Reverse Transfer: Using Social Media to Teach Academic Paper Principles

Existing scholarship has predominantly looked at transfer with the composition classroom as the primary location for writing skill development. Subsequently, composition scholars have theorized about and constructed courses around this developmental, classroom-centered setup, with multiliteracy and multimodality at the forefront of these applications. This article adds a new theory and application into the mix. By using the growing influence of social media, the author has adopted a theory of transfer in which the focus is not about how the skills of the classroom can answer the call to the public and thus send students equipped and ready for a world of dialogue and symbolic meaning-making. Rather, the article focuses on the transfer of students' preexisting public rhetoric skills, via social media, into the classroom, which then deconstruct with my students, through class activities and assignments, to show how these skills can be used within traditional academic prose.