Your Advocacy: Creative Project and Justification
Requirements: Creative Advocacy Project, Explanation Memo (1000 words)
This assignment is based on extensive research, providing evidence to support the advocacy.
Student must receive a “C” or higher on this to pass the class.
Synthesizing everything you have learned about writing, rhetoric, and advocacy, you are going to create your own piece of advocacy, purposefully exploring how audience, context, and content affect the media and mode you will work in. This project will be both a research project—you need to understand your issue and where the need for advocacy is—and a creative project: you will use your talents and skills to create a functional, real-world piece of media that advances understanding or advocacy on the issue you are researching.
You will begin by formally proposing a project and justifying it. Then you will create a prototype of your project to present and user-test in class, and then incorporate your feedback into a revision for the final project. In a separate memo, you will provide the justification for all of your final decisions, including the results of your user test.
This project has 3 graded parts.
1. Project Proposal: (10 points) 250 words • Format: Discussion Board 10
Calling on the research you did in Paper 3, propose a new advocacy project on your issue. In your proposal, explain your idea, audience, medium, and mode. Justify your decisions with rhetorical principles. Specific instruction on how to write memos and what to include in this one will be given in the discussion board prompt
2. Creative Advocacy Project: (40 points) • Format: You Decide
Choosing an issue that is meaningful and urgent to you, create a media project that acts as a potentially effective piece of advocacy for a specific audience. Your audience should guide the decisions you make about content, genre, mode, and tone. You do not have to have a professionally produced final piece, it could be a mock-up of what it would look like. For example, if you think a billboard on 290 would be particularly effective for creating awareness about the dangers of synthetic drugs, then you would create a realistic sketch of your idea. However, if you have the technical skills to make a video or create a website, then you should create the actual media. Due: Week 11 for User-Test / Final draft due Week 12/last day of term for evaluation
3. Project Justification Memo: (60 points) 1000 words • Format: Memo
This memo should be written to your instructor, providing detailed rhetorical justification for the decisions you made for your project. Why did you choose to create what you did and in that particular format? How do you think the text or object will work? How does your project operate as an effective tool for advocacy? You should have distinct sections on Audience, Research Findings, Audience, Genre and Media, Verbal and Visual Rhetoric, User-Test Feedback, and Reflection. Specific instruction on how to write this memo will be presented in class. Due: Week 12 for workshop / Final draft due last day of term
Please note that when I am asking you to do “research,” that does not mean only consulting scholarly journals with peer-reviewed articles or books published by University presses. Oftentimes, those sources are not appropriate as they are written for other scholars and practitioners. Often we can turn to credible popular source publications which report on, digest, interpret, and interact with scholarly findings. So, you can and should use popular source articles. Library databases like ProQuest will give you better access and further range in grabbing those than Google or Google scholar alone.
Paper 4
Your Advocacy
:
Creative Project and Justification
(100 points)
Requirements: Creative Advocacy Project, Explanation Memo (1000 words)
This assignment is based on extensive research, providing evidence to support the advocacy.
Student must receive a “C” or higher on this to pass the class.
Synthesizing everything you have learned about writing, rhetoric, and advocacy, you are going to create your own piece of advocacy, purposefully exploring how audience, context, and content affect the media and mode you will work in. This project will be both a research project
—you need to understand your issue and where the need for advocacy is
—and a creative project: you will use your talents and skills to create a functional, real
-world piece of media that advances understanding or advocacy on the issue you are researching.
You will begin by formally proposing a project and justifying it. Then you will create a prototype of your project to present and user-test in class, and then incorporate your feedback into a revision for the final project. In a separate memo, you will provide the justification for all of your final decisions, including the results of your user test. This project has 3 graded parts
. 1. Project Proposal (10 points) 250 words •Format: Discussion Board 10
Calling on the research you did in Paper 3, propose a new advocacy project on your issue. In your proposal, explain your idea, audience, medium, and mode. Justify your decisions with rhetorical principles. Specific instruction on how to write memos and what to include in this one will be given in the discussion board prompt. (Please note that while this is a part of the final project, the points for this will fall under your discussion board points, rather than the total points for this project.)
2. Creative Advocacy Project: (40points) •Format: You Decide
Choosing an issue that is meaningful and urgent to you, create a media project that acts as a potentially effective piece of advocacy for a specific audience. Your audience should guide the decisions you make about content, genre, mode, and tone. You do not have to have a professionally produced final piece, it could be a mock-up of what it would look like. For example, if you think a billboard on 290 would be particularly effective for creating awareness about the dangers of synthetic drugs, then you would create a realistic sketch of your idea. However, if you have the technical skills to make a video or create a website, then you should create the actual media.
Due: Week 11 for User-Test / Final draft due Week 12/last day of term for evaluation
3. Project Justification Memo: (60points) 1000words• Format: Memo
This memo should be written to your instructor, providing detailed rhetorical justification for the decisions you made for your project.
Why did you choose to create what you did and in that particular format? How do you think the text or object will work? How does your project operate as an effective tool for advocacy? You should have distinct sections on Audience, Research Findings, Audience, Genre and Media, Verbal and Visual Rhetoric, User-Test Feedback, and Reflection. Specific instruction on how to write this memo will be presented in class. Due: Week 12 for workshop / Final draft due last day of term.
