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This article presents a classroom assignment that uses memes to help journalism students engage with editing rules. Students identify a writing rule or convention they find most difficult, design a meme to illustrate it, and contribute their work to a class collection. The assignment combines humor, peer learning, and critical reflection, producing a shared resource that acts as a crowdsourced repository of editing guidance that students can reference as they continue refining their editing skills. The article outlines how the assignment works, highlights its pedagogical value, addresses potential pitfalls, and discusses observed impacts. While designed for a journalism class, the assignment can be readily adapted for writing courses in strategic communication.
Editing, whether it involves grammar, Associated Press style, or journalistic conventions, remains a persistent challenge in journalism classes. Students often find it difficult to master editing rules, while traditional exercises may seem repetitive or disconnected from their everyday media practices. This assignment adapts internet memes, a form of communication students know and routinely practice outside of class (Milner, 2018; Shifman, 2014), to support the teaching of editing in journalism classes by asking students to translate challenging editing rules into memes and contribute them to a shared class collection. Having students reframe editing rules in this way challenges them to think critically about their recurring errors and to practice distilling knowledge into quick, memorable takeaways. The result is a collection of memes that functions as a collective editing reference that is at once humorous, practical, and expressed in students own voices.
Although this article draws on my experience developing the assignment for journalism classes, it can be readily adapted for courses in strategic communication and, given its accessibility and minimal resource requirements, is well suited to a variety of learning environments.
Assignment design. Students are asked to reflect on the editing rule or convention they find most challenging by revisiting their writing, create a meme that encapsulates this rule, and upload it to a shared slide deck on Google Drive, which becomes a crowdsourced repository of actionable editing guidance that students can reference as they continue refining their editing skills.
The memes can relate to any aspect of editing, such as grammar, AP style or journalistic writing conventions, and should provide actionable guidance...