Writing to Fulfill an Informative Purpose

 

Overview

Through completion of this assignment, you will make progress toward essentially all the W131 course goals. Thus, a well-developed assignment, based on thinking critically about your purpose and audience, will show your ability to develop a strong sense of your issue and to present it with relevant information to an appropriate audience.

 

The Assignment

You will produce an informative piece about a social justice issue, an equality-related issue, or an education-related issue you care about and which touches your world in some way.

If you have an idea that you don’t think falls within social justice, equality, or education, but the issue touches your world in some way, talk to me.

Write about something you’re interested in but which works within the time and other constraints of the course.

 

After identifying a specific audience who is not informed about the topic or who needs to know more, you will produce your piece in a genre of information of your choice;

Examples include brochures, PowerPoint presentations, newsletters, magazine articles, blogs, websites, letters, and of course, essays.

To be effective informing your audience, you will want to consider the values they think are important and the knowledge they already have about the issue.

You are not arguing for any view in this piece nor persuading your audience about anything.

 

Once you select your issue, audience, and genre of information, you will perform basic research at my direction to find 2-3 sources you’ll use in your informative piece.

 

If you choose a genre like a brochure or PowerPoint, so one with significantly less writing, you will write a supplemental essay thoughtfully discussing all of the choices you made to produce your piece.

This is not an essay about your issue; it is an essay about creating your alternate genre.

 

Several readings we’ll do will help you move forward with this project. “Writing to Inform” will be especially helpful with this project, thus not reading this will greatly hinder your ability to do this work. You may decide to revise this project for the final portfolio.

 

Getting Feedback and Submitting Our Work

We will first get reader response from a classmate to help us move forward with our writing.

 

Once you revise based on reader response, feedback from others, and any visits to the writing center, you will upload your final draft to Canvas. I will provide anonymous feedback on all drafts and re-upload the drafts with my comments to Canvas.

 

You will review all drafts with my comments and write a Discussion Post discussing what you see in your fellow students’ drafts as a way to frame your discussion about revision you will need to do with your own piece.

We will read these Discussion Posts to see what our peers are saying about our work.

 

As with your Project 1 draft, your Project 2 draft is not graded but the above is required before you can move forward with Project 3. The Discussion Post reflection is a graded assignment.

 

Common Issues

• The writer does not demonstrate audience awareness and includes information not relevant to the audience selected.
• Information presented is overly general; your audience already knows it so the piece does not actually inform the audience about anything.
• The writer does not proofread carefully or use MLA properly.
• The writer procrastinates.