Writing Across Media (INFO 303 / WRIT 303) is an advanced composition course supported by the Center for Writing Studies and Illinois Informatics.
In Writing Across Media (WAM), students explore how to create tools for communicating across multiple forms of media beyond the written or spoken word. As a writing studies course, WAM foregrounds how writing—as an object and a practice—is shaped by multimodal interactions. Combining theory and practice, the course asks questions such as:
• How does one "read" a video game?
• What are the ethics of audio sampling?
• In what ways do gesture and physical space affect how we write?
• What avenues for persuasion and inquiry are afforded by technologies as different as typewriters, word processors, and camera phones?
• For what reasons are our approaches to reading, writing, and making different across physical and digital media?
Student projects in the past have taken the form of remix tracks, photographs, short films, dances, installations, podcasts, Snapchat stories, Twine games, objects from the C-U Community Fab Lab, and much more.
If you're a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and would like to teach Writing Across Media, contact CWS Director Paul Prior at pprior@illinois.edu for details.