I am an Expository English Composition instructor at the University of Texas at El Paso. The goal of this program is to develop students’ critical thinking skills in order to facilitate effective communication in all educational, professional, and social contexts. In order to do this, this course deals with a wide array of different kinds of writing, from traditional media to looking at how discourse takes place in the online world.
One issue in this field which is extremely important to me is developing students' ability to analyze visual and textual rhetoric, as well as teaching students methods for effectively employing these types of rhetoric in their own writing. Due to the fact that individuals in society are increasingly inundated with multimodal forms of rhetoric designed to persuade them of ideological systems or attract them to commercial products it is absolutely necessary that educated members of society be aware of how these rhetorical systems act upon them.
Over the course of the semester I will be focusing on and discussing how these issues play out in society, how to analyze the ways in which entities, both corporate and ideological, use rhetoric, and how rhetoric can be employed effectively in different textual contexts.
