Unit 6

With this unit you will do the following:

Generate Texts

• Develop critical and formal strategies for identifying and addressing a variety of rhetorical situations.

Read Critically

• Make sound decisions about when, why, and how to do further reading and research during the production of a text.
• 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.
• 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 Texts Collaboratively
• Develop ideas for topics in dynamic and interactive conversations with other writers and relevant texts.
• 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.

Use Style Rhetorically

• 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.
• Edit and proofread their own writing and the writing of others until final drafts are virtually error-free and in compliance with the grammatical and mechanical demands of the rhetorical situation.

Introduction

At this point, you have written five five- to seven-page papers and probably quite a few shorter texts as well.  Now it's time to start putting together your course portfolio. For your portfolio, you will need to choose four texts that you are interested in including in your portfolio and reconsider them in light of all that you have learned this semester.  Each of the texts you choose should undergo at least one more substantive revision, as you further refine your topic, conduct additional research, and apply your greater understanding of what it means to write for a specific audience, purpose, and forum.

Work Schedule

At this point, you have also illustrated the ability to work independently and collaboratively, so I'm going to let you design your own work schedule here. You will have three weeks to complete three of your global revisions, but the only deadline you have for me is a revision plan due each Friday during this unit. In that revision plan, you will identify the text you plan to globally revise, tell me why you want to revise it, who your audience will be for that new text, what forum (if any) you will address, what genre conventions you will need to take into consideration, what stylistic features you will need to tweak and how, what additional research you may need to conduct, what relationship you will develop with your audience through the text, what your ethos will need to be, and (perhaps most importantly) what new purpose your text will serve. You will email me with these revision proposals no later than 5:00 on Friday afternoons, and I will respond no later than noon on Sunday to what you have proposed. On the following Monday, then, you may begin your revision, peer review, or research on your own schedule.

Requirements

For each of your global revisions you will need your revision proposal, drafts, and at least one peer review. These items will be included in your final portfolio and not given any advisory grades.

Instructor Response

For each revision you do, I will respond in writing to your proposed changes, but I will also respond in person to each revision at any stage in the process that you feel you want/need my response. I have also arranged for some out-of-class conferences in addition to my regular office hours, so feel free to take advantage of these meetings to discuss your revisions in progress, your final portfolio, your advisory grades to date, and/or any lingering questions you have about the class and what is required of you.

Fun and You

This is traditionally the funnest part of the semester for me and, I've been told, for the writers in the class. You are going to get to try your hand at some writing challenges that you may not have anticipated, so keep an open mind as you begin to think about how to globally revise your papers. In previous classes, I've had students turn personal essays into works for Chicken Soup for the Soul essays or children's books and research projects became letters to senators and representatives, grass roots movements, public service campaigns, web pages, brochures and flyers, speeches, radio addresses, magazine articles, letters to the editor, etc. If you've been writing nothing but traditional papers in school, you may find that you enjoy and excell at other (more public) forms of writing as well, and hopefully, what you've learned about rhetoric, audience, forum, and genre conventions will help you figure out how to approach different writing situations. At least, that is the whole point of the approach we've taken this semester...:)

Terms

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