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.