Due Thursday, May 8

The Assignment

For this assignment you will use your op-ed/opinion essay (both the research you did and the argument you made) and present it in a multimodal text composed for a specific audience.

Your final piece will go beyond the written word; instead you will communicate using multimodal composing. Think about what you want to say and to whom and choose a genre that is appropriate for your audience. Look at the lists below, and choose both an audience for your piece along with the most appropriate genre.

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

  • Fourth graders
  • City Tech First-Year Students
  • The Mayor’s office
  • Your grandparents or older relatives
  • Activist groups (like BLM or LGBTQIA+ Youth, etc.)

Next, choose a genre:

  • TED Talk (include written transcript along with the video)
  • Wikipedia entry (include images)
  • Video, photographic, or graphic essay 
  • Blog (include images and/or video)
  • Informational brochure (include images)
  • Infographic
  • Poster with Public Service Announcement (PSA) 
  • You might think of something else!

Remember, you are trying to reach a specific audience, so don’t choose the genre arbitrarily. You want to choose a genre that is going to speak to the audience you have in mind: who would be most likely to watch a TEDTalk? What is the point of a PSA poster and who do you think you’d reach with that genre? Who might be attracted to the information on an Instagram page with well-curated stories?

Here are some questions to consider as you write your multimodal text:

  • your purpose: why did you compose the work on that specific topic?
  • your audience: what did you understand about your readers and how did this affect the compositional choices you made?
  • your choice of genre: why did you choose this genre for your audience and point?

Here are the grading criteria for the Multimodal project:

Your multimodal piece…

  • follows the conventions and formatting of your chosen multimodal genre.
  • integrates the research and argument from your op-ed/opinion essay.
  • uses quotes and/or makes reference to specific data or facts from your research.
  • uses tone, language, grammar, and sentence structure appropriate for this genre.
  • has been carefully proofread.
  • has been submitted on time.

(Assignment adapted from Dr. Carrie Hall’s Multimodal Project)