projects english 110c: first-year english composition ~ autumn 2005
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				dewitt
scott lloyd deWitt ~ associate professor of english ~ 614.292.4640 ~ dewitt.18@osu.edu ~ drsldosu
the ohio state university-columbus ~ 164 w. 17th avenue ~ denney hall 324 ~ columbus ohio 43210

Project 3
Digital Media Fusion: The Multimodal Campaign

As you begin the last project for this course, you need to reflect on your experiences thus far.  First, consider the range of production technologies you have had early and brief experiences with:

Microsoft Word
Adobe Photoshop
Macromedia Dreamweaver
Audacity
Macromedia Flash (coming soon)
Imovie (coming soon)

Also, consider the range of composing assignments you have had early and brief experiences with:

Composing with print text
Composing with non-print materials
Collecting media assests
Re-mixing images
Layering audio
Illustrating in a timed space (coming soon)
Editing video (coming soon)

Next, consider the range of concepts you have had early and brief experiences with:

Rhetorical choice
Persuasion and argumentation
Design
Media choice
Research

Finally, consider the types of composing processes you have had early and brief experiences with:

Descriptive composing
Analytical composing
Argumentative composing
Reflective composing
Collaborative composing

Your final project in this class, a collection texts you will compose, will involve a complex fusion of these technologies, assignments, concepts, and processes, where you will be asked to make appropriate and thoughtful choices in order to achieve this blend. All of these texts will be on the same topic, and all of them will be argumentative, each approaching their goals and reaching their audiences in different ways.  You will find that thinking about and working on them simultaneously will allow them to feed into and enrich each other.  You will work on these projects collaboratively in a production team of three to four students that you have chosen, drawing on one another's affinities and expertise with particular media and composing processes.

Assignment:

With your production team, collaboratively create a multimodal campaign portfolio on a subject of your choice but that is relevant to a university audience.  In this project, you will want to take strong, clearly articulated positions where you promote thinking and action that will influence particular audiences. You must fuse appropriate media based on your audience, your purpose, and the forum where you hope to achieve your goals. You want to target your audiences:  bring them to your side of an argument, change their thinking, alter their behavior or actions.   How you do that and what media you use to do that will be up to you.  The concept of “range” will be highly valued as your portfolio is assessed.

The only part of this project that will be prescribed to you is a Project Analysis.  In this analysis, you must answer the following generative questions:

In what ways are your production team’s multimodal campain arguments effective?  What choices did you make when considering your audience, your purpose, and your forum where you hope to achieve your goals, and why did you make these choices?  

This analysis should be exceptionally well developed and must rely heavily on print text and its appropriate associated conventions.  You might consider your audience and your purpose in terms of assessment and evaluation.  Why should an organization/agency/program/institution use your projects in a campaign they are developing?  How might you convince them that your production team worked well together and made thoughtful decisions about this work?  This project should be carefully researched and documented (using MLA style of documentation). 

The Project Proposal:

Early in this project, you will need to convince me that your portfolio idea is both effective and rigorous.  To do this, you will write a short Project Proposal. Your proposal will describe your project and how you plan to complete it.  In this proposal, you are describing both the issue at hand that your project addresses (the topic) as well as how you plan to execute the project. Your proposal must describe your targeted audience and argue why your approach will meet this audience’s needs.  Your proposal will be evaluated according to the following questions: 

Do the proposal writers take a creative and innovative approach toward the subject matter?

Do the proposal writers carefully consider the project’s audience and scope?

Do the proposal writers articulate a logical relationship between the subject matter, the intended audience and purpose, and the chosen media?

Do the writers use clear, descriptive prose in their proposal?

Project 2: Multimodal arguments
English 110C, Autumn 2005
Scott Lloyd DeWitt

Project note: I would like to extend an invitation (and strongly encourage you to accept the invitation) to work on Project 2 collaboratively. You may work in pairs, and your team will complete and submit one project (both the print and audio compositions). Project 3 will require you to collaboratively; this could help you prepare for that experience.

Part I: Print composition
The Critical Response

Responding to other people's ideas and arguments will play an important part in the writing that you do in college--and beyond.  You will be asked to evaluate, assess, examine, explore, judge, criticize, and add to the ideas and arguments of others. Of course, before you can write an effective response, you need to fully understand the texts you are reading.  Formulating written responses to the texts you read will force you to think critically, to question rather than simply accept what you see in print.

Assignment:

Write a critical response to an idea or position with which you take issue that is presented in one (1) of the written texts offered to you as a part of this assignment (.pdf files located on the classroom LAN).  Your writing should demonstrate your understanding of the author's intent by making clear and specific references to the text to which you are responding.  Your writing should exhibit a clear sense of purpose and should be directed toward a specific audience.  Above all, your essay must be supported by strong evidence and thoughtful reasoning. 

You will need to cite other research in your paper.  This assignment requires that you make clear reference to at least three (3) sources in the text of your paper in addition to the text to which you are responding.  Your Works Cited page, then, should include four (4) sources.  Of those four:

    one (1) must come from “print,” library-type sources;

    one (1) must come from the Web;

    one (1) must be some kind of interview (face-to-face, email, phone, chat) that you are able to conduct.

All research must be cited using correct MLA documentation. 

Looking at the assignment

• "Write a critical response . . .": Whereas this assignment seems prescriptive in what it is asking you to do, there are options available to you.  A key phrase in this assignment is “an idea or position with which you take issue.”  This phrase should indicate that your purpose for writing is to persuade, to take a critical stance, and to convince your readers to see your perspective on the issue.  You will note that the assignment does not say “an idea or position with which you disagree.”  I think that finding an issue with which you disagree is sometimes the easiest way to approach the task before you.  You summarize the text early in your paper, and then turn the argument around to your point of view.  You would analyze this text, showing its faults.  Then, you will offer your own perspective and research material as evidence that supports your argument.  Another approach to writing a critical response is to use the text you are responding to as a "point of departure" for your own essay.  In this case, you have something that you want to "add to" the arguments and ideas already presented.  When you use a text as a point of departure, you make clear reference to the text, summarizing what it says.  But your paper "jumps" off of this summary to critically respond to the broader issue that text was discussing or the issue that the text did not cover.  You need to be careful with this approach, however.  First, it is not fair to criticize someone for not covering an issue that really had nothing to do with his or her topic.  Also, you need to make sure that connection between your argument and the author’s argument is logical.  You do not want to “reach” here.
  
• “Your writing should demonstrate your understanding of the author's intent . . .”:  Regardless of what approach you choose, your audience wants to know how you came to write your essay.  In other words, they want to know what you read that caused you to write your critical response.  Both methods will require that you summarize the text you are responding to early in your paper. See this handout on writing an effective summary. > > >
  
• ". . . strong evidence and thoughtful reasoning.":  Being able to formulate an effective written response to others' writing requires that you support your own ideas instead of merely asserting them.  "Because that's just the way I feel"/"Because that's just the way it is" is not acceptable support.  "Research" is loosely defined here.  As long as you meet the minimal research requirement, you should feel free to use a wide range of support:  carefully formulated opinions, interviews, surveys, library material.  You should achieve a balance between your opinions and the information you find in your research. 

Part II: Audio composition
Re-mixing the Critical Response

In a richly layered audio text, re-imagine, re-fashion, and/or re-purpose your print composition for Project 2. The concepts "re-imagine, re-fashion, and/or re-purpose" are open for interpretation. However, all the rhetorical strategies that you had to consider for your print composition are still relevant, and you need to consider them carefully: Who is your audience? What is your purpose? What is your role in the construction of this text? What evidence and material will you use to reach your audience and achieve your purpose? You may go in a very different direction with this assignment than in your print composition as long as you stay with the same topic and general argument.

You should create your audio composition using Audacity. Your final composition will be turned in as an .mp3 file. You also need to submit a "credits" list of media assets you used in your audio composition.

Part III: Audio composition
Composing an Artist's/Artists' statement

Compose a short text where you describe your work on the audio composition. I am not interested in an exhaustive text where you describe all the rhetorical choices you made throughout the process of creating the text. Instead, I would like you to think of this text as a companion piece addressed to your listeners that will provide some contextual information and that will shape the way they understand your audio composition (as your teacher, I am one of these listeners).

Below is a list of questions you might want to consider as you compose this piece. I am not interested in simply having you answer these questions in list form, and you are not required to answer all of them. Instead, think of them as "generative." In other words, how can your answers to these questions help you generate ideas for this short artist's/artists' statement?

How did you devise your audio composition?  How did you come up with the topic and your approach to the topic?

Who is your intended audience for the piece?  How do you think your audio composition reaches this audience?  What kind of effect do you hope to have on your audience (your purpose)?  Where did you imagine this piece being broadcast? 

Which specific choices did you make while constructing your audio composition? How and why did you make these choices, and how did they affect your composition?

What struck you as the most meaningful aspect(s) of this assignment in terms of how you think of yourself as a writer/rhetorican/digital media composer? What specifically do you think contributed to your success or lack of success?

Project 1:  Imaging Quotations
English 110C, Autumn 2005
Scott Lloyd DeWitt

Part I:  Photoshop composition

Layering image and print, create a series of three (3) illustrated quotations in Photoshop.  This series of illustrated quotations should explore the relationship of print and image while carefully considering the rhetorical concepts you have studied in class.  The illustrated quotations should be separate files, or frames, and should be saved as a .jpg file. 

In the series, you should be working with the same found quotation (or a variation of the same found quotation) in all three frames.  However, the images and design of the three frames should vary significantly, allowing you to achieve different rhetorical objectives in each frame.   You should plan to spend a significant amount of time working with your images and design, shaping and manipulating them, making deliberate choices about the meaning you are trying to convey. 

Part II:  Print composition

In a print essay, write a descriptive rationale for the work you did in your Photoshop composition.  This print composition should carefully consider and cite the rhetorical concepts you have studied in class as well as any other research that will help you make rhetorical choices and understand these choices.  Your composition should be written as a tradition print document and saved as a .doc file (or a format compatible with Microsoft Word). 

Your goal in the print composition is to present an argument of sorts, one that convinces an audience of the rhetorical choices you have made in your Photoshop compositions (this composition might also convince your audience of strengths and weaknesses of these choices—a self-assessment).  Your print essay should make clear and descriptive reference to your Photoshop compositions.  Also, your argument should be supported by source material that we have read for class and other research you have conducted that will help you better understand your subject matter and your audience.  These sources must be documented using MLA style. 

As you write the first draft of this print composition, you might consider the following questions:

Why did you choose the images you did? Why did you choose to manipulate them as you did, or if you left them unaltered, why? What argument or meaning were you trying to make?

Which rhetorical concepts did you consider while constructing your series of Photoshop compositions? How and why did you use the concepts you chose, and how did they affect your composition?

What struck you as the most meaningful aspect(s) of this assignment in terms of how you think of yourself as a writer/rhetorican/digital media composer? What specifically do you think contributed to your success or lack of success?

Resources to consult

http://www.quotationspage.com/

http://www.google.com (image search)

http://www.yahoo.com (image search)

http://www.flickr.com/

Research

Any resource you use in your paper will need to be cited.  I will provide you with bibliographic information for all sources you have read as a part of this class.  We will also talk about citing sources using MLA style of documentation.  In the meantime, you should always gather the following information when you use a source:

Print=authors, titles, publishers, page numbers, dates.

Web=author, site titles, page titles, URLs, date viewed.