This English 1102 course asked students to consider how health functions as a social ideal and regulates our actions based on the norms, attitudes, and ideas that prevail in our culture. In addition to this course-specific theme, there is a set of common objectives that this course was designed to teach, developing a Writing Process with revision, synthesis, and drafting and rhetorically effective presentation for distinct audiences and contexts. Revision and research play a large role in developing ideas and arguments and making the arguments robust. While this recursive, iterative process played a role in every assignment, the digital reading journal is the primary source of process documents.

Assigned prompts in the reading journal correspond to class readings and ask students to develop arguments and ideas based on course material. Sourcing and eventual finetuning of these ideas both play a role in the journal: in most entries, we were asked to use quotes and references from both class material and pop culture or general research. This is especially visible in the final post ("Medical Devices, the DMCA, and the corporate profit motive"), where I used links to other websites to make it a better document to refer back to later. Images and analysis also emphasized the role of the digital reading journal as a process document for my analysis of specific works or the overall health theme. But each entry also marks my progress in the general skills of analysis and rhetoric, especially. The electronic form factor has unique norms and options to elaborate, like a less formalistic style and heavy image presence, and these can change the rhetorical strategy I use when sectioning and emphasis are much more fluent than an essay.

The use of images actually enhances my analysis, too, because I'm responding to the ideas that another work provides, and if I can directly include that work, it becomes much easier to speak about since the audience is meant to refer back to it and familiarize themselves. When the audience is me, this anchors my ideas to a specific factual reference, like the timeline in "HeLa and Henrietta."

Quotes and the use of photos to highlight what's important is particular to the electronic medium, and it's particularly valuable when creating a personal reference piece. This is one example of shifting language and presentation towards the desired audience and situation, which is one of the major points of the Rhetoric Learning Outcome.