class meeting Wednesday Mar 9
Picking your article idea. What a feature article looks like. Doing some initial research. How to do annotated bibliographies and field work.
Here is the Assignment Sheet again. Please read it.
due by Saturday Mar 12 end of day
- Post on this Padlet your idea for an article. You might discover somebody who’s working on the same thing that you could share resources with!
- You don’t need to post this, but try a quick KWL+ to generate some questions for you to start doing your research:
- OpenLab post: Create a new post and write a proposal of at least 300 words for your Unit Two article. This should include the following:
- An explanation of your “beat.” This is a bit of an expansion on what you wrote last week. This time, talk about what makes this something you have the knowledge or curiosity to write about.
- Your research question(s). What you need to know more about in order to write this article. Again, use the KWL+ activity to generate those questions and start you on your research. You may be able to figure out who you could interview as well as what to Google/go to the library for.
- Who your target audience is. This should be a specific group of people (like people who want to learn about fitness, or beginning bakers, or the city council). If there’s a specific publication you can think of that publish something like that, say what it would be.
- What will make this story interesting to your readers. A general idea of the kinds of things you might include (stories, data, etc.).
- Where you will go to find the information you need to write this article (newspapers, websites, friends, family, experts — think in terms of both primary and secondary sources).
- Category: Feature Proposal
Helpful things for doing primary/interview research
These three handouts will get you all set to do good interviews with everybody from experts to friends and family members.
due by Tuesday Mar 14 end of day
- Perusall: Read and annotate one of the Feature Articles. In your annotation, talk about what do you like/ dislike about this writer’s style? What are you confused by? What do you want to know more about? Pay special attention to how this author uses research (outside facts, statistics, history, news, interviews) in their writing.
- Sports Illustrated. “Why I’m behind the student athletes’ bill of rights.”
- Science News. “How coronavirus stress may scramble our brains.”
- The Cut. “Is marriage obsolete?”
- Vox. “The age of monsters.
- Google Drive: In the class folder labeled “Feature Article,” create your own folder titled with your name. In that folder, post annotations for two sources you’re hoping to use in your article. The handout below explains how to do it. Briefly, each annotation has these components:
- bibliograhic citation (the citation for an interview looks like this: Smith, Jane. Personal interview. 19 May 2014.)
- descriptive paragraph (summary of the main idea and supporting idea)
- evaluative paragraph (how credible the source is)
- usefulness analysis (whether this will help you with your article and how it will be useful)
MLA Formatting help
This is a link to the Purdue Owl’s section on MLA citation. You can use the menu on the left side to scroll to the one you need.
