Genre: Research Report
Audience: WRD faculty and students (primary); New York Times Masthead (secondary)
Learning Outcomes: Rhetorical Knowledge; Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing; Knowledge of Conventions; Processes
Length: 1000 words; include embedded links and compelling, illustrative visuals
Background: St. Martin’s e-Handbook:
Last term in WRD103, I worked with students on a project that asked them to take an advocacy position: should students be reading the New York Times in print or in digital formats? You can read their conclusions here.
One unanticipated outcome of the project was learning about the extent to which reading is a social practice. We take for granted that writing is a social and civic activity, but many of us had not considered the effects of reading as a private, individual act made public, collective, and collaborative in some contexts, such as ours.
Our WRD104 Print & Digital Literacy Project will build on WRD103 students’ efforts and conclusions with research. While many of their claims are plausible, we need to research some of the contexts surrounding contemporary issues in print and digital literacies: how people read a printed page versus a screen; strategies for annotating and sharing texts; and the role of serendipity, all while keeping the social contexts for reading and writing in mind.
Your project will be to research and to report on one of those contexts in a Research Report format.
Context & Background
- Literacy and reading: why do people read? (Rosenblatt)
- Differences between reading in print and reading on a screen (also see Cull and the NYT)
- The serendipity issue
- The annotation issue
- The socio-economic argument for long-form narrative
- Is there a potential third side to the print vs. digital proposition?
- Finally, the New York Times recently announced a complete redesign of NYTimes.com (3/12/2013). The redesign description uses interesting rhetorical terms such as “context,” “navigation,” “interactive,” “story elements,” “responsive designs,” and “data visualization.”
- New NYTimes.com prototype
- “First Look” redesign blog
- Follow @nytdesign on Twitter
- Interesting analysis and overview: “Inside the New York Times’ web redesign”