Week 11:

• Dates: Monday, 11/13 and Wednesday, 11/15
• Meeting Info: This course meets in person for 100 minutes twice per week, Mondays and Wednesdays from 12:00-1:40pm, in Namm 602A. By the end of each week, I will post an agenda that will outline the next week’s work. It will include instructions for you and links to readings, discussion questions, and other work. We will work on developing community both in our classroom and in our online written community.

Objectives

• To work on Project 3 by learning about mentor text genres
• To share sh!tty first drafts of Project 3
• To catch up on any missing or late work, especially with the Final Portfolio in mind.
• To schedule a time to talk with me to discuss your revision of Project 1.

To Do Before Week 11

Just in case you haven’t already, please:

• Catch up on any readings or discussions you’ve missed–you can review the Weekly Class Agendas to see what we covered.

To-Do This Week

Monday, 11/13

Texts:

• Find mentor texts to help you understand the genre you’re interested in using for Project 3

Writing:

• If you haven’t yet submitted a reflective cover letter for Project 2, please do so either as a private post or on paper in class on Monday. You can find the questions online in our Week 10 Agenda, in the In Class section of Wednesday, 11/8.

In Class:

• In class focused freewrite: set an intention for class today. What do you hope to get out of class today? What are you able to put in to class today?
• What genres are we considering using for Project 3? Some examples:
  • Infographic: we can use Canva.com and create infographics there. It combines data and some text to convey information, in a very visual way, often simplified for easy comprehension.
  • Listicle: an article that lists things plus a description or information for each item in the list. we’re saying minimum 5 items in the list. Listicles can be all text or text and image; stylized (or not)
  • Interview (different media options): interviewer asks open-ended questions; between 3 and 6 questions, plus a framing introduction
  • Photo essay: transformations and visualizations; gathering information; photos speak to the topic, not just the text doing all the work. Q: how do the photos and text work together? Q: how much text? how many photos? Q: where do you get the photos?
  • Multimedia blog post
  • Open letter
  • TED Talk/TED Ed Talk
  • Social media thread
  • Podcast
  • Any others?
• What do we know about these genres?
  • Who composes in this genre?
  • Who are possible audiences for this genre/who isn’t an audience for this genre (whichever is more helpful for you)
  • What is the purpose of a text in this genre?
  • What are some of the features of the genre? Think about tone, style, diction/word choice, format, organization, etc.
  • How do you know a text is an example of this genre?
• What are some mentor texts in this genre?
  • Podcast: “All for a Library Card” from Borrowed, Season 7, Episode 1
  • Listicle: “Small Steps to Improve Your Mental Health in 2023” by Hannah Seo
  • Multimodal Interview: “Nontsikelelo Mutiti on Interrogating the Euro-centric Design Canon” by Ksenya Samarskaya
  • Open Letter: Sinead O’Connor’s Open Letter to Miley Cyrus
  • Photo Essay: “Photos: A Year of Grieving and Struggling for Answers After Uvalde School Shooting” by Evie Blad
  • Infographic: HERI YFCY Infographic “Journey Through the First Year of College” (click on it in the sidebar; if you can’t find it, you can view the pdf of the infographic)
• Remembering genre awareness: “Understanding Genre Awareness”

Wednesday, 11/15

Texts:

• Mentor texts
• Texts from your annotated bibliography

Writing:

• Prepare a draft that you can share on our site with the class on W 11/15

In Class:

UPDATE: We’ll be asynchronous today. This means that the work you need to do is listed below, and you can do it on your own time today. I encourage you to work in our classroom so you have a quiet space with some friendly classmates nearby. Please devote the full 100 minutes to this work.

Here is what you can work on for our class time today:

• Review the instructions for Project 3.
• Presentation of drafts (shifted to online). Share your ideas in response to these questions by writing a post (review the instructions for Writing a Post):
  • What is your plan for Project 3 (topic, genre, goals)?
  • What genre have you chosen, what is your mentor text (include a link)?
  • What are 5-6 features of the mentor text that you’ll use as a model for your new text?
  • What advice do you need to make your new text?
  • Reflect on what you do in the rest of the class time, and share links to your drafts.
• Workshop time: on your own, spend some time drafting your new text.

Some advice about creating your text:

• Some of the following examples use Canva.com, a free website that helps you design beautiful texts. Even though it’s free, it may come with some hidden costs, specifically, what they do with your data. If you are not comfortable creating an account with them, we can find an alternative way to create your visual text. If you feel comfortable with this as you do with most other widely used free .com sites, then please take advantage of the beautiful content it can help you make.
• Infographic: Create an account on Canva.com. Search for Infographics or use this link to create infographics using Canva templates. Choose a template and start adding your content!
• If you’re interested in creating a more stylized Listicle, you might want to use Canva as well. Look at that same link as above, infographics using Canva templates, and see how the listicles in the templates look.
• If you’re interested in other visual-oriented texts, browse through Canva to see what else is possible. Would a timeline or flow chart be a useful text for you to create? Would the slideshow you can create make a good foundation for a TED Ed talk? There are many, many possibilities.
• If you are creating a text that includes images (a photo essay, a multimedia blog post, a multimedia interview, etc), use images that you have created, or that are in the Public Domain or have a Creative Commons license. This means that you are not violating copyright by posting your work with these images in them–as long as you follow the rules the creator established when they posted it, meaning if they say you have to give them credit, you have to give them credit! For now, just save the link, and we’ll work on creating citations for attribution together the next time we meet. You can learn more about following copyright rules for images. Also, here are some sites where you can find images you can use :
  • Flickr (be sure to filter your results for Creative Commons license rather than Any License if you’re using Flickr)
  • Creative Commons Search Portal
  • Wikimedia Commons
  • Wikipedia Public Domain Image Resources
  • Digital Public Library of America
• What questions do you have? Do you want to meet via Zoom? let me know either by email or by leaving a comment here on this post. If you have questions you think anyone in class might be able to answer (eg how to make Canva do what you want), please share them with the whole class here in a comment.