Due Dates

November 14: Project Proposal
November 21: First Draft 
December 5: Finished Capstone Project

Technical requirements

• Multimodal web text
• 1200-1500 words
• 6-10 secondary sources

About this assignment

The goal of this assignment is for students to conduct research based on their own interest in new media topics to create a multimodal webtext. Some examples of this particular medium for academic writing include these texts we have read from the publication Kairos.

• What’s in a Name? The Anatomy of Defining New / Multi / Modal / Digital / Media Texts
• The Facebook Papers
• Multimodality in Motion: Disability and Kairotic Spaces

If you imagined your Unit 1 project as something that could be submitted to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, you might imagine this project as something that could be submitted to Kairos.

Possible approaches to take

During Week 12, you will submit a Project Proposal to identify your research goals, potential sources, and plans for your project. This proposal will allow me to give feedback on the appropriateness and feasibility of your potential project, and provide guidance on how to successfully achieve your goals.

Students have some freedom in the purpose and topic of their project, based on your own research interests. The project must be based on scholarly research on new media topics, but there are several avenues you can take to get there.

For example:

• You may choose to create an autoethnography of your own new media writing practices. Examples:
  • Izabela Olejnik, From a Diary to an iPhone: The Extension of Journaling to Digital Forms (Issue 9.2)
  • Jessi Batterman, *Insert Caption That Will Make All Your Followers Like Your Picture Here*
• You may choose to analyze or investigate research questions about online discourse communities. Examples:
  • KJ Rawson, Transgender Worldmaking in Cyberspace
  • Barbara Guzzetti and Margaret Gamboa, Online Journaling: The Informal Writings of Two Adolescent Girls
  • Lehua Ledbetter, The Rhetorical Work of YouTube’s Beauty Community
• You may explore the rhetorical environment of online writing platforms. Examples:
  • Daniel Lu, Reddit’s Diverse Platform: Transforming the Social Media Landscape Through Its Communities
  • Jennifer Joy Thimell, Looking for Love With All the Wrong Rhetoric

Don’t let those above categories limit you. There are dozens of other ways students may research and write about reading and writing in new media environments. Any sources, topics, or assignments that we’ve done this semester that inspire you to explore your own research question are also fair game for this project. 

Requirements and Scoring Criteria

• Length of 1200-1500 words
• Rhetorically-effective integration of multimodal elements
• A clear and focused purpose related to reading and writing in new media environments
• Meaningful transitions and connections between parts, a logical organization of ideas
• 6-10 credible sources integrated meaningfully and cited with hyperlinks
• An appropriate combination of rhetorical appeals to the emotion/values (pathos) and logic and intellect (logos) of the audience, while writing in a voice that is fair-minded, knowledgeable, and appropriate in tone (ethos) 
• A language style that is appropriately professional, clear, and fair
• Evidence of careful sentence-level editing with few grammatical and/or mechanical errors. The sentence structure is varied and the words are carefully chosen. 

Required Unit 1 Reading
AW Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4

Due Dates
January 25: Media Literacy Reflective Moments
January 28: First Draft
January 30: Conference Draft
February 1: Peer Review
February 8: Final Project 

Goals of this Project
Our first project in ENC1102 is designed to explore and reflect on ways writing, research, and information can influence change in our world. You’ll share your ideas about how beliefs, thoughts, feelings, and/or actions have been influenced by writing. By connecting a few different stories and experiences, you will start to identify patterns and draw conclusions about the power of media literacy in your world.

What you’ll need to do
By the time you start planning this project, you’ve already begun reflecting on media literacy in your world. In the Introductory Discussion, you’ve talked about the writing and research you’ve done in previous classes. You’ve also taken the Online Reasoning Assessments to see how you critically evaluate online media and how that compares to other students from the SHEG study. 

In this project, you’ll need to come up with 3-4 short reflective moments. These moments could tell the story of a time when…

• you struggled with media literacy
• you tried to help others who had poor media literacy
• you changed your perspective based on research
• you took action because of something you saw online
• etc

After sharing your reflections, take some time to develop your own position about media literacy in your world. What have these experiences, together, demonstrated to you about the action you can take as a student, writer, and researcher during this semester? This action could be small, such as setting personal goals; medium-sized, such as improving media literacy within your family; or large-scale, such as an argument about media literacy in your own community.

Your rhetorical situation
For every writing project, you’ll analyze your rhetorical situation as discussed in AW Chapter 3, particularly pages 54-55, by reflecting on the writer, reader, text, and medium for the work you are doing.

As you’ve already noticed, what you’re asked to do for this project doesn’t exactly sound like a traditional essay. You’ll have to make decisions about how to piece together your reflections and transition into your larger argument that builds on those stories.

Obviously, you will be making your own decisions about your role as a writer. Your reader, the intended audience for this project is internal to the class — your instructor is obviously part of your audience, and so are your classmates since we will all be learning from each other all semester. For the text, these assignment guidelines do have some requirements for the content: you must have the 3-4 reflective moments and your position about media literacy. You will make your own decision about form, and you will have total freedom for your medium.

Requirements and Scoring Criteria

In order to successfully complete this assignment your essay will need to meet these requirements. Here’s how they will break down in the final score.

For each requirement:
A = Extraordinary work, more than fulfills the guidelines
B = Clearly above average work, more than meets the guidelines
C = Average work, solidly meets the guidelines
D = Below average work, serious attempt to fulfill requirements but does not fully meet the guidelines
F = Substantially below average work

Reflections – 40% Students are required to:include 3-4 reflective moments that tell stories related to the topic of research, information, and/or media literacymake meaningful connections between course concepts and their prior learning and personal livesshare clear, specific and detailed stories that readers can bring readers into the moment

Position about media literacy – 30% Students are required to:explain what these experiences, together, have demonstrated to you about the action you can take as a student, writer, and researcher during this semesterinclude a clear, easy-to-understand statement of their positiondevelop their position with sufficient explanation and detaildemonstrate a meaningful connection to the reflections

Rhetorical awareness 30% Students are required to:choose a medium for their project that is appropriate for their purpose, audience, and messageappeal to logos through meaningful transitions between each part and a logical connection between your stories, your argument, and your conclusionsappeal to ethos by coming across as someone who is informed, willing to learn, open-minded, and understanding of other points of viewappeal to pathos with stories that are interesting to readerssubmit a project that is polished, edited, and audience-readycompose in a voice that is appropriate for the audience and medium

Due Dates

April 15: First draft, script, or storyboard due
April 22: Finished Argument Remix Due

About this assignment

What you are asked to do for this assignment is craft a persuasive message designed for a public audience. You have already made this argument in an academic context, but now will be making choices about style, voice, design and structure to share a similar message with a wider audience. 

The skills you can demonstrate with this assignment provide practical applications of the power of writing and research. All the work we do to study problems that exist in the world around us is meaningless if it’s kept to yourself or stuck within the narrow space of our classroom. But we also want to be effectively persuasive, and demonstrate writing that appeals rhetorically to a clearly identified audience.

What you need to do

To simplify things in the time of Covid-19, I will provide three possible options for your remix.

Option 1: Video Essay

A video essay is a scripted video, a visual representation of a written essay. A video that is improvised or extemporaneous speech is not considered a video essay. Below, I provide some examples of video essays, but given the limitations we have in terms of time, technology, and expertise, I expect you will make production choices that work for you. You might voice over a Prezi, for example, or use animation tools or a series of still images.

Elien, of the YouTube channel, Tube Reporter, lays out five characteristics of this visual genre in her video What is a video essay? Five criteria explained.

Characteristics of a video essay:

• Words
• Eloquence
• From a single perspective 
• Well-reasoned
• A personal point of view

Here are a few example video essays.

• Why Do We Tolerate Poverty? by T1J
• The Dark Sides of Flex Culture by tiffanyferg
• WOKE BRANDS by hbomberguy
• Cause and Effect: the unexpected origins of terrible things by Adam Westbrook 

Option 2: Web Article

You may choose to reach an audience through a written medium rather than a visual one. If you choose a web article for this project, you should pick a particular website or online magazine that covers topics like the one you are writing about. You can analyze other articles within that website to craft your message in a voice and structure appropriate for the audience that reads that publication.

Here are some common characteristics of web articles:

• A writing style and tone appropriate for the context (publication, purpose, and target audience)
• Inclusion of visual rhetoric, such as photographs, charts, or other visual elements that contribute to the message and are integrated meaningfully with helpful captions
• Clean layout and use of space, color, and framing to provide a clear aesthetic that avoids clutter.
• Sources referenced through hyperlinked citations

If you create a web article for this project, you may create a website yourself, use a blogging platform like Medium, or create a Word or Google doc with the design principles and genre conventions appropriate for your target publication.

Option 3: Online Petition or Fundraiser

If you really want to follow through on this, and try to do something that can reach an audience and make a difference, you might create an online petition through change.org, petition the White House, or start a fundraiser through gofundme.

This web article by Tracey Anne Duncan, How to Start an Online Petition That’ll Actually Make a Difference,provides some advice for starting an online petition. Another helpful resource is change.org’s Create Your Petition guide, which provides these guidelines.

If you choose to go the fundraising route, here are some Fundraising Tips by gofundme.

Due Dates

February 19: Research Stories are due at class time

Goals for this project

At this point, you’ve been writing about your research in two different genres and audiences.

• Informally and reflectively in the Diaries with a primary audience of yourself and a secondary audience of your instructor and classmates.
• Professionally and informatively in the Annotated Bibliography, with an audience of scholars who have an academic interest in your topic.

Since our goal in Advanced Writing and Research is to effectively create researched writing in a variety of context, we’ll conclude Part 1 of the semester with a narrative project, to share the story of your research in a medium and genre appropriate for a public audience.

This assignment asks you to tell the process of your research so far in a story-telling medium and genre of your choice. Some common mediums for story-telling include vlogs, podcast episodes, comics, and speeches (to name a few).

What the Research Story Remix is

This story will become is a first-person chronologically organized narrative account of your research and thought process as you investigated your question through research, talking with others, and doing your own reflective thinking. The idea is not to simply report on your findings, but instead to share with your audience the process of your research.

Your Research Story shares the history of your researching and thinking process (what you read or whom you talked to, how you responded, how your thinking evolved). Along the way, you can make your narrative more colorful and grounded by including your strategies for tracking down sources, your conversations with friends, your late-night trips to a coffee shop, and so forth. 

Because this remix is a narrative, it follows an unfolding, narrative structure. You should include chronological transitions such as “I started by reading, ” “Early the next morning I headed to the library,” “On the next day I decided…” 

What you need to do

Start the planning by identifying the key moments of your research process. Here are some questions that can guide you.

• What made you decide on the research topic you chose in the beginning of the process?
• What led you to the first couple sources? What search terms were you using? How did you sift through the early search results to decide on sources?
• What was going through your mind as you started to shift, narrow, or revise your research question? Why did you make the decisions you did?
• What were some key moments in your research process? Why were they important?
• What conversations did you have about your research? How did those conversations help you move forward?
• What did you find most interesting and eye-opening throughout your research?

After thinking through what you want to include in your project, consider what medium or genre makes the most sense for you. It will make sense to put together a general outline or storyboard to get started, no matter what form your final project takes. From there, many students are likely to create scripts to follow to produce their projects. 

Due Dates

First Draft: September 5
Finished TLN: September 12

Goals of this Project

Our first project in ENC3416 is designed to explore and reflect on ways technology has shaped your writing and literacy experiences so far. By writing a narrative, you will tell your own story about your life as a student and writer and choose how you want your classmates and instructors to see who you are. Because this is a reflective narrative, you will learn more about yourself as a writer and critically reflect on your past writing experiences by using the concepts that we discussed in class.

This focused approach to a literacy narrative asks writers to tell the story of how you developed the current literacy you have with the technology you use. This project allows writers to take control of how your audience of instructor and classmates perceives you, and lets me know where you’re coming from, what you have already learned, and what technological literacy you hope to develop further.

Another goal of this project is to experiment with writing in mediums that are “new to you.” This narrative may take any medium that you choose, as long as it includes some media that you haven’t used for academic writing before. We’ll look at examples of technology literacy narratives created as short films, animated videos, and web-written texts.

What you’ll need to do

We will begin planning this project by exploring the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives. The DALN is an archive of personal literacy narratives that serves as an excellent record of the stories of literacy from people of all backgrounds, ages, and experience. By searching the DALN for literacy narratives on technology, you will explore some of the discourse about technology literacy and the ways that other writers have told their story.

By the time you start planning this project, you’ve already begun reflecting on the writing and rhetoric in your life. In many of our Canvas assignments, you’ve talked about your early experiences with computers, with online writing, use of smartphones for communication and expression. You’ve also discussed your present relationship with technology. Any of these might turn into the story you tell in your TLN.

Make sure you don’t just tell your readers about technology. Instead, make it a narrative that has details that create a concrete vision for your readers. What specific moments in time illustrate the development of your technological literacy? How can you use these moments to illustrate a meaningful point about technology for you?

To conclude your narrative, look to the future and significance of technology on your life moving forward. You might conclude by addressing these questions.

• What role do you see technology playing in your life and future? How do you feel about computers and the role they have and will play in your future?
• Do you think your writing will change based on new technologies? If so, how?

Requirements and Scoring Criteria

In order to successfully complete this assignment your project will need to meet these requirements. Here’s how they will break down in the final score.

For each requirement:

A = Extraordinary work, more than fulfills the guidelines
B = Clearly above average work, more than meets the guidelines
C = Average work, solidly meets the guidelines
D = Below average work, serious attempt to fulfill requirements but does not fully meet the guidelines
F = Substantially below average work

Here is what is required for the final draft:

Requirement	Points
Critical reflection on your past technology literacy experiences	20
Use of a medium that is new to you	20
A clear purpose that indicates to readers why your story matters	15
An easy to follow organizational approach	15
Specific, vivid, engaging use of language that makes the story come alive, demonstrating attention to word choice	15
Work that demonstrates an effective writing process, including discovering of ideas, drafting, revision and proof-reading	15
Total	100