Near the end of 2023, a popular YouTube creator known as hbomberguy released a video on plagiarism — a topic often confined to conversations in composition classrooms. The four-hour video, “Plagiarism and You(Tube),” meticulously analyzes how some of its most popular essayists failed to cite sources and, at times, stole content from lesser-known creators. The video resonated, earning 10 million views just weeks after its release and mainstream coverage on NBC News, Vulture, and Vox. As of this writing, the video has 25 million views.
Seeing a lengthy video about research and writing ethics go viral may surprise academics who routinely discuss that topic in class, but perhaps it shouldn’t. Over the past decade, longform video essays on niche topics have thrived on YouTube. Indeed, as Vox reported, “when the platform began to prioritize watch-time over views, the genre flourished.” Now, deeply researched videos on all manner of subjects can be found on YouTube. Many of these examples weave research, narrative, and editing to convey messages that are rhetorically sophisticated and visually striking.
What does all of that have to do with college writing? Considering the rhetorical techniques on display in so many video essays, our proposal here is simple: Undergraduates can effectively develop writing and research skills by experimenting with the video-essay genre.
Despite being considered the “TikTok Generation,” Gen Zers say their social-media platform of choice is YouTube. A 2023 study named YouTube as the social-media platform of choice among teens, with 71 percent of respondents saying they used the website daily. Moreover, an earlier study found that young people prefer using YouTube videos as learning tools compared with print books. Rather than bemoan those trends, we suggest that instructors connect students’ interest in videos with learning goals of writing courses.
Video essays allow students to practice and refine many of the same skills as the traditional research paper — and in ways that bring those skills out of the classroom and into students’ worlds. Additionally, research in the field of writing and digital-media studies suggests that students actually enjoy creating video essays. They see video composition as akin to how they write and communicate outside of school, potentially allowing for authentic expression and creativity.
By composing in a format that feels natural and comfortable, students can express their ideas with more confidence in the classroom and feel more invested in the work.
We’ve seen that happen in our own courses. Our students have enthusiastically used the video-essay format to produce work that is critical, reflective and, at times, joyful. Our institutional contexts differ. One of us (Michael) teaches writing and humanities courses at a private liberal-arts college, and the other (Natalie) teaches general-education writing at both a large public university and a local community college. Here’s how each of us incorporated video-essay assignments into our teaching.
Michael
Teach a video-composition unit. My inspiration to experiment with video essays grew out of conversations with writing colleagues shortly after the pandemic. Faced with flagging student motivation, we spent many faculty meetings speculating about the possible causes: learning loss borne out of the abrupt pivot to remote teaching, new priorities in a time of personal crisis, shifting attitudes toward the value of a college degree. We were all grasping for strategies after Covid restrictions had left so many students feeling isolated from their education and from one another.
For me, one of the most promising ideas came from a colleague who had offered video-discussion options in his first-year writing course. Instead of having students reflect on course readings and research topics via online discussion boards, he asked his students to record video exchanges with peers. Something about the video format invigorated students. My colleague noticed that their voices became vivid and lively, in contrast with the usual rote and impersonal online posts.
That was an intriguing enough development that I decided to create a course in which students could study and practice video composition in a formal way.
I taught “Digital Storytelling” for the first time last spring. The description on my syllabus emphasizes how students will study “a range of digital media, including audio documentaries, video essays, interactive webtexts, and video games.” But the real star of the show is the video-essay unit, and students spend the most time on that genre. In this unit, I ask each student to find a video essay on a topic of their choosing and write about how the example they select uses storytelling and editing techniques to make an argument. After completing this written essay, I train students how to use Adobe Premiere Rush. Students then apply their analysis and production skills to create their own 10-minute video-essay project.
If my conversations with, and evaluations from, students are to be trusted, they found the video-essay unit to be the most productive part of the semester. Students name-dropped YouTube creators they liked and explained what made videos by these personalities so engaging. With only minimal prompting, they conducted sophisticated rhetorical analyses of how YouTube essayists use the format to present arguments. In their own video essays, students adapted concepts that are beloved by those of us who teach writing — purpose, audience, context, and genre.
I was surprised by how organically my composition lessons applied to the teaching of video essays. It turns out that drafting, argumentation, organization, and research are foundational to the creation of an effective video essay, too. The one major difference that I have noticed between my teaching of written composition and of video composition is the level of student enthusiasm.
Video essays make sense to students. The genre excites them. Why not harness that interest to help students meet the learning outcomes associated with undergraduate writing programs?
Natalie
Have students create documentary shorts. My decision to center video creation in my second-year composition course started with a question: What if, instead of writing a traditional research paper, students produced a documentary short?
My goal as an instructor is to encourage students to see that the powers of analysis and storytelling extend far beyond the confines of a 15-week semester, a campus classroom, and a stack of 12-point, Times New Roman essays that I alone read. While my students often approach written essay assignments with lukewarm enthusiasm and some trepidation, they freely and avidly consume video content that informs, argues, and builds awareness on a variety of issues. Asking them to create compositions in a format that is both exciting and familiar to them seemed a good way to minimize apathy.
Yet form — no matter how engaging — is nothing without content. I wanted students to create thoughtful, analytical, research-driven compositions on pressing topics that captured their own interest. What better way to do that than to ask students to take video cameras and microphones into their own worlds?
The assignment I devised: Produce a documentary short of 6 to 10 minutes — a kind of video essay — about an issue facing a community they belong to. Because we build communities around our personal identities, the places we live, and the things we love and believe, those varied factors are ripe for analysis in the composition classroom.
In creating a documentary short, students completed many of the same steps as they would for a conventional essay. They conducted research, reading articles in academic journals and news sites, as well as consulting local resources. They interviewed people (doing field research of sorts) and gathered photos and video clips. Then they combined all of those elements in a cohesive informative video.
Students leave class feeling the weight and strength of their own voices.
While viewing their finished compositions, it became clear to me that, when instructors encourage students to “go into your world and describe what you see,” we unlock so much student potential and expertise. Most of my students chose to include an element of personal narrative in their video projects. Their use of voice-overs or video-diary style scenes allowed them to describe their personal relationship to their topic and community.
Among the diverse topics were videos on the sense of belonging fostered in online gaming groups and on the aspirations of women majoring in STEM fields. As a skateboarder, one student argued that skate parks decrease rather than increase crime in low-income areas and, therefore, our city should invest in more urban skate parks. Another student, whose hometown is Lewiston, Me., changed his topic midsemester after the 2023 tragic mass shooting there and traveled home to interview his friends and family about gun control.
Students also submitted reflective statements about creative decisions they’d made throughout the project and about how their ideas of community and composition changed over the course of the semester. Some students wrote that the assignment had deepened their investment and sense of belonging to the community on which they’d focused their project. Others wrote that making a documentary short had inspired them to think more purposefully about how to convey their ideas. Combining research, personal stories, photos, and video clips challenged them to figure out how those elements might come together to convey a desired message.
There’s something uniquely powerful — and vulnerable — about recording your voice and showing your face on camera to communicate opinions and information about an important issue. In composition classrooms, video projects not only strengthen student investment in their work but also allow students to investigate the power of storytelling and its ethical implications. Because of its potential to create an almost immediate impact, video storytelling can exert a real influence (good or bad) on our world and those around us.
Students leave class feeling the weight and strength of their own voices. The world is there for them, and they have the power to compose within it.
We see video essays as a gateway to writing education, a way for students to put composition principles into practice in exciting ways. Our advice here is not for teachers to get rid of the traditional academic essay entirely. Instead, we suggest that instructors recognize and respond to growing student interest in the video-essay genre. In doing so, teachers can showcase how important writing is to the creation of video work and clarify the conventions that define different genres. As dominant modes of expression and cultural forms shift, so should our teaching. What remains constant is our mission to provide students with the tools to inform, inspire, and persuade others.
