NOTE: Students in English 2010 Online Plus created three major projects over the course of the

summer 2020 semester: a flash memoir, an informative project, and a persuasive project using
a persuasive genre of their choosing. These three projects all focused on a single “local, social
issue” chosen individually by each student according to their own research and writing interests.
The final signature assignment for the class was a “public-facing website” that featured all three
major projects, revised and adapted to suit the rhetorical circumstances of a website designed
for a local audience. Below are the project guidelines for the final signature assignment,
followed by the guidelines for each of their 3 major projects.

Public-Facing Website

The Public-Facing Website is the culmination of your reading, writing, and research this
semester in English 2010. It is your final project. To complete it, you'll produce and publish a
polished website that features ​all 3 of your major writing projects from this semester, plus
additional content from your notebooks.

This project will serve as your signature assignment for this class, a multimodal digital showcase
of your writing and composing in English 2010, and a resource for a relevant public audience
that needs to learn more about your social issue.

We started this final module on revision with this big idea:

Meaningful writing is achieved through sustained engagement in literate practices

(thinking, researching, analyzing, conversing) and through revision.

We hope by now that you’re starting to see the rewards of this sustained engagement in writing,
researching, and composing in this class. So far you've created three major projects and six
notebook entries that all relate in some way to the local social issue you elected to study and
write about this semester.

To produce your final portfolio of work, you'll revise, add to, layout, design, and publish all three
of those major projects on your English 2010 website. Along with your notebooks, these three
projects will come together to make up your own original public-facing website dedicated to your
local social issue.

What do we mean by a "public-facing website?"

When it's done, this won't be your English 2010 website any longer. (it's ok if your website URL
mentions this though). Instead, it's a published collection of articles, images, videos, podcasts,
infographics, and other media (for example) dedicated to your issue and targeting a local,
public, real-world audience.
This means all or most traces of writing that identify this class and its projects, assignments, etc
will be removed and replaced by material that is rhetorically appropriate for a public-facing,
issue-focused website.

In this sense, your final project is actually two things at once:

1. A final portfolio of your work in this class, displaying your ability to work with genres,
mediums, and rhetoric to craft authentic and effective writing for a specific public
audience.
2. A public-facing website that engages deeply with your local social issue and seeks to
serve the needs of the community and audience it targets.

Ultimately, this project is an opportunity for you to decide how to best represent your local issue
by arranging, organizing, and strategically revising/adapting the writing you have done this
semester. ​At least one of your major projects should be multi-modal​--more than just a text
document. Strong websites will make use of multiple mediums throughout, combining text,
images, and other forms in order to best reach their intended public audience.

Key Features for Every Website

● A ​title​ and ​homepage​ that contextualizes and frames your issue for a public audience
● An "​about​" page (you can call it whatever you want) that identifies you as the website
author and contains a bio or other fitting info.
● At least ​3 major feature pieces​ (articles, reports, videos, podcasts, infographics, etc),
all related to your local issue. (a "feature piece" can be revised versions of any of your 3
major projects or a hybrid piece created from 2-3 notebook entries.)
● At least ​3 notebooks​ repurposed to fit the rhetorical situation of your public-facing
website. (see below for a note on using notebooks)
● Clear, intentional, and rhetorically fitting ​navigation​ features that allow your website's
readers to easily move from one piece to the next.
● Multimedia work​, either throughout the website, or prominently featured in one major
project/piece/article/etc.
● Frequent and clear ​in-text citations​ for all sources and ​full citations​ in works cited or
reference sections at the end of each piece or on a separate page.

Notebooks

You have some flexibility in how you use your notebooks on your final project. You might:

● Turn them into a series of blog posts that relate to your issue.
● Select a few of them to craft into mini-articles about your issue, and feature them
together or separately on your website.
● Combine 2-3 of them into a more developed feature piece for your website.
 ○ NOTE: If you choose this route, you may substitute this new feature piece for one
of your major projects, or simply include it in addition to your 3 major projects.
● Keep them on a single page, but reframe the page for your public audience. (How will
you explain their presence here? What value do they offer your audience? how will you
make them "fit" the situation and circumstances of a public-facing, issue-focused
website?)
● Repurpose them in some other way that fits the needs, interests, and use of your
intended audience. Be creative and take risks with how you use your notebooks!

Flash Memoir Project

For now we’ll just introduce the project for the narrative effect module: the flash memoir. This
page will help you understand the requirements for the project, but you will learn more about
this project as you draft, receive feedback, and revise the project over the next few weeks.

The Occasion, Audience, and Goals

Each project this semester provides distinct ways of approaching, researching, and writing
about your local issue as well as new occasions for practicing writing. In your first project, you
will try out the narrative effect—using story as the forward frame in your writing—by producing a
flash memoir.

Memoirs are an important genre with an unquestionably strong presence in the contemporary
book publishing industry as well as literary and art circles. In short, memoirs are so important
because they allow for individuals to connect to others through the shared experiences,
challenges, and triumphs of being human.

While memoirs hold an important place in our public eye and are particularly good at
foregrounding human experience as a point of connection, the occasion and main goals for
writing your flash memoir should begin on a more personal level.

You will use the memoir—the acts of imagining, drafting and revising it—to establish a personal
connection with your local social issue and you will write for an audience that includes you, your
peers, and instructor. Connecting to your issue is an important part of enlivening your writing
about your issue and invigorating your research and general pursuit to understand it. As you
begin drafting your memoir, your primary goals are to demonstrate to your audience that you’re
working on creating the narrative effect in memoir. Therefore, you need to focus on a moment in
your life that connects to your issue and use storytelling qualities and techniques discover and
reveal those insights in your memoir. Finding your story, and exploring how to tell it slant, is the
art, practice, and experience of memoir writing.

The Narrative Effect

Writers employ the narrative effect when they use story as the primary method for making
meaning in their writing. Because narrative writing primarily relies on storytelling techniques to
convey meaning, the narrative effect will require attention to your story’s details and how you
strategically create and convey meaning to readers through the details. As you begin
composing your flash memoir, you’ll find that you’re first in pursuit of identifying the story you
need to tell. As you continue drafting, periodically return to the story you’re telling to consider
how it evolves and takes shape as the meaning and message of the story come into clearer
focus and become more defined.

Remember that the story itself—the elements and details of the story—are the primary method
for making meaning. Therefore, give ongoing attention to the available narrative techniques you
are employing to craft your story.

The Genre

You are composing a flash memoir, a type of text anchored in memory and one relying on
storytelling qualities (e.g., scene setting, description and detail, characters and dialogue, and
musing) to engage readers on an emotional level so that they come away with a deeper
understanding of the writer’s experiences and the issues the writer spotlights while narrating the
experiences. Flash texts gesture toward the importance of brevity and focus in a text, and
therefore flash memoir writers must work to perhaps cover less ground with purposeful detail.

Try This Out

Adding an outside source may be counterintuitive, as memoirs are so focused on personal

experience and perspective, and the style and features of memoirs seem an odd place to
integrate something so formal seeming as research, but try integrating the outside source in
different places and in different ways in your memoir. Observe others’ memoirs in this module:
when and where and how do you see research woven into the memoirs? What is the source
and the basic idea it engages? How does the source’s information advance the writer’s story
and meaning (or not)? As you read, can you imagine moments in the story where additional
research could illuminate something or where the writer’s source may be more useful or
effective?

By the end of this module, maybe you’ll have something to say about this: What role can outside
research play in memoir? Keep these questions close by as you learn more about the narrative
effect and memoirs.

Information Effect Project

From our narrative effect project, the flash memoir, we now move to the information-based text.
This page will help you understand the requirements for the project, but you will learn more
about this project as you draft, receive feedback, and revise the project over the next few
weeks.
The Information Effect Project: Interpreting, Selecting, Assembling, Explaining, and Presenting
Information

Recall from the first week of class when you learned about the various effects, that when writers
foreground the presentation and organization of information for a specific audience, they’re
using the information effect. Your main goal for this assignment is to produce an
information-based text that organizes, presents, and clearly explains information on a specific
aspect of your local issue for a defined audience and purpose of your choice. The information
effect can be seen in reports, but also in informative texts like infographics, fact sheets,
informational posters, FAQs, explanatory documents, research-based reports, etc.

The Occasion, Audience, and Goals

As you research and write your information effect project, one of your primary challenges is to
identify a need for a particular information and then select, assemble, explain, and present
information in ways that respond to the human needs that you identified. There are a number of
ways to go about identifying a need for information, but one way to focus on finding it is to think
about people related to your issue (there are many) and how they might use the information in
specific locations and situations. If you can locate your report in a particular occasion and
situation, then you can begin to reflect on what makes information valuable, or not, to the
audience in that situation. Consider whether they already have access to information and, if they
do, consider how you can provide information that gains its value by standing in distinction and
relation to what already exists, or perhaps you realize an absence of information and a clear
need.

With so much information out there, how can you even start? You might set a goal to quickly
narrow the scope of information you’re interested in finding. Use this project as an occasion to
step back from your issue to review the information you’ve already collected and what you know
and need to know more about. This means you’ll look at sources you’ve already collected to
more carefully observe what they reveal about your issue individually and alongside other
sources. This means, too, that you should review other texts you’ve produced that may hold
valuable information about your issue (e.g., notebook entries, previous projects, discussion
posts). As you work with the information you have, you should think about and identify a reason
for writing: a need for accessing and assembling information in particular ways so that you can
present that information meaningfully for an audience that needs it. Once you’ve determined a
need for writing and assessed the information you have, you should collect more information
based on the occasion and goals you establish for your project.

Minimum Requirements

○ Primarily text-based documents should be about 1,000 words or 4 double-spaced pages.

○ Video-based drafts: 3-5 minutes. You must record and edit the video yourself. Do not
simply make a compilation of clips.
○ Audio-based drafts: 3-5 minutes.
 ○ Image-based drafts (like photo essays, infographics, comics, or political cartoons): at
least 10 images accompanied by 50 words of descriptive/explanatory text per image.
You must take the photos, make the graphics, and draw the comics yourself. You should
only use someone else's images if absolutely need to--if you need a picture of a famous
person, for instance. Check with your instructor of record and be sure to credit the
image.
UPDATE: Due to Covid-19, we realize it might be impossible or unsafe for you to go out
and take photos, conduct interviews, or make videos. Don't put yourself at risk for this
class! Talk to your instructor about your situation and we'll figure it out.
○ You must use at least five sources, two of which come from the SLCC Library
Databases. You must document your sources in such a way that a reader would be able
to trace back, find, and examine them. This includes some form of in-text citation for
every source, and some form of works cited or references section at the end. ​MLA​ and
APA​are two academic citation systems you can use if you want to follow a specific
guide. Regardless of the citation system you choose, use consistent citation throughout
your project and make sure you do not include a list of pasted URLs at the end of your
document. If you need more help with citation, check ​this​ out.

The Information Effect

Writers foreground the information effect when they foreground the selection, explanation, and
presentation of information in their texts. Information-focused pieces typically have a public
purpose: the sharing and representation of information with a public. Keep in mind that
information-based texts downplay overt argumentation and are therefore less likely to
foreground claims that are based in opinion and point-of-view. Rather, information-based texts
typically feature an authorial stance that is focused outward—for instance, first person is usually
not a strong feature of information-focused genres (although it’s also not unheard of); the writer
of an information-focused piece keeps the reader’s attention on the information at hand.
Information-based texts gain their value by providing access to relevant and timely information
for people acting, or needing to act, in particular locations and situations. In this sense, writers
of information-based texts create value by dealing in quality information (verifiable, credible,
useful information).

Genre + Medium + Mode: Making Your Writing Matter to People

In this project we want to draw your attention to the ways that texts ​move i​ n writing situations,
and how your decisions about your genre for this project will influence the mediums and modes
of delivery you use too. All three of these things—genre, mediums, modes—influence a text’s
ability to circulate among members of a community. Please read more about multimodal writing
here​.

You have many potential avenues for this piece: you can choose a text-based piece (it’s a
classic!) with visuals that communicate information (graphs, charts, maps, etc.); you can choose
a multimedia piece, such as a presentation of some sort with voiceover; you can make an
infographic; you could do an audio piece; or you can do a hybrid text that draws on any number
of genres/mediums/modes. These possibilities are not exhaustive. If you choose a text-based
genre, though, think carefully about the medium you use to publish the text and make it
encounter-able by others, particularly those individuals among your target audience. A Word
document in itself won’t suffice. A lone PowerPoint won’t cut it.

Try This Out

Find a graph that displays information relevant to your information effect project. Look closely at
the information in the graph. Observe the kinds of information it includes; consider how it
assembles various information types; notice how it organizes the information; determine where
and how it explains information for readers. Once you’ve spent time with the information
presented in the graph, add a caption that contextualizes it for viewers and shapes what they
notice about the information. FInally, create a brief paragraph that connects up to particular
information in the graph, or that adds to or extends information seen in the graph. How can you
work your graph into your information effect project, and is this technique of assembling
applicable to this project?

Persuasion Effect Project

This page will help you understand the requirements for the persuasion effect project, but you
will learn more about this project as you draft, receive feedback, and revise the project over the
next few weeks.

The Occasion, Audience, and Goals

The Persuasion Effect Project gives you the opportunity to explore a range of viewpoints,
opinions and arguments surrounding your local social issue, and to imagine how you might
enter an ongoing public conversation about that issue, working rhetorically to craft your own
argument and support it with evidence, logic and storytelling. Persuasive genres often seek to
sway, influence, or otherwise move their audiences—not necessarily to change their minds
completely about an issue, but to invite them to fully consider the merits of a specific point of
view.

The audience for this persuasive project is up to you, but it should be specific and well-defined.
Ask yourself: who is discussing this topic in the public sphere? Who is making arguments? Who
are the various stakeholders, or groups and individuals with “skin in the game?” Who needs to
hear what I have to say? Who needs to change? Who out there can I hope to have an effect
upon? These questions should help you focus the audience for your project, and make
rhetorical choices as you draft and revise.

Persuasive writers adopt a wide range of authorial stances, from the deeply personal first
person point of view, to more outwardly focused informational/logical perspectives. Select an
authorial tone, voice and stance that you think will best work for your project.
The message of your persuasion-focused project should be your central argument, your main
point, your big idea, your thesis, your compelling story of how you came to think and believe
what you do. Start with a rough working message, and refine it as you research and write.

You should specify the occasion and context for this project based on your audience, your
message, and the current state of the ongoing public conversation you are seeking to join.
Persuasive writers often seek to craft timely arguments that respond to recent events or recent
commentary on an issue.

We will be studying 3 persuasive genres: position arguments, proposals, and evaluations. You
must use one of these genres for your Persuasion Effect Project.

The medium for your project is up to you. Think rhetorically to choose whether you’d like to
produce a text-based, video-based, audio-based, or image-based project. What medium would
best suit the needs of your intended audience? What medium excites, intrigues or terrifies you?
Choose that one.

Minimum Requirements

Your Persuasion Effect Project can, depending on the medium you choose, have varying
lengths.

● Primarily text-based documents should be about 1,000 words or 4 double-spaced

pages.
● Video-based drafts: 3-5 minutes. You must record and edit the video yourself. Do not
simply make a compilation of clips.
● Audio-based drafts: 3-5 minutes.
● Image-based drafts (like photo essays, infographics, comics, or political cartoons): at
least 10 images accompanied by 50 words of descriptive/explanatory text per image.
You must take the photos, make the graphics, and draw the comics yourself. You
should only use someone else's images if absolutely need to--if you need a picture
of a famous person, for instance. Check with your instructor of record and be sure to
credit the image.

UPDATE: Due to Covid-19, we realize it might be impossible or unsafe for you to go out and
take photos, conduct interviews, or make videos. Don't put yourself at risk for this class! Talk to
your instructor about your situation and we'll figure it out.

Integrate and cite at least five sources, two of which come from the SLCC Library Databases.
You must document your sources in such a way that a reader would be able to trace back, find,
and examine them. This includes some form of in-text citation for every source, and some form
of works cited or references section at the end. ​MLA​ and ​APA​ are two academic citation
systems you can use if you want to follow a specific guide. You can also look at example texts
to see how they do documentation when it’s not in MLA format. Regardless of the citation
system you choose, use consistent citations throughout your project and make sure you do not
include a list of pasted URLs at the end of your document. If you need more help with citation,
check ​this​ out.

The Genres

We will be studying 3 persuasive genres: position arguments, proposals, and evaluations. You
must use one of these genres. Within these genres are several forms, such as: academic
essays in various forms, newspaper and magazine commentary (op-eds), public-service
campaigns, political speeches, campaign ads, political cartoons and comics, manifestos,
memes, white papers, performance/product/work evaluations, and
book/movie/music/film/art/restaurant/destination reviews. These are just some of the most
common. You can likely think of a few more.

Try This

Some pieces of persuasive writing use micro-blasts from other genres, such as profiles, or
narrative, to create a vivid effect and more strongly connect with readers. Is there a particular
place or person who might illustrate some dimension of your argument? Could you insert a
mini-profile, or a micro-scene description, into your persuasive piece? Try beginning your
argument piece with one of these micro-genre-blasts. Or try ending your piece this way. Or—be
daring! Be bold!—try beginning and ending using these micro-genre-blasts.

Or Try This

Have you identified people who strongly disagree with you as the audience for your persuasive
piece? Try thinking about what you have in common with people who strongly disagree with
you. What shared ground might you have? How might that shared ground help you craft an
approach toward these readers, so that they might, if not change their minds, at least consider
the merits of your argument? What would help you, as a writer, invoke that shared ground?
Some ideas: citing a source that connects with your audience; affirming some dimension of the
audience’s beliefs (the part that you share or find meritorious); taking a reasonable and
thoughtful tone; inviting the reader to consider some dimension of the issue that you think they’ll
find compelling.