To prepare for the IMRAD Essay, you will do textual research on the writing/literacy-related topic you will be studying. Therefore, you will read and review at least five articles–three from popular texts and two from academic texts. This assignment gives you the opportunity to share your understanding of the textual research that you will do and get feedback on it before you use it in your IMRAD Essay. In a 1000 - 1500 word essay, you will summarize these texts and explain how they "speak" with each other–or explain how and in what ways they agree or disagree.
After you have chosen a writing or literacy-related problem/issue that you want to address, you will explain your current knowledge (based upon your experiences and the textual research you have done for the Literature Review), state and justify your research questions, and detail the primary research methods you will use to learn more about this issue for the IMRAD Essay.
Using the IMRAD format, you will write an essay reporting the writing/literacy-related topic you studied, what you learned from other sources about this writing, how you conducted research, what you learned from this research, and what you think the data means.
As a way of thinking how you would present your research to a different type of audience, for a different purpose, through a different media, you will produce a 5-minute TED Talk-like presentation. We will analyze the genre and audience of TED Talks to learn what the expectations for these presentations are and thus provide guidelines to compose your work.
You will write a letter to the instructor explaining what you have learned about the six course concepts and apply at least three of them to the work you did and the work you observed your peers doing.