AS91475: Writing Portfolio

Credits: 6 Word Range: 650-1000 words per piece

Due Dates: Piece #1 draft: T1 W6 Piece #2 draft: T2 W7 Piece #3 draft: T3 W5 Final Hand-In: T3 W10 (Fri, 19 Sept)

FOR YOUR FINAL HAND-IN, YOU WILL SUBMIT WHAT YOU THINK ARE YOUR TWO BEST PIECES.

Prompt #1

Why is your chosen critical theory relevant or important today?

This task serves as a prelude to the 'Critical Texts' project. Why is feminist / psychoanalytic / Marxist / post-colonial theory worth knowing about?

Prompt #2

Across the universe

Explore how philosophers from at least two different cultures have considered the same concept or problem.

Prompt #3

Write a piece of fiction which explores philosophical ideas AND/OR

Write a story from the perspective of an animal, or non-human person

Prompt #4

Respond to the ideas from a class discussion or in a text (or texts) you’ve read this term.

Choose a publication and write in a style appropriate for submission for that publication.

Prompt #5:

Opinion piece from the future! What are the petty concerns of the future?

Here is an example:

'Please stop printing unicorns'

This is a chance to do creative writing disguised as a serious opinion piece! Be imaginative and outlandish, but disguise your creativity with a veneer of seriousness...

Privatizing the U.S. Army was a mistake

Prompt #6:

How does a particular thought experiment help us to understand a philosophical problem or concept? Even better: come up with your own thought experiment.

Here is an example:

The Drowning Child

These prompts could also work well for developing an oral text (AS91476) transcript.

Instructions

Step One: During each term, we will have frequent freewriting and discussion time to help you develop your thinking around an array of philosophical ideas.

Step Two: Choose the idea you're most keen to explore in a 650-1000 word writing piece, and use a prompt above to help you consider general structure. (We're picturing you using a prompt above for each term, but the order is up to you.)

Step Three: Turn in your doc at the rough draft deadlines to receive feedback from your teacher about your idea development, use of language features, and accuracy with language conventions (like punctuation, capitalisation, spelling, paragraphing, etc.).

Step Four: After you've received feedback on your rough drafts, we'll have a variety of mini-lessons related to editing and proofreading to help you prepare two polished drafts for the final hand-in.