Unit 5

With this unit you will do the following

Read Critically

• Identify the assumptions they bring to encounters with new texts, ideas, and situations and analyze how those assumptions may shape their reading of and response to those texts, ideas, and situations.
• Make sound decisions about when, why, and how to do further reading and research during the production of a text.
• Use personal writing about reading in the process of creating public writing about reading.
• Use appropriate research strategies to identify and integrate a variety of ideas and evidence from human, Internet, and library resources into original, cohesive, written texts.
• Use appropriate conventions for citing and documenting source materials correctly and ethically.

Generate Ideas

• Become familiar with and practice strategies for generating ideas or exploring specific topics, issues, ideas, or beliefs.

Use Writing to Learn

• Use writing to clarify thinking; demonstrate knowledge; explore, explain, and analyze ideas and experiences; and influence beliefs and action.
• Use writing to become aware of and think critically about writing processes, especially their own and their classmates'.
• Use writing to become aware of and think critically about written products, especially their own and their classmates'.

Use Rhetoric

• Presented with the need to write within a specific rhetorical situation, students will be able to identify texts that respond to similar situations and analyze the rhetorical conventions and strategies of those texts in a way that will enable them to use similar conventions and strategies in their own writing.
• Take the stylistic risks necessary to develop appropriate sentence structures.
• Develop critical and formal strategies for identifying and addressing a variety of rhetorical situations.

Produce Texts Collaboratively

• Consult with other writers about successive drafts.
• Respond to other writers about their drafts.
• Evaluate the usefulness of other writers' suggestions.
• Incorporate appropriate suggestions into a text.

Write for a Variety of Audiences

• Write for a variety of purposes, including those that support their own learning, growth, and development; those that promote responsible citizenship and engagement through public discourse; and those that allow them to meet the demands of their academic courses.
• Demonstrate an awareness of the intended audiences, purposes, and forums for writing.
• Demonstrate the ability to respond to and edit other writers' texts in an effort to help the writer meet the needs and expectations of different audiences, purposes, and forums.
• Demonstrate the ability to respond to and edit other writers' texts in an effort to help the writer meet the needs and expectations of different audiences, purposes, and forums.

Unit Description

From the Course Guide: In the very most general way of thinking about it, a forum is any place where ideas are made public.  A presidential debate is a forum; so is a radio talk show, a book, a movie, a newspaper, and so on.  Sometimes, having a specific forum in mind can give a writer an idea for a text.  Other times, identifying specific forums for their work helps writers shape their texts.  In this unit you will write a text tailored to the demands of a specific forum.

A forum is literally any place where a text meets an audience.

With this next unit you will get some experience analyzing how writing is done in a particular forum. You will learn some of the questions you should ask before writing for a particular forum or in a particular genre.

You will get to know the conventions of writing for a specific forum by conducting a thorough analysis of those conventions and by writing an essay, speech, webpage, etc, for that forum. Note: if you use your COM 110 speech for this unit, you must revise that speech into something other than a speech.

Begin by brainstorming a list of topics you know something about and you want to write about. Choose your favorite topic and ask yourself who needs to know about that topic (or be persuaded by what you know about it). Once you have chosen a specific audience, consider where your audience might be likely to encounter your text (magazines, newspapers, web pages, etc). What specific magazine or newspaper or television show, etc might that audience go to? Once you have narrowed your topic and your audience, you should be able to find a specific forum for your essay.

OR

You could begin by looking through your favorite forum and generating ideas for essays that might appear in that forum, for topics that might interest that audience.

Example: I want to write about how to buy a home while still in graduate school. My audience would be young people with a lot of education and precious little time and money. They will probably only be connected to a particular city/university for 5-8 years, so they won't have to worry much about school districts--they aren't in this for the long haul. They're likely to read magazines like The Atlantic and the New Yorker, but also possibly Time or Newsweek (especially since Newsweek runs a yearly guide to graduate schools).

After scrutinizing these magazines to determine which one is best suited for my audience and topic, I decide to write to a Newsweek audience. I figure I'm likely to hit people in their late 20s, early 30s with moderate incomes and at least Bachelor's degrees. Some of the advertisements in this magazine confirm that I have identified a possible forum for my audience as well.

So now I need to find out what style and tone articles use in this magazine; what language is appropriate; how do they document sources; how do they open and conclude pieces; what sentence and paragraph lengths are appropriate; how long are these articles; what kinds of titles are appropriate; do they use direct quotes; do they refer to the audience (you) or themselves (I) or speak in third person (one, he or she); do they use pictures, graphs, charts, sidebars; do they direct readers to additional sources of information? Once I have figured this out, I begin writing my article, conforming to the rules I have discovered in my analysis of the forum.

This is what you will do for Unit 5, and I think you'll discover that this type of writing comes easily when you have really analyzed your forum.

Unit Requirements

You must participate in each peer review and in every activity associated with this unit, and you must provide all associated drafts, peer reviews, and activities with the "final" paper you turn in to me.

You will also include an analytical essay examining the process you went through to write this paper, the decisions you made throughout the process, and the assistance you received from your classmates and from me throughout the process. This analytical paper should be 2-3 pages (double-spaced, Times New Roman font)

This project will be as long as it needs to be for the forum you have chosen and in the style appropriate for that forum. Please visit the class schedule regularly so that you are aware of and can meet the deadlines for each draft of this paper.

Grading

Please consult the grading standards at the back of the Course Guide to see how your work will be assessed. Note that you will be given an advisory grade with your "final-for-now" unit draft, but this grade may/will change after you have globally revised this work for the final portfolio.

Terms

For an explanation of any of the terms used in this assignment sheet, please consult the glossary of terms.