Category: Unit 3

Project 3: New Audience: New Genre

What does this mean???

Maybe you wrote about the effect of Covid in the Bronx for Unit 2, and you think New York politicians should know about what you wrote. Maybe you wrote about young women skateboarding in the Olympics and you want girls in grade school to know how awesome those athletes are to boost their self-esteem. In this unit, you’ll think about a specific audience that should know about your unit one word/ (discourse) community or your unit two beat (and why). You will then “repackage” or “re-vision” your research to reach that audience.

First, choose from ONE  of the following five audience groups:

• Fourth graders
• City Tech Freshmen
• New York City Council members
• Your grandparents or older relatives
• Activist groups (like BLM or LGBTQIA+ Youth, etc.)

RE-VISION: Multimodal Text

Once you have decided who your audience is, you will decide how best to reach them.  In other words, you will have to choose the best genre for your project.  For Unit 3, this genre must be multimodal. We’ll talk more about what this means, but for these purposes, it means you need to have words and images or words and sounds or words, images and sounds.  In other words, you cannot write a simple essay– this is time for either your Unit One or Unit Two research to come alive!

Remember, you are trying to reach a specific audience here. So you don’t want to choose a genre arbitrarily. You want to choose a genre that is going to speak to the audience you have in mind. Fourth graders probably aren’t going to want to watch a TED Talk. Likewise, you probably shouldn’t make a comic book for the City Council. An Instagram page, with well-curated stories might be a great way to reach high-school seniors, though!

A note: we’ll brainstorm possible genres in class, but there is one restriction now: No PowerPoints!  The reason for this is that PowerPoint  isn’t a genre–it’s a tool, a slideshow, basically. You would never just send a slideshow to City Council and say “here you go!” You might use a slideshow when you give a speech (and you can use a PowerPoint in any speech or lesson plan you give) but the speech is the product, not the PowerPoint. You should also be aware that PowerPoints are famously boring, so it’s best to rely on them sparingly and to rely mostly on what you have to say.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Composers of all sorts often write an Artist’s Statement for their audience that explains their inspirations, intentions, and choices in their creative and critical processes. It helps the reader understand the process that led to the final product by providing insight into what the author set out to do, how they did it, and what they might do to further improve the piece. You will write a one to two page Author’s Statement that reflects on your finished Unit 3 Project.

A successful Artist’s Statement should:

• Discuss your specific rhetorical situation and related choices:
  –your purpose: why you composed the work on that specific topic, in that specific way
  –your audience: what you understood about your readers and how this affected the compositional choices you made

• Explain your choice of genre and how you worked with its conventions. For example, maybe you created a photo essay. An accompanying statement, in which you explain why you found the photo essay to be the best way to communicate your ideas about gun control, for example, would go a long way toward helping your viewers get the most out of your work.

• Reflect on your composition, discussing successes and limitations. Use this as an opportunity to look back at your composition and evaluate the extent of your achievement as well as note what you would have done differently or better.

*Note: This should be a fluid, cohesive document that reflects on and justifies the rhetorical choices in your Unit 3 Project. Do not just merely answer each question in list form.

Length

How long should it be?  This is a hard question to answer because everyone is writing in a different genre.  But look, this project is worth 15% of your grade– and the last big project of the semester so it should be substantial— the equivalent of a 4-5 page paper. 

In other words, if you do a one page infographic, that’s fine! But you’ll need to write an artist’s statement of at least a few pages that gives that infographic some context. 

Which brings me to the final point…in addition to creating the multimodal text, you will write an artist’s statement. How long the statement is and what is included will really depend on how long your multimodal text is. Combined the two projects have to be between 1600 and 1800 words.

Grading Criteria:

You will largely get graded on: Appropriateness for your audience, effectiveness of message, and care. What does this mean?

1. APPROPRIATENESS FOR AUDIENCE: Well, first of all, a puppet show is not appropriate for a city council meeting any more than a brochure is appropriate for a preschool class, so, in part, I’m talking about what genre you choose. But I am also talking about topics and diction. If we take the examples of the preschool and the city council meeting, it’s pretty easy to think about. Learning how to use crayons isn’t a real city council topic, and commercial zoning laws aren’t a real preschool topic. Likewise, you would use different diction (and fonts, and pictures, and so on) with kids and with politicians. Usually.
2. EFFECTIVENESS OF MESSAGE: This one is simple to explain, though not always simple to DO. Does your point get across to your intended audience?
3. CARE: This sounds pretty vague, because it’s going to vary by genre, but basically, this is how much of a finished product you turn in. If this is a more formal paper, or a children’s book, or a brochure for the city council, it should be relatively free of grammatical “error.” If you are writing in Brooklyn English, that’s fine (if it fits your audience, of course,) but you still need to be consistent and free of typos and your project needs to look good. In other words, you need to be able to explain why everything that’s on the page (or in the video, or on the webpage, or in the recording, etc) is THERE.
4. ARTIST’S STATEMENT: A fluid and cohesive Artist’s Statement that explains the rationale behind the rhetorical choices made in your Unit 3 assignment.

Project 3: The Steps

For Project 3, you will repackage what you wrote for either Proj. 1 or Proj. 2 in order to reach a totally new audience. To do this, you’ll chose a new genre* that you think will best reach that audience and create a multimodal text in that genre.  You will also write an Artist’s Statement explaining your choices. 

STEP 1: Choose Your Audience

First, choose from ONE  of the following five audience groups:

• Fourth graders
• City Tech Freshmen
• New York City Council members
• Your grandparents or older relatives
• Activist groups (like BLM or LGBTQIA+ Youth, etc.)

STEP 2: Choose a Genre

Once you have decided who your audience is, you will decide how best to reach them.  In other words, you will have to choose the best genre for your project.  For Unit 3, this genre must be multimodal. We’ll talk more about what this means, but for these purposes, it means you need to have words and images or words and sounds or words, images and sounds.  In other words, you cannot write a simple essay– this is time for either your Unit One or Unit Two research to come alive!

Remember, you are trying to reach a specific audience here. So you don’t want to choose a genre arbitrarily. You want to choose a genre that is going to speak to the audience you have in mind. Fourth graders probably aren’t going to want to watch a TED Talk. Likewise, you probably shouldn’t make a comic book for the City Council. An Instagram page, with well-curated stories might be a great way to reach high-school seniors, though!

**DUE: Project Proposal

STEP 3: Draft Your Multimodal Text

You will compose a multimodal text in a genre appropriate to audience and purpose! 

Your multimodal text should: 

REPURPOSE or REPACKAGE what you wrote for Project 1 or 2 

• Use the research and information you have already compiled! Just repackage it for a new audience in a new genre! 

Use Rhetorical Appeals to Strengthen the Message

• Provide facts, statistics, and other evidence 
• Appeal to the audience’s emotions
•  Provide a logical and well-organized argument

(Maybe) Provide a Clear Call-to-Action for the Intended Audience

• How do you want your audience to think, act or behave after interacting with this text?
• Write a strong and persuasive call to action that leaves your audiences ready to act or change their thinking!

STEP 4: Compose an Artist’s Statement

Composers of all sorts often write an Artist’s Statement for their audience that explains their inspirations, intentions, and choices in their creative and critical processes. It helps the reader understand the process that led to the final product by providing insight into what the author set out to do, how they did it, and what they might do to further improve the piece. You will write a one to two page Artist’s Statement that reflects on your finished Unit 3 Project.

STEP 5: Revise and Edit

You will revise and edit your multimodal texts and artist’s statements and share your work with your classmates.