I found the process of reformatting Dr. King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail into a modern form to be an interesting one. I can’t say I’ve ever done a project of this type before and I found the process a bit daunting at first. I primarily work within text, and being challenged to make a more visual depiction of the text was hard. I think for this project in particular I found a nice middle ground between making something visual and sticking to my comfort zone. Facebook is the social media that contains the most text so I think I made the right call in using it.

Next, I want to get into the nitty-gritty of why and how i achieved certain objectives. I pretty heavily target Pathos for this post as I feel an issue like racism is most effectively discussed in emotional terms. I do use portions of his letter that discuss his credentials as a pastor for a bit of Ethos. My thought process there was that southern evangelical and clergymen, his primary target, would be more willing to listen to him if they had something they could relate to. My use of, “I AM IN BIRMINGHAM BECAUSE INJUSTICE IS HERE,” had multiple facets. I wanted to break up the monotony that comes from large blocks of text by interjecting moments of intensity. I also wanted to establish a consistent pace as the phrase is used to break up the piece into sections.

So why transform it at all? Even though I personally don’t think any genre will outdo the simple elegance of his letter, I do think that moving it into a Facebook format has advantages. It does allow for the use of images, giving a more concrete foundation for words to paint, but it also has to go into less depth. A letter primes the reader to expect a lot of text, but any other format forces simplification and a loss of content and context.

I learned a few things. First, people really don’t like reading nowadays. The more efficiently you can visually communicate an idea the better off you’ll be. At least, in a social media setting this holds true. I learned a fair bit about rhetoric and rhetorical devices, but more than that I learned how to effectively implement them. It’s to be able to put ideas into practice. Although this project definitely started me on the right track, I wouldn’t really learn the power of visual devices until much later.