This course explores the use of social media campaigns for building organizational or brand identities for audiences including customers, interest groups, and followers on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We look at how to use social media to create coherent messaging, build a reputation, and cultivate reader loyalty. We also explore how readers and designers approach multimedia texts as complex entities that bring together language, image, sound, and gesture to produce a coherent message. With its multiple modalities--visual, aural, and somatic--social media makes different types of demands of its creators and its audiences than those imposed by conventional top-down, left-to-right texts that one encounters in books, essays, or letters, requiring an expanded understanding of rhetorical strategies and contexts. By the end of the course, students have a multiplatform portfolio of social content to show employers, colleagues, or clients.
You have the option to enroll in the individual course without committing to the entire Certificate in Professional Writing, enjoying the flexibility and expertise offered by Penn LPS Online to suit your schedule and interests.
*Academic credit is defined by the University of Pennsylvania as a course unit (c.u.). A course unit (c.u.) is a general measure of academic work over a period of time, typically a term (semester or summer). A c.u. (or a fraction of a c.u.) represents different types of academic work across different types of academic programs and is the basic unit of progress toward a degree. One c.u. is usually converted to a four-semester-hour course.
Instructor
- Director, Critical Writing Program, Marks Family Center for Excellence in Writing
Matthew Osborn is the Director of The Critical Writing Program at Penn and holds a PhD in rhetorics, communication, and information design. In addition to Critical Writing Seminars, Matthew's teaching experience includes technical communication, history of language and digital technologies, media theory, document design, and video production. His research explores rhetorical dynamics among criticism, writing, and arts innovations.
