The Video Essay

Anxiety and Relationship Goals in the Video Essay

I teach First Year Writing courses at St. John’s University, and for the first time this semester, I assigned what we called a video essay. I’ve previously asked students to create short documentary films before, but I decided to make the video essay an option after the work I saw on the website StoryCenter.

When writing incorporates some combination of text, images, links, sound, and video, it is called multimodal writing. I ask my students to do digital multimodal writing because of the degree to which their reading, writing, and thinking happens in conjunction with the screens of their devices. I think the less students read and publish in digital spaces, the more they are likely to be manipulated by them.

If you’d like to see the directions I gave the class for the video essay, you can click here.

Two of my students gave me permission to share their essays. I think you’ll really enjoy them!

Here is Jessica’s essay about relationship goals:

And here is Jisan’s about anxiety:

Thanks for taking the time to check out some of what we were up to this semester!

Author: Torg

Writing Teacher at App State, Head Women's Basketball Coach at Watauga HS in Boone NC and podcaster at Torg Stories View all posts by Torg