Podcasts, sound essays, and audio essays are an increasingly popular media for storytelling, education, reporting, commentary, and more. From recent hits like Serial and S-Town, to old favorites like Radiolab and This American Life, the wide variety of podcasts available represent an exciting and approachable opportunity to integrate new types of media into the classroom. (1)
As a writing assignment, podcast composition can help students to grasp key concepts such as audience, purpose, and context; as Jennifer L. Bowie argues, podcasts prove particularly effective at helping students to find purchase in classical rhetoric, including Aristotle’s five canons (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery). Students’ understanding of these concepts will help them not only to create better podcasts, but to develop a transferrable approach to writing in a variety of contexts.
But podcast composition involves much more than just reading an essay into a microphone. The framework below, adapted from Sweetland’s Basic Framework for Sequencing and Scaffolding Multimodal Composition Assignments, offers specific approaches to creating effective podcast composition assignments in any college-level course.
Sweetland’s resources on Supporting Multimodal Analysis offer useful concepts and vocabulary for analyzing podcasts as multimodal texts. The primary modes involved in podcast composition are:
Linguistic – word choice; delivery of spoken or written text (tone); organization into sentences, phrases, paragraphs, etc.; coherence of individual words and ideas.
Audio – music; sound effects; ambient noise/sounds; silence; tone; emphasis and accent of voice in spoken language; volume of sound.
In Navigating The Soundscape, Composing With Audio, Rodrigue and co-authors propose five “sonic strategies” applicable to podcast composition. These are music, silence, sound effects, sound interaction, and voice. For Rodrigue et al.’s “microexaminations” of these five strategies in the podcast composition process, see their excellent webtext.
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