Digital culture and new media have transformed reading, writing, and research practices, revealing the multidimensionality of texts, blurring the roles of writer and audience, and creating new spaces for dialogue, collaboration, and participation in rhetorical acts. In this course, we will apply rhetorical principles across a variety of media genres-from blogs, to YouTube videos, to podcasts, to Tweets, to Instagram and Facebook posts-and will address the complex realities and challenges of composing ethical, persuasive, and effective arguments in the 21st century. The course will explore how traditional processes of writing and reading texts are challenged by communication across a range of diverse new media genres that employ multiple modes of communication (linguistic, visual, spatial, gestural, and aural ways of making meaning). We will examine the impact of multimedia/multimodal discourse on ourselves and our culture, and through our analysis and production of multimodal texts, we will explore how medium and mode shape the message, work to persuade multiple audiences, and alter the way that we understand, structure, and process knowledge. Prerequisite: Prior completion of at least one 300- or 400-level English course.