Reflection and context: This assignment was created for an advanced composition class that includes students from different majors. Students create their own project, based on their own interests and goals, that meets certain requirements from the prompt. They work on this project all quarter, creating process documents to help them along the way. This unit starts with the prompt for the main project and gives you the first 3 weeks of work, ending with the proposal.
This class was taught fully online and asynchronously.
Welcome to our main assignment for UWP101Y, where you will complete your own project to help you meet your goals. Rather than assigning you a specific assignment this quarter, I am inviting you to pick a project that helps you achieve a purpose outside of this class. You will use this class to create a project that is meaningful for you and helps you move towards your future goals (professional, academic, or personal).
For this project, you will create a main project (that may contain more than one genre) that will help you move closer to achieving your goals. Start by articulating your goals, deciding what would help you move closer to them, and by brainstorming some ideas on what you could produce in these 10 weeks of the course.
Video that goes over the promLinks to an external sRationaleWelcome to our main assignment for UWP101Y, where you will complete your own project to help you meet your goals. Rather than assigning you a specific assignment this quarter, I am inviting you to pick a project that helps you achieve a purpose outside of this class. You will use this class to create a project that is meaningful for you and helps you move towards your future goals (professional, academic, or person
Your project will be created to match a specific audience and it should be useful to you to help you achieve your specific goals. Here are some examples:
You are completing an internship at a clinic and would like to create a series of pamphlets or other educational materials to help the patients make informed health decisions.
You know you will have to write formal reports in your future profession, so you write a manual on how to write reports or write a professional report on a topic of your choice.
You are headed to graduate school and would like to improve your knowledge on a specific topic, so you will write a formal research paper ready for publication.
You would like to know more about your future profession, so you create a website or a blog or a podcast sharing what you learn about it with other students.
These are just ideas! However, they give you a sense of what kind of project you could take on. We will dedicate the first few weeks of class to figuring out your project through brainstorming activities.
Note that there is no word count attached to the main project. The genre/s in your project can be written products, multimodal products where you mix text with other modalities, or they may not contain any writing at all.
Because this is one of our main assignments for the course, it has a stricter evaluation criteria to receive credit:
The assignment must fulfill the requirements below to be considered complete and the assignment must be completed to pass the class:
You will create a rubric towards the end of the quarter, guiding me on how to assess your audience and genre awareness for your project; the rubric will also be used during peer reviews. You should be able to demonstrate that your project has met the criteria listed in your rubric.
Your final project must be revised multiple times based on the feedback you have received, and the final product should be polished and ready for submission to its intended audience.
Your final project must meet these requirements:
Help you move closer to your goals; at the end of the quarter, you will have produced something concrete that is ready to be shared with others (e.g., a website, podcast, pamphlets, videos, research paper, etc.).
Require research. (You will build expertise through research in two areas: the topic of your project and the genre you have picked for your project).
Have a real audience other than yourself with whom you can share your knowledge through a specific genre that helps you meet audience expectations. In other words, your project must communicate something to someone.
Be complex enough for 10 weeks of work, without making it overwhelming. We will be working on this in the first few weeks of the quarter to make sure you find the perfect project. Part of picking the right project means picking the right audience, and we will focus some of our time at the beginning of the quarter discussing audience and genre awareness.
Be revisable: you will create a lot of versions of your project as you revise it, so you must be able to keep copy of your past drafts.
Be concrete: it has to be a genre or multiple genres that you can share with your audience.
Read the prompt for the Main Project
WRITING TO COMMUNICATE
Copy and paste these questions and complete this student questionnaire (Please add a recent picture of yourself to this questionnaire! Or even better: complete the questionnaire as a video!):
What’s your major and/or minor? Are you double-majoring/minoring?
Why did you pick this major?
What are your professional goals after you graduate?
What language/s do you speak at home?
How are you feeling right now? These are not easy times and sharing how we feel helps us manage the anxiety and depression we are all dealing with at times.
What are your preferred pronouns? Would you prefer that I use another name or nickname than what shows up as your name in the official roster?
Anything else that you want to share with me?
WRITING TO THINK
You are picking the main project that you want to work on this quarter, and the project should help you meet or move you closer to your future goals. Therefore, you have to start thinking right away about your goals in order to pick a useful project.
Please write down the answers to these questions in a few sentences each:
What are your goals, as a student, this quarter? Next year? After you graduate from UCD?
What are some projects that you could complete within this quarter that would help you either meet or move you closer to meeting those goals?
What are your professional goals for the next year? In 5 years? 10 years?
What are some projects that you could complete within this quarter that would help you either meet or move you closer to meeting those goals?
What are your personal goals for the quarter? For the next year? 5 years? 10 years?
What are some projects that you could complete within this quarter that would help you either meet or move you closer to meeting those goals?
Pick your favorite among all the listed projects and explain in a few sentences how it would meet ALL the requirements from the prompt:
Requirements for your project
Your project must:
Help you move closer to your goals; at the end of the quarter, you will have produced something concrete that is ready to be shared with others (e.g., a website, podcast, pamphlets, videos, research paper, etc.).
Require research. (You will build expertise through research in two areas: the topic of your project and the genre you have picked for your project).
Have a real audience other than yourself with whom you can share your knowledge through a specific genre that helps you meet audience expectations. In other words, your project must communicate something to someone.
Be complex enough for 10 weeks of work, without making it overwhelming. We will be working on this in the first few weeks of the quarter to make sure you find the perfect project. Part of picking the right project means picking the right audience, and we will focus some of our time at the beginning of the quarter discussing audience and genre awareness.
Be revisable: you will create a lot of version of your project as you revise it, so you must be able to keep copy of your past drafts.
Be concrete: it has to be a genre or multiple genres that you can share with your audience.
READING RESPONSE 1
Read Lamott's "Shitty First Drafts" and summarize it in about 100-150 words.
Then, describe how your writing process is similar or not to Lamott's (100-150 words).
READING RESPONSE 2 (100-150 words)
Read Straub's "Responding, Really Responding" and discuss how this reading will affect the way you peer review
WRITING TO REFLECT
Watch this video on helpful feedback and answer the question I am asking in the video in a few sentences.
WRITING TO THINK 1
Watch the Proposal and flowchart 2 video
Remember to read the prompt!
Read this chapter on proposals (there are 4 pages, so match sure to hit "next" at the bottom)
Summarize the main points from the reading in a bullet points list. Upload the list here.
WRITING TO THINK 2
These activities are meant to help you get started with planning your project and to show that planning in your Flowchart 2. Please freewrite a few words (50-100) under each set of questions:
What is my project for this quarter? What is my purpose for this project? What do I want to say and how do I want to say it? Do I want to tell a story? Inform? Persuade? Some combination?
What are my most important goals and how will this project help me meet them?
How would I describe my primary audience? Whose attention do I want most? How will I connect with this audience?
Do I want to work with written words? Will I present my ideas in person, orally? Will I use visuals? How about audio? Does my idea lend itself to video? Do I want my project to be available digitally or in print? Will I use some combination of media?
What do I already know about my topic? What intrigues me about this topic? What questions do I have about it? Is there a way to narrow the topic by time, place, demographic, etc?
Use your freewrite here as the shitty first draft for your proposal.
Then, revise it and move on to Writing to Communicate 1.
WRITING TO COMMUNICATE 1
Upload your draft of the Proposal Memo (flowchart optional for this draft) for peer reviews.
WRITING TO COMMUNICATE 2
Go to the discussion board "Group Introduction" and complete the work there.
WRITING TO COMMUNICATE 1
Complete the peer reviews assigned to you for the proposal draft.
WRITING TO COMMUNICATE 2
Go to the discussion board "Group Introduction" and respond to your peers.
WRITING TO THINK 1
Watch this video on Rhetoric and then tell me: why do the authors of this video think that rhetoric is not just for liars? (I encourage you to watch the whole thing, but you are only required to watch the first 5 minutes).
Video on the rhetorical situation:
Jot down some notes on this video on the rhetorical situation, upload them here, and answer the question asked in the video.
READING RESPONSE
Read Dirk's "Navigating Genres." "Genre" is an important concept for this class. Don't rush this reading!
Then, answer in 150 words: Why would Dirk call the proposal memo a genre? What allows us to call it a genre?
WRITING TO THINK 2
Watch this video on genres
After jotting down your notes from the video, and uploading them here, list some possible genres and audiences for your project, starting with the genre and audience combination that comes closer to what you’re planning to do now for your project. Then, next to each of these genre/audience combinations, explain how picking these different sets would shape your project differently.
WRITING TO THINK
Watch this video on audience awareness
Jot down some notes from the video, upload them here, and remember to review the prompt for your audience analysis.
Watch this quick video that provides you a little bit more explanation on audience:
Writing With Your Audience in Mind
Before you get started: Make your audience as specific as possible. Can you make it as smaller as a specific committee? Or one person in that committee? The smaller and more specific the audience, the easier it will be to imagine them as you compose your genre and to research them.
WRITING TO COMMUNICATE 1
Go to the discussion board "Writing for an audience" and complete the work there.
AUDIENCE ANALYSIS
Step 1/3: quick freewrite: In 100 words, explain who your audience for the project is, what the project will focus on, why the audience needs/wants this information, and what they already know about the topic of your project.
Step 2/3 Research your audience:
If it’s a professional audience, what kind of projects have they worked on? What are they interested or concerned about? What can you learn from them through the company’s website?
If it’s academic audience, what have they published? What are their main research interests? (see if they have a CV on their faculty website).
If your audience is neither academic nor professional, what are some other ways to research them? What can you find about them?
Share your answers.
Step 3/3: Draft Audience Analysis (500 words altogether. For the peer review draft, you can do either bullet points or paragraph form, but please use full sentences). Then post this as peer review draft.
Who’s the audience for the project? How does your project meet the needs of this audience?
What do you know about this audience (for example, statistically speaking, but also geographical location, level of education, English proficiency, etc.)?
What is your purpose in completing this project? What do you want to achieve through this project? Why is this purpose important for your target audience? How does it connect with your audience? What problem will it solve for your audience?
How will your purpose and audience affect your language? Visuals? How will you address the topic and explain things in a language that will match both the purpose and the audience?
What kind of person do you want to seem to be in your project? What do you want to sound like? Why?
What would your audience consider “good communication”? Why? What’s important to them?
WRITING TO COMMUNICATE 2
Upload your draft of the audience analysis for peer reviews. For the peer review draft, you can keep your draft in bullet points, if you want. but please use full sentences.
CHECK-IN MOMENT
How are you doing? What are your questions, struggles, confusions about the course?
WRITING TO COMMUNICATE 1
Complete the peer reviews assigned to you on the audience analysis.
WRITING TO COMMUNICATE 2
Go to discussion board "Writing for an audience" and respond to your peers (see instructions in discussion board).
WRITING TO COMMUNICATE 3
Upload your revised draft of the Proposal Memo here for me. Be sure to:
Include a description here in the prep work of the changes that you have made to your draft after the peer reviews.
Include a link in the proposal to your Flowchart 2
Check that you are following the requirements from the prompt for the proposal.
WRITING TO THINK
Watch this video on the annotated bibliography (you can, if you want, just watch Part 1). Be sure to also go over the prompt for the annotated bibliography.
Link in case the video doesn't u
Then, respond to these questions:
What kind of research do you need? What kind of research would seem credible to your audience?
How do modalities come into play as you’re choosing sources? Do your sources need to be all in writing or are there podcasts, videos, or visuals that would help me become an expert on this topic?
Will you need primary research (interviews, observations, surveys…) or secondary research?
Resources for the Annotated Bibliography:
Videos on APA citations:
APA 7th Edition: References | Part I
This video shows how to cite in APA and how to find the information to fill out the citation, what to do with multiple authors, and how to date the source.
APA 7th Edition: References | Part II
This video shows you what to italicize, what to do with titles, what to do with edited works, and how to cite social media and websites.
If you're doing in-text citations for your project, check this video:
APA 7th Edition: In-Text Citations
WRITING TO PRACTICE
Find two scholarly articles on your topic. Read them. Write down the APA citation for two academic articles that you'll use in your annotated bibliography part 1, plus the summarizing paragraphs (just the summary, not the evaluation). It's okay to use programs that create the citation for you, but they are as reliable as Google Translate (in the sense that they make a lot of mistakes!), so make sure you check the citation with the APA handout.
For the summaries, please follow the format from the annotated bibliography prompt.
Do not copy/paste the abstract of the articles. You need read those articles and make your own summaries in your own words. The point is to really know these articles since you'll use them as sources in your project.