ENG 101: Composition I

University of Southern Mississippi

Project 3: A Writing Redux

Your third project this semester will be a revised version of one of your three writing projects for this class. You will
need to address a new audience (i.e., not me) and use a digital medium appropriately to enhance your purpose. In
addition, you will be required to submit this project to an appropriate venue that can be either published or widely
viewed. The writing redux is an opportunity to try something new, be creative and have fun, and present information
to our class and communities outside of our classroom in meaningful and contemporary ways.

Getting Started
Your goal will be to rethink one of your essays and consider how you would like to revise it for your new audience
using a different medium. For example, you may have chosen to write your first memoir piece (the food memory)
about the food your Mexican grandmother used to make on special occasions. Such a project would lend itself well to
a Buzzfeed article in which you meet people who share a similar culture, interview people who live and work in our
area but have different food traditions, and “publish” your findings via Buzzfeed. Or, if you wrote your rhetorical
analysis in response to the piece on John Edge’s book, you might consider developing a brief video documentary
about the history behind why the history of Southern food is so important in which you explain to adult viewers why
Edge’s book is important. If you wrote your position essay about the cultural appropriation of Southern food by
corporations and how destructive that can be, you might consider ways a personal manifesto that could take shape in
any number of delivery modes. (e.g., op-ed articles, YouTube videos, podcasts, or blogs).

Putting it together
Your final project must meet criteria appropriate to the medium you choose. For example, a video composition will
need to be 3-5 minutes in length, include video and audio, and include a credit reel. In addition, it will need to be
produced and edited in ways that lead to a video that viewers will want to watch. Similarly, if you choose to build a
website, you need to design a site that meets expectations for an engaging website and that is appropriate to your
topic and audience. Thus, part of this project is analyzing the medium as well as using the digital skills necessary to
convert your essay appropriately and successfully.

In addition to your multimodal project, you will write what we are going to call a “heads-up” essay about your
project in which you give me a heads up about the design of your project. This will be relatively brief (2-3 pages) and
should explain why you chose the medium you did, what you perceive as the most important criteria for this medium,
and the rhetorical choices you made in composing the project. We will talk more about my expectations for the
heads-up piece in class.

A few things to keep in mind: 1) I do not expect you to be brilliant or earth-shattering in these projects, as none
of us are experts at creating these types of documents. I do, however, expect your best efforts; 2) Do not forget
that your redux project will have an audience outside of our class. This is your opportunity to illustrate your strengths
as a writer/designer and get real results from your work. 3) Your success in this project will be determined by your
ability to use a new medium (and I will keep in mind that it is new) to present new information stemming from your
writings for this class, to make it relevant to a new audience, and to discuss (informally) how you accomplished these
things. Also note that you have the option of using a pseudonym if you do not want to use your full name in a digital
public space.

We will spend our remaining class sessions working on our projects, but below is a tentative set of deadlines for your
project. This will be a time-consuming project, so be sure to set aside plenty of time to work on it in addition to the
time we use during class. I will place sources that I think might be helpful on our Canvas shell. Please let me know if
you have suggestions to share with our class.

Email Proposal to Instructor: Sunday, November 4 by midnight

Initial Project Draft (in-class presentations): Monday, November 12 th
Final Project Due: Monday, November 19h by midnight (via Canvas)