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last.updated 8.7.08

 

Final Text

Purpose

This document is your ideosyncratic response to the problem or issue you worked with throughout the second-half of the semester.

Instructions-Research

You have already done a lot of research about your chosen subject matter in the Proposal and your audience in the Audience Research Memo. You may choose to do more of these types of research on your own to help you prepare yourself for composing this text.

For this assignment, you will need to choose a genre that you will use to present your text. This decision should reflect both the purpose of your text and who the text is being written for. Some options include...

  • an academic essay
  • a brochure
  • a PowerPoint Presentation
  • a letter
  • a blog
  • a wiki entry
  • a video (posted to a site like YouTube or Google video)

Then you will want to use the strategies you learned in the Social Networking Genre Project to develop a better understanding of the genre you have chosen.

Instructions-Writing

Each of you will compose a text that you think will most effectively address the problem or issue you chose for a specific audience. As a result, each of you may be composing very different types of texts. The text you produce should be reasonably substanative. Therefore, the instructor reserves the right to set parameters for your project; these parameters, of course, will be decided by a process of negotiation.

When writing this document, you will want to use the knowledge that you now have to prompt your audience to a course of action or to reconsider how they understand the specific problem or issue. Due to the nature of the documents that some of you will choose to write or the audiences that you are writing to, some of you will not be reporting your research within your documents. However, all of you will want to use your research to inform what and how you compose what you articulate in your document.


Criteria

Logistic:

  • Due December 12, 2008 with your Portfolio. If you are submitting a text that is a hard copy, place the hard copy in the portfolio. If you are creating a digital text, either submit is on a disk (in a file that is Mac compatible) or write a URL where is can be retrieved on the Take-home exam (a follow -up email with the URL would be appreciate so that the instructor only has to click on a link).
  • 100 points

The instructor will use what you have written for the Take-home exam to evaluate your submission of the Final Text. While the Take-home exam will be evaluated on its own merit to determine how well you can write about the decisions you made to compose the Final Text, it will also be used to determine whether you performed what you said you did. For example, if you state that you learned that your target audience does not have good access to computer technology and you create a web text, then you will do well on the Take-home exam for demonstrating this awareness, but poorly on the Final Text for not composing a text that is effective for your target audience.

In addition to the general evaluation criteria, the instructor will be looking for evidence of...

  • an understanding of the subject matter of your problem or issue. Does your text follow from the research your have done?
  • an understanding of your the target audience you have chosen. Will your audience have access to this type of text? Is it the best type of text for this audience? Do you fulfill generic expecations? Will the text move your audience?
  • an appropriate persona; have you adopted a tone and a style that will connect with your intended audience?
  • an understanding of the composing decisions that you made. Does your text comply with the decisions you made in your Take-home exam.
  • a quality text. Is this a text your target audience will want to engage with?
  • appropriate use of conventions, if relevant, MLA, APA, or an appropriate citation formatting