Multimedia
Introduction
Writing or rhetoric isn't only text; it is also the cultural reality of audio, video, images, graphics, video games, video calls, phone apps, and social media, such as Plants & Poetry adaption of my Mint Tea website that digitizes its social media publication for the contributions of combination of text, audio, and photos and the Red Cross' use of my immersion essay for social media content. Multimedia expands where and how I gather information and narrative and how I distribute it, such as with people of a variety of physical and mental disabilities or means by which people learn and access rhetoric.
Especially during this pandemic, rhetoric has outgrown its accepted textual space to protests and protestor signs; YouTube DIY videos; social media posts that include videos, photos, GIFs, and a return to hieroglyphic emojis and acronymic texts.The social distancing and things we learned as a result have become a serious lifeline in education, social interaction, exhibit showings, and sharing something as simple as the instructions and patterns face masks through webinars, Facebook posts, and emails.
This expansion engages people's imagination of rhetoric anew. The array of rhetorical multimedia affords the content producer more interaction or involvement with the audience to better express how we all think, feel, believe, perceive, and even care.
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Excerpt from my paper on the subject,
Inclusive Exclusivity
I first learned to use multimedia rhetoric creating my first website, Inclusive Exclusivity. As my first foray into web creation and design, some things, such as mobile friendliness, were not integrated into the design.
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Inclusive Exclusivity incorporates rhetoric in various media forms, engaging the audience to explore and discover the message for themselves to share storytellers’ experiences by asking the question, “Who are people behind our distinctions, and how are we related to one another by experience?” Audio, video, and graphics develop the narrative in ways that we all experience life—using our different senses.
This was the beginning of my journey into multimedia forms of rhetoric. The website, Inclusive Exclusivity, won me the Rhetoric and Writing Department of U of AR Little Rock Writing Award for New Media and Technology. In projects to come I continue to improve and expand on this initial work.
Writing on the Web
Write Here, Write Now and tools provided by peers continue to be a resource to refer to for effective internet communication in my career as a freelance writer, editor, web designer, and photographer. I with the rest of the Editorial Team for Write Here, Write Now practiced collaboration, developing editorial philosophy and communication plan, worked with less experienced peers in developing their ideas for blogs and edited the blogs before posting. Besides my vlog, I wrote a blog called “Who Do I Want to Be: Online Identity and Me.”
To create the vlog, “Writing on the Web 2020,” I used multiple cited sources, learned a new technology or web configuration with animoto.com, kept usability and accessibility in mind with concise statements, pleasing colors and images, some from my personal stock, and used upbeat non-distractive music selected from my own collection. Despite continual crashing I prevailed. Since then, I added a vlogging kit to work with either my phone or camera, to add to this experience and meet the prevailing need of the audience.
Another aspect of this experience was learning basic HTML and CSS coding that is valuable to act in a support or web design capacity. With this early coding experience, I did not purchase a domain.
Career Coach Blogs, plus
4-Part Series:"4 Uses for Social Media"
I pitched and obtained an internship, supporting career coach Cynda Alexander as she began her business and her WordPress blog. My role involved building the blog site, developing ideas, creating quality content, finding applicable license-free images, seeking good sources, such as Forbes, to which to hyperlink, and, frequently, using my own photographs. In addition to writing blogs on topics, such as, writing resumes, developing an elevator pitch for a job, and having good manners on the job, I sought the additional experience of writing a solid blog series. I challenged myself by writing a four-part series on the subject multiple social media platforms and their application to careers.
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Unfortunately, that blog no longer exists. The following is the four-part series complete with links.
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4 Uses for Social Media You Don't Want to Miss: Part 1 Professional Branding and LinkedIn
4 Uses for Social Media You Don't Want to Miss: Part 2 Networking and Twitter
4 Uses for Social Media You Don't Want to Miss: Part 3 Content and Facebook
4 Uses for Social Media You Don't Want to Miss: Part 4 SEO and WordPress
Mint Tea: Multimedia Journey
The Mint Tea website is the setting into which the multi-faceted essay "Oasis" is expressed. "Oasis" extols the virtue of gardens as an example of a ceremonial essay of praise such as you might write to introduce someone at an event or write about a book newly released. This multimedia site adds to the text the sensuality of my own colorful flora portraits, aural wind chimes, and dynamic website design. Mint Tea is an example of what to do with a subject for parties potentially less interested in it.
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In fact, it intrigued the editors of Plants & Poetry Journal who took the experience one step further. To text and photograph, they added a recording of me reading parts of the "Oasis" text, including it in a digital publication and intending the website's use for social media content.
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This is communication through the multimedia of website design, photography, audio, digital publication, and social media content on the foundation of text.
"Justice" Google Site
"Justice" was my initiation in the application Google Sites. The professor's pre-formatted design framework was the first challenge as I made color, image, and text choices that suited both his web design and my text.
The essay itself explores whether Pres. Trump executed what he originally termed the “Muslim Ban” unjustly and prejudicially, without respect to his office, the values of the Constitution, humanity, or reliable intel. In addition to the essay, the web page assignment called for an abstract, bio, and my reason for selecting to post this piece.
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I applied multimedia resources to “Justice” through--
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Hyperlinks and chart reference
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Google Site format and design elements
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Personal processed photographs
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License-free web images
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Dynamic document presentation
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Because the original site is locked for those who contributed to it, so I gained more experience by back-tracing and creating the original design from scratch.
Picture the Present Photo Essay
My approach to the “Picture the Present” deliberative essay, the purpose of which is to to cause something to progress or improve, was two-fold. First, I shared personal experience of meditation through photography as an alternative to common meditation practices. Second, I used photography to make a point, and to draw a broad audience into the subject through my photographs' stories. Revealing my personal struggle with meditation, showing my own photographs, and narrating a specific instance in sensual description encouraged the audience to be present in the moment I describe, see a different take on meditation and photography, and be inspired through the media of text and images.
"Keepers" by Y. Hope Osborn
E-Newsletters for Office of Campus Life
The Office of Campus Life's confidence in me as an intern producing e-newsletters was high enough that they kept me through a full year. During that time I was responsible for helping create the original e-newsletter format and producing all ideas for and content of the e-newsletter except for the introduction letter written by the department head for Non-Traditional Students. These multimedia--email, photos, copy, e-newsletter--forms gave me an opportunity to be creative and to gain experience in a different area of content. These are just a few pdf e-newsletter samples:
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By Y. Hope Osborn
for Campus Life
Advanced Persuasive Advertisement Site
This project's parameters were creating in any format an advertisement that sought to persuade an audience to study persuasive writing in the U of AR at Little Rock Rhetoric and Writing Department Advanced Persuasive course. I chose a website and and to interpret the limitation of a brief document as opportunity to test my experience with a single page website. The website shows how diverse and dynamic the deceptively dry-sounding course and persuasive writing in general can be. I used naturally positive colors; relatable images like those for the popular division between of Star Trek and Star Wars fans; hyperlinks to YouTube videos and my Mint Tea website; and music to cultivate audience interest.
Red Cross Blogs
Within the Research page you find a project in which I chose to volunteer at the Red Cross for an immersion experience. A couple of years later I found a place on the Red Cross website where you post very brief messages to the Red Cross, and I thought it wouldn't hurt to see if my written piece might help. I only sent a couple of sentences with a brief context in the limited space within the form.
Two days later, I received a call from a Little Rock chapter Red Cross employee who had themselves been called by someone else. This Little Rock employee not only wanted to use my work in multiple blogs but asked if I might be interested in blogging for the Arkansas-Oklahoma region. In the beginning we discussed particular subjects to cover, but before very long she gave me complete freedom to choose the topic and, next, the opportunity to be Lead Content Producer, overseeing bloggers across the region in conjunction with my blogging if so chose.
For the Arkansas-Oklahoma region's awards ceremony that year, that same employee, at that time turned Executive Director in Little Rock, awarded me a plaque for volunteer excellence.
Even after I left the Red Cross the ideas for blogs I wrote with them were repurposed to create blogs as an intern with the career coach. Additionally, in the essay, Justice, I referenced my experience with the Red Cross and one of the blogs in which I had written,
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People were picketing and criticizing the Red Cross for helping those Muslims stuck in airports and other places apart from their families and homes because of the 'Muslim Ban.' It infuriated me and I would have loved to kick ass in expressing some way the Red Cross’s impartial mission to aid people whomever and wherever they are. I felt bound by my responsibility toward the Red Cross mission to restrict speaking out in my personal blog. I finally expressed the strong emotions I felt about the whole thing to the Executive Director, my supervisor was by that time, and she encouraged me to vent safely to her personally about it. Then she rallied me to write my passionate blog within the ideology of the Red Cross mission which birthed "Principle-Not Stance."
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That "Justice" essay with the hyperlink to the blog then became part of my Google site. This all shows our age's rolling repurpose and reuse of content for a variety of uses.
Here are a few samples of blogs I wrote for the Red Cross. They show the range of content I produced.
ABC Fitness Solutions
My first experience as a blogger, the job for which I competed with a large pool of applicants for employment, was for what is now ABC Fitness Solutions, an international fitness software company. I was tasked with writing blogs both for gym users and for their gym business owner. The variety I aspired for in this as well as other blogger experiences is indicative of what I wrote about Creative Nonfiction,
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I read, study, learn, listen, view, touch, storing up knowledge for every existent is an opportunity of discovery for the audience and for myself to be mindful of the world in minute and minutiae among mundane and magnific topics.
​​Strength-Train Your Gym for Slow Seasons
