Writing Project 3: Joining a Conversation

Task: Based on your prior knowledge and new observation of a communitys practices, write a text in a genre
of your choosing in order to join an ongoing conversation or propose a change within that community. You will
also write a cover letter explaining your communitys communicative practices and justifying your rhetorical
choices.
Purposes of the Assignment: This assignment will allow you to gain a better understanding of how
contextespecially values, goals, and beliefsinfluence the rhetorical choices people make. It will help you
move from analyzing texts to creating a text within a genre that you have studied. It will strengthen your skills
in crafting an argument within a public context to achieve specific rhetorical goals. You will also strengthen
skills in maintaining ongoing conversation to assist others and receive constructive feedback in your work.
Specifics:
The Project:
1. You will choose a specific discourse community in which you have an interest: a group that addresses a
favored activity or an organization related to your major, for example. In order to work for this
assignment, the community must have some official organization to it (a regular set of meetings,
newsletters, or a website, for example). These can include political organizations, religious groups,
nonprofit organizations, Greek life, online communities, sports teams, and countless others.
2. You will then investigate the communication of this community by collecting text samples. How do
members of the community interact? What genres do they use? How do they construct these genres?
3. From your observations, locate current debates or conflicts within the community or find something in
the communitys current practices that you think could be changed. Decide what debate or conflict you
want to address or what change you want to propose, consider who could hear what you have to say,
and select a genre that suits your purposes and audiences. This may be blog post, op-ed piece,
presentation, flyer, poster, letter to someone in authority, or any other genre you deem appropriate.
4. Write in that genre to argue for your position in the debate you have identified or to persuade your
audience to make a change. Your argument can include visual and textual elements, though visual
elements are not required. Your audience for this piece is the members of the community you are
addressing.
The Cover Letter: Since your classroom readers (including me) might not be familiar with the community, you
will write a 1000-word cover letter explaining how the community communicates; what forms, styles, and
genres they use; and how your knowledge of the communitys communication determined the choices you
made when writing your argument. You should also briefly explain the issue or debate you are addressing, as
well as anything else the classroom readers need to know in order to understand your argument. Your
audience for this piece of writing is your classroom peers and teacher. You will be given more specific
information later in the unit.
You Will Turn In: the final draft of your community writing (via BB if possible or hard copy if necessary),
your cover letter, and your Unit 3 reflection
Evaluation Criteria: 50% of your grade will be based on your community writing and 50% on your cover
letter. We will determine specific grading criteria as a class, but expect your community writing to be graded
partly on the logic of your argument, evidential support, appropriate genre choice, and appropriateness of
your rhetorical choices. Your cover letter will be graded based on logic, coherence, organization, and the level
of analysis/explanation of your communitys communication and your own rhetorical choices.