This course expands the scope of traditional academic communication practices to consider how public-facing communication—particularly that based in multiple modes, including linguistic, visual, spatial, gestural, and aural—is shaped by the dialogic meaning-making that occurs across a variety of social and cultural contexts. In this course, students will consider how public communicative situations differ from academic communicative situations. Coursework will engage in focused examinations of public communication genres in order to compare and contrast how these genres deviate from traditional academic communication. Throughout these investigations there will be a focus on understanding how and why different communicative genres persuade (e.g. medium, platform, mode, etc.), as well as attention to students’ ability to transfer learned skills to their own experiences with public communication. Students will practice composing across contexts, modes, and technologies in order to investigate, analyze, and critically reflect upon the rhetorical affordances and expectations of diverse communicative spaces.