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Context

    Besides featuring student experiences on the PWR social media and blog during Fall 2020, I wanted to give credit to the faculty who make all those experiences in the PWR program possible during my time as the PWR Social Media Intern. Many students in the program would mention the professors’ dedication to helping students become better writers and achieve their professional goals both in and out of the classroom when asked what they love about PWR. I published one post at my supervisor’s request introducing a new faculty member to others with an interest in the PWR program (students, alumni, etc.), but I also wanted to dive deeper into what the professors do to develop their own understanding of writing-related topics and contribute to the academic field of rhetoric. So, I chose a professor who had recently had a journal article published, Dr. Li Li, and emailed her a list of questions about the article as I did with my student-focused blog posts. After she sent back her responses, I edited them for grammar and clarity while keeping her original ideas as intact as possible, wrote an introduction, published the post, and advertised it on social media.

Rhetorical Decisions

    Aside from the convenience of Dr. Li’s recent article publication, she was an effective choice of a subject for this post because she is the PWR Major Coordinator (establishing ethos) and because more current Elon students seem to know her than some of the other PWR professors from having taken the introductory courses that she often teaches, such as PWR 215: Intro to Professional Writing & Rhetoric and ENG 110: First-Year College Writing. I did not know what the topic of Dr. Li’s article was before I received her responses, but once I read what she had written, I realized how timely her analysis was as well. Although she studied historical documents from centuries ago, her research on the data visualization of race and immigration can apply to the rhetorical analysis of today’s political and social justice communication--concepts about which many student audience members are passionate (allowing for pathos).

    As I did with my blog post about student research, I put the questions in what seemed to be chronological order in my email to Dr. Li, and the way her responses were written told a story about her investigation. For the main image in this post, I decided to add a photo of the original graph that had inspired the analysis in the middle of the paragraph that discussed idea development so that readers could have a visual reference in proximity to that text. Finally, in contrast to the advertisements for my other blog posts, I added a professional headshot of Dr. Li to a simple Canva graphic that used the recognizable blue/yellow/white PWR color scheme and contained a blurb about the post instead of posting the photo by itself on Instagram. I thought this format would appear more professional to identify a faculty member rather than tagging a personal Instagram account as I did with the students I featured.

Reflection

    I think that the story told in this blog post accomplished what I had set out to do in showing how a PWR professor had contributed to the field of rhetoric outside the classroom. I again employed my editing and interviewing skills in telling that story, but I added the aspect of a professional perspective to this post. Sometimes writing within the same genre and in a similar rhetorical context requires adaptation based on the subject matter, which I can see when I compare this blog post to the ones I wrote about students during my time as the PWR Social Media Intern.