidexterous, agent, and act (the latter two from the root aġere). Ambiguity makes multiple interpretations possible, each of which may be legitimate and thus contestable.
3. Exploiting Ambiguity. In some situations, you want to persuade someone to take a specific course of action or to change an attitude. Using the term you chose in #2, choose one of the term’s meanings, then write a paragraph that uses that meaning to change someone’s attitude about it.
4. Rhetorician Kenneth Burke once wrote in a concrete poem called a “Flowerish” (a pun on “flourish”), “From the very start, our terms jump to conclusions.” What do you think he had in mind? In what ways do our terms, our vocabulary, determine what can be known? Spoken? Seen? What might our terms filter from view? Provide one or more examples.

1. In the first section of this essay, you experienced the story of choosing a restaurant to dine out at with your friends. In this story, the different kinds of pictures shaped the decision made. When have you made a decision based on pictures or visuals? How did the pictures or visuals affect your decision exactly?
2. In the discussion of the menu from Oren’s Hummus, it’s clear that the organization and design of the information may impact how a diner might decide what to eat. If you had the opportunity to re-design the menu at Oren’s, what decisions would you make? Why would you make those decisions?
3. There are six elements of visual design named in this chapter. Which of these elements were new to you? Which were ones you had encountered before? Individually or in a small group, take a look at either a picture of a poster from the Works Progress Administration OR find a photograph from the Associated Press images database and see if you and your group members can identify the elements of design in one or two of the historical posters or photographs. Use the guiding questions in the “Elements of Visual Design” section of the chapter to help guide your understanding of the images.

1. How have you generally started your own writing assignments? What worked and didn’t work for you? Are there any ideas you have for invention in writing that are not in this chapter that you would like to add? What are they, and do you think they could help other students?
2. Out of the new invention strategies you have learned in this chapter, which do you think would be most helpful as you transition into writing in higher education? Why do you think the invention strategy you choose would work well and in what way do you see yourself using it?

1. How many different genres do you encounter in a typical day? For which does the author’s or publisher’s bias affect your understanding the most? The least? Why?
2. Free-write about a past experience of significant importance to you. How does the context surrounding this experience contribute to your memory and retelling? How does your present context compare or contrast with your past context?
3. Which topics of controversy often simplified into two sides actually have more than two valid positions? How should writers handle topics for which a pervasive viewpoint has little or no credible supporting evidence?
4. Write down an opinion about which you feel strongly. Is it a preference, a moral belief, or an informed viewpoint? What would it take (if anything) for you to change your mind?

1. The author begins the essay discussing a discourse community he has recently become a member of. Think of a discourse community that you recently joined and describe how it meets Swales’ criteria for a discourse community.
2. Choose a college class you’ve taken or are taking and describe the goals and expectations for writing of the discourse community the class represents. In small groups, compare the class discourse community you described with two of your peers’ courses. What are some of the differences in the goals and expectations for writing?
3. Using Swales’ criteria for a discourse community, consider whether the following are discourse communities and why or why not: a) students at your college; b) a fraternity or sorority; c) fans of soccer; d) a high school debate team.
4. The author of this essay argues that discourse communities use genres for social actions. Consider your major or a field you would like to work in after you graduate. What are some of the most important genres of that discourse community? In what ways do these genres perform social actions for members of the discourse community?

1. Find and evaluate a meme as representative of a discourse community.
   • Justify the extent to which the meme is or is not representative of a particular discourse community and explain your rationale.
   • Analyze language expectations of the discourse community by comparing the meme to another genre from the discourse community.
   • Evaluate the meme use (if present) of translanguaging or code-meshing. If no translanguaging or code-meshing is present, evaluate how well the meme adheres to its discourse community’s language expectations.
2. Design a meme for a particular discourse community using its lexis and integrating translanguaging or code-meshing practices as appropriate to your linguistic resources. Be respectful and do not appropriate another cultural language practice or dialect that is not your own.
3. Consider your language background and history. To what extent has your language use and literacy changed through your participation in a specific discourse community? If you are/are not a monolingual English speaker, for example, how does this interact with your membership in and access to the discourse communities where standard English is expected?
4. Why do we use the Englishes that we do in particular discourse communities? How is audience a key factor for our communication choices?
5. How are Englishes different across the communities where you am a member and when does it really matter what language choices you make in the discourse community?
6. Choose a discourse community that you are a member of—or that you want to join. Analyze the language expectations of this discourse community by considering the following questions:
   • What would it look like for you or others to utilize linguistic resources, such as the dialects or language styles a person feels most comfortable with, in this community? What are the risks and benefits of doing so?
   • What do you notice about language expectations and which languages or dialects are and are not valued in this discourse communities?
   • What are the benefits or challenges of using translanguaging and/or code-meshing in this community? When are the stakes high and where are they low?
7. How can we better understand the choices people make as writers and speakers and learn to value diverse and interesting language practices?

1. Have you ever been in a situation where you felt excluded or othered? How did this make you feel and why? How did power/powerlessness feed into your feelings?
2. Oftentimes we hear and read stories that have nothing to do with us and who we are. Why is it important to expose ourselves to these stories? What can these stories teach us about ourselves, our positionality, our privilege, and/or our being in the world?
3. How does counterstory contribute to or rewrite how histories are told?
4. Think of your lived experiences thus far. Whose stories do we traditionally hear about in our academic experiences? How about through the media? Why is it important to also hear the voices of minority communities? What can their experiences teach us, and how does counterstory contribute to social justice and change?
5. How can counterstories contribute to our larger understandings of diversity, social issues (i.e., poverty, homelessness, working conditions, food justice, immigration, refugee experiences), gender identity, linguistic discrimination, and/or learning differences?
6. What are some of the stock stories you have encountered as a multilingual learner, both inside and outside of the classroom? How did these experiences make you feel? If you are not a multilingual learner, what are some of dominant narratives or myths you have heard for people who speak English as their second, third, or fourth language?

1. What is your process for developing an argument or a thesis? How do you approach a writing assignment that does not provide you with a specific problem or question?
2. Examine the writing assignments you’ve received in your classes. Have your instructors provided you with problems and/or questions? How do the types of problems and questions provided differ form course to course? What types of problems and questions are characteristic of writing in your major?
3. Look at papers you’ve written over the course of your academic career. Do you tend to present problems, pose questions, and identify what is at stake? How do your introductions unfold?
4. Examine the introductions of several newspaper and scholarly articles and books. For each text, identify the problem, the question, and what is at stake.

1. When was the last time you had to argue for a specific position on an issue? What was the issue? Were you alone or did you have friends to back you up? How did you find evidence to support your position? Did you “win” the argument by getting your way or by convincing the opponents of you were right? Why did you win or not win?
2. What are some issues have you recently talked about in courses (other than writing)? What were some theses offered by students in those classes (or by the professor)? Pick one or two of the theses you found most intriguing (or that elicited the most conversation) and see if you can write the antithesis. Is this impossible without doing some research? Why or why not? What would you do next, if you needed to follow up on this thinking exercise as a writing project?
3. Because of research on a particular issue, have you ever changed your mind about what you believed was right? What was the issue? Why did you change your mind? Or why not?
4. When you’ve been in classes and not agreed with other students or the professor, did you offer your differing opinion? Was that based on research or your gut instinct or your own experience? What was the most effective process you’ve used for participating in debate in classes? Or has this been something you’re unwilling to be involved in? Why has that been the case?

1. What writing assignments have you received from your various professors? How many of them involve working with sources? What kinds of sources do your professors ask you to use?
2. What difficulties have you encountered in finding good sources for writing assignments? How have you overcome those difficulties?
3. How helpful is the “recipe analysis” technique for understanding how to go about your assignments? What other analysis techniques have you used to understand writing assignments?
4. The metaphors in this dialogue explain some aspects of using sources, but not others. What other metaphors can you think of for working with sources? How would those other metaphors add to an understanding of writing with sources?

1. How is “Reading Like a Writer” similar to and/or different from the way(s) you read for other classes?
2. What kinds of choices do you make as a writer that readers might identify in your written work?
3. Is there anything you notice in this essay that you might like to try in your own writing? What is that technique or strategy? When do you plan to try using it?
4. What are some of the different ways that you can learn about the context of a text before you begin reading it?

1. What are the three questions the author says are negotiated that you need to be aware of when engaging in invention activities? How do these questions move you to consider unusual perspectives? Do theses questions work for you? Could you rewrite them so they work more efficiently for your circumstances, for a particular assignment?
2. What are the six potentials the author talks about in the title? How would you define these potentials in terms practical to your own writing? Which of these would you be moved to try/ consider first?
3. The author uses sequence connectors throughout, such as this final one: … College → First Year Writing → Objects of Study → Reflection. What does this mean to you in the context of this essay? How would you juxtapose these sequences to the rest of the sections of the essay (the potentials for invention)? How could you use this sequence to inform how you approach writing in courses other than first year writing or freshman English?
4. Which of the student authors do you most relate to? Why? What, if anything, specifically moved you to inspiration, perhaps to try a similar process or seek a similar epiphany?
5. Does the author talk about college writing that you know— something that is familiar to you? Are you uncomfortable with the methods the author talks about? Why? Are you intrigued by the author’s ideas about invention? What do you want to try first in your own project—which invention strategy do you think will move you forward toward creativity and perhaps, eventually, focus?

1. Primary research techniques show up in more places than just first year writing courses. Where else might interviews, surveys, or observations be used? Where have you seen them used?
2. The chapter provides a brief discussion of the ethical considerations of research. Can you think of any additional ethical considerations when conducting primary research? Can you think of ethical considerations unique to your own research project?
3. Primary research is most useful for first year writing students if it is based in your local community or campus. What are some current issues on your campus or in your community that could be investigated using primary research methods?
4. In groups or as a class, make a list of potential primary research topics. After each topic on the list, consider what method of inquiry (observation, interview, or survey) you would use to study the topic and answer why that method is a good choice.

1. Because so many of these guidelines depend on the writer’s purpose, publication space, and audience, it can be difficult to know when to follow them strictly and when to bend them. What are some specific writing situations where a writer is justified to bend the standards of how to incorporate sources?
2. Choose one of the annoyances. Then, look through a number of different pieces of writing from different genres and collect two examples of writers who followed your chosen guideline perfectly and two who didn’t. For each source you found, jot a sentence or two describing the context of that source and why you think its writer did or did not follow the guideline.
3. Rank the annoyances in order of most annoying to least annoying, pretending that you are a college professor. Now, rank them from the point of view of a newspaper editor, a popular blogger, and another college student. What changes did you make in your rankings?

1. Try the prompt mentioned in the reading to have a chatbot such as ChatGPT or Gemini tell you what it notices about you as a writer based on a sample of your writing. What does the bot tell you that is similar to or different from what you already knew about your writing voice? In what ways might these insights help you strengthen your writing voice?
2. Consider a writing assignment you’re currently in the process of completing. What would be a detailed prompt (like a specific coffee order) that you could ask a chatbot to get help with the stage of writing you’re at (i.e. invention, outlining, drafting, revising)?
3. Test out your prompt from question 2. Do you get the results you expected? Do you need to modify the prompt for better results? What do you notice about working with a chatbot from this activity?
4. Practice citing your chatbot conversation by first writing the full citation and then a parenthetical citation:
   • Create a full citation: “Summary of the question you asked” prompt. Type of chatbot. Company who owns that chatbot. Version. Date.
   • Use the first few words of the full citation to create a parenthetical citation that you insert after the quote from the bot: (“Summary of the question”)
5. Based on this chapter as well as your own experience, what advice would you give other students about working with chatbots?

1. Do any of the attitudes about peer response that DePeter discusses in the beginning of his essay apply to you (e.g., not wanting to “judge” others or regarding a teacher’s feedback as more important than peers’)? Where do you imagine these attitudes come from?
2. How do you think Nick (or any peer) would feel hearing the praise comments written in the Donald Murray style of “I like the way you…”? What effect would such praise have on the writer, compared to just seeing “Good” next to a passage?
3. Do you feel there is a difference between what you feel is “good writing,” and that which teachers have identified as “good?” If so, what accounts for these different expectations? What is your definition of “good writing?”
4. Can you think of ways that Nick or Andrea’s peer response praise could be even sharper, or more helpful to an author?
5. Discuss experiences you have had in other classes sharing peer response. Have they been a metaphorical “Descent,” or enjoyable journeys? What made your peer response sessions in the past work, or not work?

1. Define what metacognitive or reflective writing is. What are some of the prompts or “topics” for reflective writing?
2. Have you ever been asked to do this type of writing? If so, briefly discuss your experience.
3. Why does reflective writing help a student learn and develop as a better writer? How does it work?
4. Draft a Letter to the Reader for an essay you are working on right now. Analyze the letter to see what strengths or problems it uncovers regarding your essay.

1. What are some genres that you feel you know well? How did you learn them? What are their common rhetorical features?
2. What rules have you been told to follow in the past? How did they shape what you were writing?
3. How much freedom do you enjoy when writing? Does it help to have a form to follow, or do you find it to be limiting?

1. The authors of this chapter present a brief moves analysis of “student absence emails.” Why do you think these moves have become typical of this genre? If you have written a similar email recently, discuss how or if your moves align with the moves described in the chapter. How might your relationship with your professor affect the moves you use in such an email? What other factors might affect your use of different moves, or even your language choices within those moves? How might the moves in an absence email compare to a “grade change request” or an “appointment request” email to a professor?
2. After analyzing student absence emails for moves, write three samples: one that you think is “prototypical” of this genre, one that you think would be poorly received by the instructor, and one that is not standard but would be especially successful. What did you learn from writing these samples? How did your moves analysis inform the choices you made in writing?
3. The discussion of the grant proposal Statement of Need suggests that audience awareness is important in deciding which moves may be obligatory and, perhaps, where innovation might be acceptable or even encouraged. What other factors might you consider when determining which moves will be effective in the genre you are writing?
4. Think about a time when you felt like you had to bend or transform the conventions of a genre in order to achieve your purpose. How did you make choices about which moves or conventions were necessary to keep, and which could be adapted?
5. Gather a few samples of a genre from a discourse community you belong to and conduct a brief moves analysis. What is the action this genre carries out and how do the moves help it achieve that action? What can the common moves tell you about how structure and language create and reflect this community?
6. Some genres tend to be more open to variation than others, including in their use of moves. Make a list of genres that you think are more open to variation and those in which bending the norms may be riskier. What kinds of things might affect your choices as a writer to depart from common moves or other features of a genre?

1. Which of the exercises did you find easiest to write? Why?
2. Which of the exercises did you find hardest to write? Why?
3. What does the rhetorical situation of academic writing demand? Who is the audience? What tone is appropriate? What jargon might be needed? What information might be included and/or rejected in an academic paper?

1. Marjorie Stewart claims that our minds are filing cabinets of stories. Do her stories, or the stories of her students, remind you of stories of your own? How does this chain of stories help us make sense of our experiences?
2. Has there ever been a time when you wanted to include personal experience in a writing project but were discouraged or forbidden to by an instructor? Why did you feel the story was important? What might have motivated the instructor?
3. Are their personal stories you are eager to include in an essay? What about stories that you would be uneasy revealing? How do you, and how do other writers, decide which stories they wish to share?
4. Work with an essay, either assigned in class or one you are familiar with in which the author uses personal experience. Compare it to an article on the same topic with no personal writing. Which do your respond to more, and why? Does the personal writing help you understand the writer, or does it get in the way of your intellectual understanding of the topic?

1. How does Reid’s discussion of audience, purpose, and genre help you better understand the rhetorical decisions involved in blogging?
   Reflect on how these same considerations apply to other writing tasks you’ve encountered in school, work, or social media.

2. Reid argues that blogging supports intrinsic motivation for writing.
   In what ways might having more freedom over content, tone, and timing change the way you approach writing? How might this affect your engagement with academic or professional genres?

3. What do you think distinguishes a blog from other types of writing you’ve done?
   Based on Reid’s description, identify at least one rhetorical feature (such as voice, structure, or audience engagement) that seems unique to blogging.

4. If you were to create your own blog, what would its purpose, audience, and genre conventions look like?
   Try outlining a few rhetorical choices you might make—such as your tone, the types of posts you’d write, or how you’d design your site—to match your goals.

1. This chapter encourages you to read both visually and aurally so that you see and hear how punctuation functions in writing. Is this kind of reading something that comes easily to you, or do you have to work at it? Do you think it’s possible to read for entertainment or information at the same time that you are paying attention to the look and sound of writing?
2. Some writers who “listen” to writing acknowledge the role punctuation plays in making texts appeal to the ear. Theodor Adorno, a 20th century philosopher, compared punctuation to music (300). The writer Lynn Truss claims that “punctuation directs you how to read, in the way musical notation directs a musician how to play” (20). What do you think about this analogy? What else might you compare punctuation to, and why?
3. In this chapter, the author re-punctuated a two-sentence expression (“They didn’t mislead. They flat-out lied.”) three ways. A famous philosopher, Rene Descartes, summed up his thinking with a famous axiom “I think, therefore I am.” (His original phrase, in Latin, is “cogito, ergo sum.”) Go online and find out what “I think, therefore I am” means philosophically, then think (or talk with your peers) about how the single comma used in the original translation helps to express that idea. Afterwards, re-punctuate this expression in three or four ways so that it has three distinctly different voices and contexts. What would be the “philosophy” of each expression? Have fun with this one.

Reviewing the Chapter’s Content

1. Review the key rhetorical concepts that the author uses in this chapter. Which concepts are familiar to you and which are new? How do you see these concepts at work in the writing you’ve done for this course?
2. In your opinion, is the scenario that opens and closes this chapter realistic to writing assignments in other courses? What challenges related to how you understand writing in your discipline are understated or missing? What do you wish the author had considered or added when creating the opening scenario?
3. The author has a list of writing strategies that she encourages you to consider. In looking over this list, which strategies complement your writing process? Which strategies do you think would be more difficult to integrate into your writing habits?

Reflecting as a Writer

1. The author mentions the role that failure and frustration plays in adapting to new writing situations. Think about a particular time you felt frustrated by a writing situation: what did you do? How did you overcome the challenges? What would you have done differently? How did this past challenge prepare you to better respond to future writing-related challenges?
2. In reflecting on your future professional community, identify some writing situations (purposes, audiences, genres, and forms of rhetoric) that are commonly used in that community. What do you know about these writing situations? If you were to engage in these situations as a writer, what questions would you need answered to be successful?
3. Open an internet search and type in “Writing in …” completing the phrase with your future professional or disciplinary community. Take 10–15 minutes to review some resources that come up. Then, do some freewriting about what you found: what resources did you find, and do you believe they reliably represent writing in your future profession? What organization or individual created these resources, and are they good authorities of writing in your discipline? What did you learn about writing in this professional community? How is this approach to writing different than writing you have done? What excites you about writing in these new ways? What do you want the writing you do in your profession to accomplish?

1. What does it mean to compose multimodally?
2. The chapter lists three reasons supporting the inclusion of multimodal composing assignments in writing classes; what are they? Why else might learning how to compose a multimodal text be important?
3. How is citing and attributing work in a multimodal text similar to and different from citing in a traditional MLA essay?

1. What style guides have you used in the past? How did following a style guide influence your writing? In what different writing situations do you think a style guide would be most effective? Least effective?
2. In what ways does the appearance of a document affect your perception of the message and of the author?
3. How can you integrate the design elements of contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity into class assignments? What documents would benefit most from good design principles?
4. How much value does including an image add to a traditional academic paper? What types of images do you think are appropriate? In what ways can images detract from the impact or intent of an academic paper?

1. You have likely heard the well-known expression that this chapter draws its title from: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Consider the differences between how we interpret pictures (i.e., imagery and other visuals) and how we interpret words. What can images convey that words cannot and vice versa? Are there areas of overlap? What might these be? Consider the assignment you are currently working on for this class and determine what information you need to present in writing and what information would most effectively be presented visually. Why? Be prepared to share your reasoning.
2. Find an advertisement (digital or printed) that has few if any words and read the ad using the information in the semiotics and/ or photography sections of this chapter. What visual signs do you see, and what do they mean? How do you know? If the ad uses pictures, why do you think the photographer chose the particular subject matter selected? How are you interpreting the camera angles used and the composition of the photograph? How do these choices add to the meaning of the ad?
3. Envision you are a manager at an investment firm. Your supervisor has asked you to prepare a report that analyzes the financial portfolios of your firm’s four most profitable clients. Visualize the data provided below that gives percentages for the portfolio for each company. Explain why you chose to visualize the data using a particular format and compare your visualization with those created by your peers.
   • Company A: mutual funds, 18.5; annuities, 32.8; real estate, 3.1; stocks, 1.2; bonds, 44.4.
   • Company B: mutual funds, 20.3; annuities, 26.9; real estate, 3.8; stocks, 4.0; bonds, 45.0.
   • Company C: mutual funds, 23.5; annuities, 23.8; real estate, 7.3; stocks, 4.1; bonds, 41.3.
   • Company D: mutual funds, 20.3; annuities, 25.2; real estate, 9.6; stocks, 6.3; bonds, 38.6.
4. Find a short set of instructions (between 6-8 steps) that uses visuals that are difficult to understand. Assess the rhetorical situation and explain why the visuals are difficult to understand. Then redesign the visuals to address the issues you identified.
5. Envision that you want to buy a new smartphone, laptop, or tablet. Make a list of 3-4 criteria that are important to you in making this decision: cost, features, design, battery life, etc. Research your criteria and then create a visual that allows you to compare what you found. What product do you think you will choose based on the information in your graphic?

1. Describe a time when you baked something: a cake, a different dessert, or any bread or baked good. What elements and ingredients were included in your baking process, and how were they combined? How does your experience with baking help you to think differently about the digital media texts that you might compose for this class, such as a video or a podcast?
2. After watching and listening to Evan’s video “A College Collage,” pick a 10–20 second sequence from the video, and write up a rhetorical analysis of the sequence. Focus your analysis on the integration and juxtaposition you see and hear in the sequence.
3. Look up the different kinds of integration that Robert Horn writes about on pp. 101–104 of his book Visual Language: substitution, disambiguation, labeling, example, reinforcement, completion, chunking, clustering, and framing. (Horn’s book is open access and can be found online here. Using Horn’s book as a reference, write up your own definition of one of the types of integration. Where and when might you see, hear, or use this kind of integration?
4. Find a digital media text online that uses integration or juxtaposition effectively. The text you find might be an image, a webpage, an advertisement, a post on social media, or a short video. Write up an analysis of how your chosen text uses integration or juxtaposition to achieve its purposes.
5. Pick a topic, and compose a short audio or video clip that combines at least two media elements strategically for a certain effect. You might combine a song and several images, for example, in a way that aims for surprise, joy, discomfort, or sadness. After composing your clip, write a paragraph that reflects over your authorial choices and their effects on a potential audience.

1. Keep track of the data stories you see on social media over the course of a day or a week. What patterns do you notice in the kinds of stories or arguments made in these texts?
2. Use the critical analysis questions in Table 1 to analyze one of the data stories you saw on social media. Discuss why you think the data story does or does not use data effectively.
3. I suggested that the title of Figure 4 should probably be revised for accuracy. Discuss what a more accurate title for this data story might be.
4. Choose a topic you are working on or have recently worked on. Generate a list of questions about that topic you might be able to answer about it using data. Can you identify good sources of data that might help you answer any of those questions?
5. Use the flowchart in Figure 10 to determine the best options you have for showing data in the following scenarios:
   • You want to show how house prices in your community have changed over time.
   • You want to present data for 7 online stores, their monthly e-commerce sales, and online advertising costs for the last year.
   • You want to show which student services on campus bring in the biggest share of total visitors.
6. Try using a different graph type to represent the data in the horizontal bar chart in Figure 13. Which graph is easiest to read and understand? Why?
7. This chapter includes several examples of data stories. Choose one of them and discuss how you could revise its genre (as one example, you might consider how you would turn the infographic in Figure 2 into a social media post). What changes would you make to the story to suit the changed rhetorical situation?

1. If you use a screen reader, what advice would you give nondisabled writers who are creating accessible documents? Are there other strategies and tools besides alt text, headings and styles, and presentation scripts that you would recommend that writers use?
2. If you don’t use a screen reader (and have ready access to JAWS, Dragon, or other screen reading technology on campus), close your eyes and test a website of your choice using screen reading software. How would you describe the experience of listening versus reading visually? Does using this software make you think of your design choices differently?
3. How does the choice to be accessible when writing connect to the idea of a writer’s ethos?
4. Presentations are far from the only circumstances where having a script or visual access to spoken text is helpful. What other circumstances or media could benefit from scripts or captioning?

1. Using the SeeClickFix website, try and find a version of the application that is close to your hometown. Based on the branding and available categories, do you think the SeeClickFix team has used user-centered design principles while localizing their service for this community?
2. Thinking about this local community, who are the target user groups of the SeeClickFix system? Make sure not to overlook anyone!
3. As a group, think of a product or service that you are all familiar with. If you were tasked with creating a list of potential user issues for this product or service, which user-centered design methods would you use?