Decoding Cultural Literacy: Rhetorically Analyzing Everyday Media for Professional Writers

Kandice Rainn  Fowlkes

doi:10.21900/pww.30

Decoding Cultural Literacy: Rhetorically Analyzing Everyday Media for Professional Writers

Authors

Kandice Rainn Fowlkes

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21900/pww.30

Keywords:

Art, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Social Media, Rhetoric, Images, Archives, Visualizations, Music, African American Studies

Synopsis

Forthcoming Title:

"With the goal of improving cultural literacy among writers, this new digital publication positions writing as an active process in the development of cultural competency, thus effectively establishing the connection between rhetorical analysis and improved cultural literacy. Fowlkes’s method for writing rhetorical analysis is especially important considering the public’s increasing access to cultural performances across various media platforms and the growing necessity to competently engage with diverse perspectives and experiences….Decoding Cultural Literacy provides a much-needed contribution to the intersection of writing, rhetoric, and media studies."

Taryn K. Myers, West Chester University

Go beyond the surface level in reading and producing persuasive, yet efficacious writing. For writers looking to engage with everyday media, cultural background knowledge is essential to understanding the depths of any media and thus interpreting its message. This handbook helps writers learn what cultural literacy is, how to critically analyze media, and then create writing which appeals to one’s own authorial credibility. The key takeaway of Decoding Cultural Literacy is to help analyze everyday media through the rhetorical analysis process, and then engage in a recursive dance by using the same rhetorical steps to write works which are culturally literate and effective for your chosen audience. These same steps for writers will then be applied for moving forward into a professional writing setting and showing how to transfer these skills for the everyday writer, to a professional writing career.

This title was peer reviewed with a single-blind process by the AFRO-PWW editorial board.

Please cite this book using the DOI: 10.21900/pww.30.

Chapters

About This Book
Introduction
Part I: Defining Cultural Literacy
1. What Is Rhetoric?
2. Rhetoric and Cultural Literacy
PART II: Reading Cultural Literacy
3. Analyzing Cultural Literacy
4. Annotating Cultural Literacy
PART III: Writing Cultural Literacy
5. The Rhetorical Analysis
6. Writing the Rhetorical Analysis
7. Concise Writing
PART IV: Your Rhetoric Your Way
8. Methods to Approach Professional Writing
Bibliography

Author Biography

Kandice Rainn Fowlkes

Originally from Decatur, Georgia, Kandice Rainn Fowlkes serves as Editor-in-Chief of Vinyle Zine, a Black literary journal pedagogically driven to increase the cultural literacy within the African diaspora. She is also an English Instructor and Writing Center Manager at Clayton State University. With a master’s in Professional Writing, Kandice Rainn Fowlkes is currently pursuing her doctorate in Humanities and African American Studies at Clark Atlanta University.