Writing with Video






Writing with Video grew out of discussions, and an eventual collaboration with Maria Lovett, a former New York documentary filmmaker. The course was predicated on the idea that, in the 21st century, contemporary rhetoric had come off the page – that writing was no longer the only, or even the primary, form of rhetorical communication in the modern world; that it is authored, transmitted, and received differently in an increasingly screen-based culture. 

We argued that today’s media landscape was increasingly populated by rhetorical forms that pushed beyond the technologies of ink and paper, that video was a powerful contemporary rhetorical form, and that university students would be well served by an advanced composition General Education course that successfully combined traditional writing with video production literacy.

The resulting curriculum combined intensive writing practices, critical thinking about both written and electronic media, and design thinking methodologies. Traditional writing was deployed in the process of drafting rhetorical messages, with the final text being completed in the form of a video.

The Writing with Video curriculum was initially developed in 2004. In 2006, Kimber Andrews undertook a revision of the curriculum that incorporated her expertise as a dancer, choreographer, and a PhD student in education.

From 2005 to 2016 the University of Illinois approved Writing with Video for General Education advanced composition credit, offering four undergraduate and one graduate section each semester. The courses always filled within a matter of days during pre-registration and the university was never able to completely satisfy enrollment demand.

Writing with Video was a ground breaking curriculum, one of the first systematic approaches to rhetorical video composition. It redefined multimodal composition pedagogy and studies, and the curriculum was guided by an integration principle: when writing and video production are fused into an integrated whole something synergistic occurs – the writing feeds the video, which feeds back into the writing. This concept distinguished the course from other programs that simply added video to a pre-existing writing curriculum.

The emphasis on synergistic integration rather than simple addition of video to writing instruction offered a sustainable model for digital media education that maintained academic rigor while preparing students to be sophisticated authors and consumers of contemporary rhetorical media. The course also bridged the gap between composition studies and the visual arts through rigorous intellectual grounding while maintaining accessibility for students across diverse disciplines. This established a model that influenced subsequent multimodal composition and rhetoric programs nationwide.