WRTC

“The School of Writing, Rhetoric and Technical Communication is a community committed to preparing its students—both writers and technical and scientific communicators—for lives of enlightened, global citizenship.”

Although "a picture is worth a thousand words," I had a difficult time selecting the images for this assignment. My first choice (from the Science Communication Center at the University of Tennessee--Knoxville) depicts several icons of writing, rhetoric, communication, and various forms of technology: a pen and paper; a computer; a stack of books. To me, this combination suggests the timeless and multifaceted nature of the writer's (rhetorician's, communicator's) art.

The mission statement makes (excessive?) use of words that begin with "comm-": communication, community, committed, communicators. To honor this choice, and to particularize the WRTC experience to JMU, I felt that my second image should feature people. But which people? Today's students learning their craft, or the professionals that those students presumably will become? The "communicators" themselves, or the people around the globe with whom they will be communicating? I wanted to take race and gender into account on some level, as we have previously discussed. As well, with more and more people going back to school at mid-life, I wanted to find an image that would include an older or otherwise "nontraditional" student; even in our tiny Technical & Scientific Editing class, 25% of us are over 30. Finally, it would have been nice for some JMU colors or logos to make an appearance, perhaps in the form of a sweatshirt. I simply couldn't find an image that satisfied me, so I went in a different direction:

James Madison--an icon of the university, and a writer and communicator of no mean stature (metaphorically speaking, anyway).