This project asks students to present the same argument to two different audiences using two different genres/media. Instead of writing a paper, students compose in more everyday genres—genres they’re more accustomed to seeing and consuming outside of school, but also genres they’re more likely to compose in once you leave school. The goal of these compositions is to try to convince their audience into action based on the position they present. While it is not required, students often opt to compose with digital media to create texts like videos, websites, podcasts, and social media accounts.

The major goals of my RHET103 College Writing course are to help students understand what writing is, how it shapes and is shaped by different situations, and how they can become better writers by understanding the situations they write in. Most of the projects in the course require that students compose alphabetic texts. This project, however, gives students the opportunity to put some of the concepts we’ve discussed in class into practice by developing a single researched argument related to a field of study they are interested in (e.g. economics, American studies, psychology, etc.). Alongside the digital texts they create, students also write rhetorical rationales to discuss why they are making the choices they’re making. This helps to establish connections between the contexts (audiences, media, genres, purposes, etc.), choices (based on those contexts), and concepts (the concepts that inform their choices).

This project helps students see how the concepts we’ve applied to more “traditional” writing—like research papers, rhetorical analysis, etc.—can be operationalized in settings/situations they are more used to operating within.

This projected is associated with the course: RHET-103

Download assignment file: https://incubator.domains.trincoll.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/A3_CompositionIn2Genres.pdf

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