Christian Kowalski
Professional Writing & Rhetoric Portfolio
Context:
For my Understanding Rhetoric class, students were grouped up and assigned a multimedia project that covered the history and development of rhetoric. The class was designed to introduce us to rhetorical principles and well as go through the history of rhetoric. Through this assignment each group was tasked with comparing and contrasting the rhetorical principles of famous philosophers over centuries. The goal for the course was to leave with an understanding of what rhetoric is, how it has developed over time and what are the principles of it. This assignment tasked us with reaching far back to early Athens and writing about Socrates’ understanding of rhetoric and following a timeline all the way to modern philosophers.
There were multiple elements to this project that required collaborative, persuasive and design skills. Our group had to create a contextual narrative for the timeline along with a visual timeline and an interactive design that highlighted the rhetorical principles of these rhetors. These three elements together were to provide a full timeline of rhetoric’s evolution and how these influential rhetors changed our understanding of it over time.
Interconnections Project
Rhetorical Decisions:
The important point our professor wanted us to learn from this project were the rhetorical principles of the rhetors reviewed in class. Each rhetor would be accompanied by a comprehensive analysis that covered his biography, definition of rhetoric, definitions of the species of rhetoric, fields of rhetoric and how a rhetor should be educated. With this amount of information required, it was essential to condense the text to accommodate the design of the Prezi. This required balancing concise writing with making sure all the necessary information was included. The text had to be read closely in order to find the clearest quotes that demonstrated the definitions of rhetoric for that specific rhetor. The process of creating the timeline required close reading of the texts along with concise summaries that wouldn’t overwhelm the Prezi.
Once the timeline was complete, the next choice our group had to make was how to translate that knowledge into an interactive medium. This required condensing the material even further and applying it to different contexts to demonstrate a full understanding of the content. Our group collectively decided to create a Choose Your Own Adventure game as the interactive design for our project. The reasoning for this is that it was unique, creative and provided an opportunity for each of us to think outside the box. We made the content as lighthearted and fun as possible given the source material. Since I was responsible for three of the rhetors on the timeline I had be confident enough in their definitions of rhetoric to create a narrative that the user could follow when clicking their responses. They had to be clear, engaging and true to the source material. Images and a sleek design were added to make the game more accessible and easier to navigate.
Finally, this project reinforced the importance of collaboration. With many different levels to the project, it was important to communicate clearly what each of our individual goals were and how we were going to fulfill them. One thing our group did was compile all of the rhetorical canons, species and other principles together so that we could have one, universal resource we all had access to. This made searching for definitions or effective passages far easier for everyone.
Reflection:
What this assignment challenged us to do was analyze these definitions of rhetoric from many different mediums. We had a contextual narrative, Prezi slides and an interactive game which all provided different elements to our definitions of rhetoric over time. These three different platforms would engage the audience in different ways but they all accomplished the same thing at the end in informing the viewer of the history of rhetoric. This project was the ultimate resource guide that provided three different outlets for viewers to access the information and learn about history of rhetoric and famous rhetors.
Here are the links to the project: