About this Book
Decoding Cultural Literacy: Rhetorically Analyzing Everyday Media for Professional Writers
By Kandice Rainn Fowlkes
Published by Publishing Without Walls (PWW), Urbana, Ill., an imprint of the Illinois Open Publishing Network at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Published as part of the AFRO Publishing Without Walls (AFRO-PWW) series.
ISBN 978-1-946011-33-6
Please cite this book using the DOI: 10.21900/pww.30
Synopsis
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.
Image Notes and Credits
Cover image design by Kandice Rainn Fowlkes.
Funding Notice
This work is a digital humanities project that was developed as part of a collaboration with the History of Black Writing’s Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP) Digital Publishing Scholars Program, an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, and African American Studies Publishing Without Walls 2 (AFRO-PWW 2) at the University of Illinois, funded by the Mellon Foundation. AFRO-PWW 2 collaborates with Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Black Studies scholars at PWIs, and community-based memory institutions to produce open-source digital publications that document Black lives and experiences.
Copyright
Decoding Cultural Literacy: Rhetorically Analyzing Everyday Media for Professional Writers Copyright © 2025 by Kandice Rainn Fowlkes
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, unless otherwise noted.
