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.