Final Project

You may collaborate with a classmate for the final project, but you should both talk to me about the guidelines for writing a collaborative paper in this class.

For your final project, you will write an 8-10 page paper analyzing the style/rhetorical/grammatical conventions appropriate for writing in your field.  You will, naturally, use the grammar and style appropriate to that community.  This paper will be due on the last day of class.

To begin this project, collect documents that are written by people who work in your field. For example, if you are going into elementary education, you would gather documents generated by an elementary educator: letters to parents, reports about students, lesson plans, course descriptions, etc. You might also gather texts written by an education professor and compare the purposes, language, style, and rhetorical strategies employed by those working in the field and those working in the academy.  Once you have gathered these documents, you will conduct a rhetorical analysis of each document (record these in your analytical journal), and begin to put together the "rules" for writing in that field.

You will also interview someone who works in your field, asking her/him about the writing s/he does for her/his profession.  I have posted some links to the Internet Classroom that discuss how to prepare for and conduct an interview. You should ask the person you interview to share some early drafts of documents (hopefully ones s/he has had peer reviewed or ones that have been written in collaboration with colleagues) and copyedited drafts. Collecting messy drafts, early drafts, outlines, and final products will give you an idea about how a text gets to the "final" draft stage.

The idea here is to get into the heads of the people writing in your field and find out what decisions they make as they write, why they make those decisions, and how they work their way through their own writing processes.

Some things for you to consider in your research...

• Types of documents (including length, format, style)
• Audiences addressed and appropriate language conventions for each audience
• Reasons why people in this field write
• Faux pas (in grammar, language conventions, and style)
• Rhetorical approaches
• The writer's relationship with his/her audience
• Specific grammar rules of this field (descriptive...how people write in the field & prescriptive...the recorded "rules")

Due dates for this paper/project...

• Early draft of proposal: Tuesday, Feb 19
• Proposal and tentative outline: Thursday, Feb 21
• First Draft: Tuesday, March 19
• Revised Draft for workshopping: April 9
• Close to "final" copy for copyediting: Tuesday, April 30
• Final Draft: Last day of class