The Project is a two-part project that asks you to extend, re-imagine, or re-mix some of your earlier work this semester for a new purpose, audience, context, genre, and medium.
For the first part of the project, you’ll look back on your writing for the course and choose a key idea, topic, or issue that you think other people need to know about. Then you’ll compose a brief multimedia text to inform people about your topic and perhaps even encourage them to take action on it.
Here’s an example: maybe for Writing Project 1, you wrote a series of vignettes about helping to care for your grandmother who has dementia. For Writing Project 4, you could create a 60-second video that gives advice to teenagers dealing with a similar situation. Or maybe for Writing Project 3, you explored how to talk with young children about death. For Writing Project 4, you could create an infographic to share what you learned with other parents.
Types (genres) of multimedia texts you might create for this assignment include:
an infographic
a short video/movie
a poster
a short podcast
a short brochure
a flyer
a web page
a comic strip
a mock-up of a billboard
an advertisement
a Public Service Announcement (PSA)
a presentation slide deck
a photo montage
and others!
Whatever medium you choose, think in terms of a “short-form” composition: something relatively brief, something that you can create in a relatively short timeframe.
Three Things to do:
Fisrt:
Pick what you consider to be your best two topics and ideas and provide the following information
1.Your top two topics and your reasoning for why they are important to highlight to the public.
2.How these topics speak to you and why you feel a connection to them.
3.Your early ideas on how you might highlight these topics in a multimedia composition. What would you do if you could? (You can always scale back later if necessary.)
4.Your initial concerns as you start this project. What challenges do you think you’ll need to overcome as you compete Writing Project 4? What new skills will you need to practice? How can you find help with those?
5.Consider your classmates as a general resource. What advice would you like from your peers? What could your classmates help you with? Would you like to speak with peers who have been affected by your topics? Do you need advice on how to create something (photography, video, drawing, writing)? Now is the time to find out what resources are available to you through your class connections.
Second:
Remember that your focus for your multimedia composition should grow out of your previous work for the course. The prompts below will help you reflect on what you’ve done this semester and–hopefully–help you develop a topic for this final project. Please write out your responses.
1. List the topics you wrote about for writing projects 1 through 3 and write a brief description explaining why you selected those topics. What about these topics made them important to you? Are they topics that directly affect your life or the lives of friends and family members? Explain those connections.
2. Explain how you feel about these topics now after writing and reading about them this semester. Has your opinion changed? Are you more or less concerned about the topic? Which topic do you feel most connected to and why?
3. In your opinion, what is important for other people to understand about each of these topics? List as many points as you can.
4. Are there specific groups who need to be educated on this topic more than others? List those groups and your reasoning behind each choice.
Third:
Now try to zero in on a message, audience, medium, and genre for Writing Project 4.
To do that, write out responses to the following:
Message
Based on your classmates’ feedback on the discussion board this week, and on your own thinking, what general topic do you want to focus on? Why?
What specific message do you want to convey through your project?
Audience
What audience would be most appropriate for your message? Why? Often, it’s helpful to imagine a specific audience rather than just “the public.”
Medium
What medium (video, audio, still images, a combination, etc.) would your audience most likely expect or be comfortable with? Why?
Genre
What genre would be most appropriate for your message, medium, and audience (infographic, blog post, video, billboard, etc.)? Why?
Summation
Now sum everything up! What will your message be, for whom, and in what medium and genre?
