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Kolton Tang
Ms. Jensen
Writing 2
December 7, 2021
Aesthetically Presenting

“I can’t breathe” - George Floyd’s three words captured the whole country and

dominated social media. Calls for social justice and police reform swept the country with many

teenagers and young adults at the forefront. Many of my peers will remember when people

would share Instagram infographics about police brutality, racism, and LGBTQ+ issues on their

Instagram stories.

An Instagram infographic felt like the perfect genre for translating my academic article.

My academic article,“Estimated car cost as a predictor of driver yielding behaviors for

pedestrians” by Courtney Coughenour, et al., discusses a study on how race, gender, and class

impact the rate at which drivers yield for pedestrians. The study gathered pedestrians that varied

by race (Black vs. White) and gender (man vs. woman) and had them attempt to cross a street

while the researchers counted how frequently drivers stopped for each race and gender. They

would record each interaction and later on, they would estimated the value of each car.

This article was originally published in the Journal of Transport and Health, which is

geared towards city planners, traffic engineers, and public health experts. While the meat and

potatoes of this article might easily pique the interests of young activists, many of them will

never come across this article not only because young adults don’t regularly read academic

journals but also thanks to the fact that this publication doesn’t even have its own website. In

searching for a good genre to transpose this article into, I thought about this line by Lisa

Bickmore where she discusses how “there are also times when you’ll have opportunities to

decide upon the genres you’ll use to write in the world...this requires some critical imagination
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and research on your part—imagining the writing situation, and the genres that might respond

well in that situation” (Bickmore). Bickmore argues that when picking a genre to contribute to,

the author must find one that will mesh well with the desired audience. Applying this wisdom to

my situation meant using a genre that would speak to young activists. The article originally

appealed to traffic engineers and public health experts so to share the article’s findings with a

younger demographic, I chose to make an Instagram infographic because it is a more common

medium among young adults.

As I was reading the original article, I searched for any facts or statistics that were

relevant to inequity and social justice. While compiling a list of conclusions and statistics, I

organized them by either race, gender, or class. My new genre is largely akin to a PowerPoint

without a presenter, so after collecting my data, the largest tasks were condensing the

information and presenting it aesthetically. This medium is defined by concision. To start, I am

limited in terms of how many slides I can make due to Instagram’s 10 photo limit. On top of that,

social media is the only place where you’ll find shorter attention spans than daycare centers, so

it's important to redact anything that will make someone lose interest and move on to the next

post. Additionally, people generally use Instagram on their phones so I have to make sure people

can read the text on a small cell phone screen. Thus, compressing several, single-spaced pages of

academic text into 10 slides proved complex. I ended up omitting a lot of the discussion on the

mathematics behind how they calculated their data because, quite frankly, I don’t even

understand much of it as a STEM major so I doubt I could effectively share it while keeping

people’s interest. A key characteristic about infographics is that they tend to have cheery/vibrant

backgrounds that stand in contrast to the sad truths of the text because people scroll through
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Instagram pretty quickly so a plain text over bland backgrounds get overlooked. Accordingly, I

found an eye-catching and vibrant color palette and unique font.

There weren’t many challenges I faced in this project. Arguably, reading the original

academic article was an arduous task in and of itself because it falls victim to its genre in that the

writing is dry and monotonous, but that feels needlessly mean to the author, whose priority was

set on professionally sharing a study and not sex appeal. The other notable challenge was

organizing the slides of my infographic. For that, I turned to Scott McCloud’s “Writing with

Pictures” because, even though my translation isn’t a comic, it is meant to be consumed slide by

slide like a comic. McCloud says that,

“Even with rough sketches like these, a casual reader should now be able to ‘read’ the
action clearly. Our Choice of Moment - the selection process that lead to these eight
panels- plays an important role in insuring that clarity. The moments chosen in the
above sequence represent the most direct, efficient route to communicating our simple
plot” (McCloud 12).
The author makes a point that comics should flow in a way that’s easy for the reader to keep up

with while being on the path of least resistance. I followed in his words by making sure my

slides were easy to follow by incorporating title slides and easy-to-digest word blobs.

Stepping back from this project, I’m very pleased with what I created. I’ve always

enjoyed projects where I am able to express my creativity. The process showed me how

important this type of work is. There are tons of important stories and studies out there but most

people will never see them because they’re hard reads and even harder to find unless you’re part

of certain discourse communities. While these articles are written for certain audiences, they

don’t realize their full potential in terms of reach. In my instance, the Venn diagram between

traffic engineers, who read the original article, and young activists, who might find it interesting,

would look like a pair of breasts. The work of translating these academic articles is crucial in

spreading information to more people that would find it useful.

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Works Cited

Bickmore, Lisa. “Genre in the Wild: Understanding Genre within Rhetorical (Eco)Systems.” Go

to the Cover Page of Open English @ SLCC, Open English @ SLCC, 1 Aug. 2016,

https://openenglishatslcc.pressbooks.com/chapter/genre-in- the-wild understanding-

genre-within rhetorical-ecosystems/.

Coughenour, Courtney, et al. “Estimated Car Cost as a Predictor of Driver Yielding

Behaviors for Pedestrians.” Journal of Transport & Health, Elsevier, 18 Feb.

2020, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214140520300359?via

%3Dihub#bib4.

McCloud, Scott. “Chapter 1: Writing with Pictures.” Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of

Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels, William Morrow, New York, 2006.