Katherine Ellison, English
The Postal Crisis Reenactment (Ellison, PowerPoint)
During the fall and spring of 2006 I taught a course unit based on documents written and circulated during and after the anthrax cases of October and November 2001. Through an examination of these documents, which include news reports issued by the US Postal Service, a federal protocol for the handling of suspicious packages, and USPS Wanted posters, students in ENG 286: Prose Gone Postal considered the civic responsibilities of readers and writers during times of national crisis. Using these rarely studied official documents, students conducted analyses of the rhetorical decisions made in the writing of disaster, questioning audience, class, the uses of vague wording, and inconsistent typography to better understand patterns in disaster prose. At the culmination of this unit, student teams created their own postal crisis reenactments, imagining and writing about a fictional disaster using the techniques we studied in order to answer these questions: What is the textual progression of a disaster in the media? And how might students use what they learn about critical reading and writing to help create more effective communication during times of crisis?
