UNIT THREE: WRITING IN A NEW GENRE

At the end of Unit 2, we asked the question: What is the most important thing you learned and what audience do you think needs to know about it? For Unit 3, we ask ourselves: what is the best genre to tell that audience the information you learned in Unit 2? 

In this unit, you will write about the subject you researched in Unit 2 in the genre of your choice. Whatever you choose, it should be the genre that best reaches the audience you think needs to hear about your topic. It also needs to showcase your research! 

How are you going to get your target audience to listen to your message? Will they listen to a political speech? Watch a video essay? Read a magazine article? Read/watch a scene from a play/film?  Read the lyrics to a song? You can use pretty much any genre, as long as it’s one that’s new to you and appropriate for the audience you choose. No middle school kid is going to sit still for a 30-minute political speech even if it’s about how to keep from being bullied. Wrong genre, poor analysis of your audience. All I ask is that you make sure it isn’t offensive (racist, sexist, homophobic, religion-intolerant). Also, no Power Point.

Once you’ve written your new genre text, you’ll also write an Artist’s Statement to go along with it, something that tells us what you intended to do, who your intended audience was, what you went through to get it done, how well you think it turned out, and where you think it might be published/shared with that audience. There will be a handout on the Artist’s Statement when that time comes. (See below for an overview)

This assignment will be due no later than WEEK 14.

So, to recap, in Unit 3, you will: 

  • Write about the research you did in Unit 2
  • Address the audience you think needs to know what you learned in Unit 2 (just the most important parts)
  • Compose in the genre that you think will best reach that audience
  • Write an approximately 750-word Artist’s Statement that explains your process

What you’ll be graded on:

  1.       Genre Selection: Whatever you choose must actually fit in that genre. When you do your proposal, you’ll have a chance to set up what the rules and conventions are for that genre.
  2.       Appropriateness for audience: If you’re doing something for 4th grade students, it shouldn’t be full of graduate school words. Appropriate means word choice, approach to topic/issue, use of visuals if you use them – does the way you “wrote” your genre piece fit what would work best for this audience?
  3.       Effectiveness of message: Did you get your point across? Did it fulfill your purpose?
  4.   Length/Timeliness: The genre piece can be whatever length it needs to be based on the conventions of the genre. 
  5.     Artist Statement: Did you thoughtfully reflect on your process, even if things didn’t turn out quite how you wanted? 

ARTIST STATEMENT OVERVIEW

Explaining the rationale behind our actions and decisions is an important kind of reflective writing because it makes visible what is otherwise invisible. You can choose to write an e-mail in Comic Sans font, but unless you explain why, the choice may seem mysterious and odd to readers. 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. 

In an Artist’s Statement, you step back and consider what you did and what you might have done differently and might do differently in the future. That’s what you’ll do in this reflection about the genre project you’ve just completed: the choices you made, why you made them, what happened, how you feel about it now.  So, for this approximately 750-word document, you’re going to create your own reflection about your project, and do it in a way that tells us what happened and when — the chronology of thought and actions that took you from your first ideas about it all the way to the completed project.

Helpful resources for composing in various genres: 

The New York Times on creating a Podcast: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/learning/making-a-podcast-that-matters-a-guide-with-examples-from-23-students.html

The NYT has an entire list of “Mentor Texts” that help you write articles like a sports article and a personal health column. It’s quite useful.  It can be found here: https://www.nytimes.com/column/learning-mentor-texts

More resources for creating texts:

Free music: https://www.purple-planet.com/

 Free sound effects: http://soundbible.com/free-sound-effects-1.html

 Copyright safe images (photos, clip art, etc): https://search.creativecommons.org/

 Stock videos (and photos): https://www.pexels.com

 Illustrations you can manipulate: https://undraw.co/illustrations

 https://www.canva.com/ is a mostly free (especially if you upload your own images) design program that does everything from posters and banners to storyboards and comic strips. A real go-to tool for a lot of people.

Posters, infographics, etc.:

 Online comic maker: https://www.makebeliefscomix.com/

 Audio creator/editor:  https://www.audacityteam.org/ [easy to use with a full range of tools, lots of videos about how to use it]

 Screencasting/video recording:

  •  https://screencast-o-matic.com/ Screencast-o-matic is free if you want to do screen capture videos from your laptop. Word of warning: if you really want to do some close editing work, it will cost, but for the basics, it’s fine. You can upload the resulting video to YouTube. A lot of faculty use it.
  • YouTube Studio will give you lots of tutorials about how to create videos.