REBECCA WILTBERGER WIGGINS
WRD 110: COMPOSITION AND COMMUNICATION I
This course builds student skills is research, writing, and speech. My focus on difference in community challenges my students to go beyond a surface understanding of the people and places around them. Through a series of speeches, writing assignments, and a final digital project students examine their own values and learn to listen to and respond to the values and priorities of their classmates and the larger community.
COURSE DESCRIPTION/OVERVIEW AND GOALS
In this course, we will be investigating ideas of community and difference. During our investigation, we will consider several questions:
- How do we define community?
- What is our place in our community?
- How does community treat those who are different from the “norm”?
- What does it mean to be different?
- What makes us different?
Throughout the course, I will encourage you to explore your place, and the place of others, in the broader community and take a stance on issues of public concern—that is, to begin to view yourself as an engaged citizen.
WRD 110 is a course in speaking and writing emphasizing critical inquiry and research. Our concept of research will go far beyond an ordinary (and frankly, boring) concept of looking up information and plugging it into essays.
Research is a creative, complex and exciting process. You will engage in reflective thinking and analysis, conduct primary research in the community and the archives and secondary research using library resources, and learn how to write and speak effectively as we answer questions focusing on our place in different communities and in evolving places in our lives.
A significant component of the class will be learning to use visuals and online resources to enhance writing and oral presentations. Over the course of the semester, you can expect to work independently, with a partner, or with a small group of classmates to investigate, share findings, and compose presentations of their research, as well as to practice and evaluate interpersonal and team dynamics in action.
STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES
By the end of the semester, students will be able to:
compose written texts in many different modes and media and deliver oral presentations that represent a relevant and informed point of view appropriate for its audience, purpose, and occasion in an environment that reinforces the recursive and generative nature of the composition and delivery rehearsal processes.
demonstrate an awareness of strategies that speakers and writers use in different communicative situations and media, and in large and small groups; learn to analyze and use visuals effectively to augment their oral presentations; to employ invention techniques for analyzing and developing arguments; to recognize and address differing genre and discourse conventions; and to document their sources appropriately.
find, analyze, evaluate, and properly cite pertinent primary and secondary sources, using relevant discovery tools, as part of the process of speech preparation and writing process.
develop flexible and effective strategies for organizing, revising, editing, proofreading, and practicing/rehearsing to improve the development of their ideas and the appropriateness of their expression.
collaborate with peers, the instructor, and librarians to define revision strategies for their essays and speeches, to set goals for improving them, and to devise effective plans for achieving those goals.
engage in a range of small group activities that allow them to explore and express their experiences and perspectives on issues under discussion.
ASSIGNMENTS AND MAJOR PROJECTS
The assignments in this class are meant to guide you through an exploration of two things:
1) critical inquiry and deployment of rhetorical discourses and media to examine issues such as ethos, community, modes of writing and communication, social media, etc.
2) the use of multiple modes of communication to examine and articulate ideas of identity related to community and change.
The broad question we will be investigating throughout the term will be: what is your understanding of your own identity and the identity of others, and how can/does it evolve? In this course we will be interrogating this in terms of writing and community.
Note on Research: Most of your research sources will come from books, newspapers, blogs, magazines, or websites, just to name a few. Regardless of the type of resource, you will select credible sources relevant to your project and contribute to rich development of your essays and speeches. We will spend extensive time in class discussing what makes a good resource and how to best find and incorporate research. We will also cover how to properly cite a resources both in-text, on a works cited page, and as an oral citation. Remember that all resources MUST be properly cited. If they are not, you have committed plagiarism. If you have questions or concerns about how to cite a resource make sure to ask me about it during office hours, consult your textbook (The Town Branch Writing Collection), the online Purdue OWL website, visit the Writing Center, talk to your tutor, or any combination of these things BEFORE you submit your final draft/give your speech.
Tumblr Documentary Project
Your final project will be a combination of images and words (and video, if there are pertinent video sources to include) in the form of a Tumblr page. This final project will tell a narrative about community and difference primarily through the use of a series of 15-22 images accompanied by short commentary of no more than 100-200 words each. During the course of the semester you will collect images from your research, both created by you and located in the archives or other research sources, and use these images to tell a story about community and difference that is compelling, creative, and shows an engagement with the complexities and controversies both of the what it means to be part of community and how difference functions in a community.
Over the course of the semester we will do formal and informal writing and research to prepare you to tell your narrative. You will be responsible for selecting an audience, locating useful primary and secondary research, and creating a narrative that is unique and insightful.
As a whole, this project is worth 30 % of your final grade.
Project Pitch
No matter what kind of project a producer wants to make, be it written or otherwise, they must always learn to pitch their ideas to various folks who will be helping to fund and work on the project. This essay will give you an opportunity to pitch your Tumblr narrative to the instructor to persuade them that it should be made. The Tumblr project will be a response to the question of what individual in your community has a compelling story to tell and how that story fits in to the community at large. Your purpose here is to argue for the importance of your answer to the question and why your project should be produced. Give the basic version of your argument here, understanding that it will be refined throughout the project. You will be required to create a creative tentative title and slogan and explain how you foresee completing the project. The pitch should also include at least 5 citations from outside sources, formatted correctly in MLA style and have a total of ~2500 words.
The project pitch is worth 10 % of your final grade.
Outline/Storyboard
One of the most important parts of being a writer or other producer is to plan and develop your ideas. This way you can understand how your project will come together, as well as providing a blueprint to communicate to others working with you. This will be a preliminary sketch of the Tumblr, specific to the visual medium. In the course of the sketch, think about what you will need to do to get the final project done. What hurdles do you see ahead? How will you leap over them? This requires that you turn in both a text-based essay answering these questions and explaining your aim, as well as a visual storyboard that explains how the Tumblr will look and flow. The audience for this component will be different from the pitch: the producers are all on board, they want a plan, a structure, and some promises from you about how the project will be developed and finished. The outline essay should be at least 800 words; the visual storyboard part will in general be about 5-7 slides of images and will include an additional 4 sources of quality research.
The outline/storyboard is worth 10 % of your final grade.
Project Reflection Essay
All work should be considered always under continual revision. It is a good idea to take a step back from any work you do to evaluate your successes and failures, and take inventory of how you would approach your work if you were to revise once again. A reflection paper will accompany the final draft. This 1000-word essay should outline your use of peer and self critiques to refine the artifact, explain and defend the choice of images and text and how these choices support the narrative of the composition, and a note on further refinement (if you had another month with this project, what would you do). Also, the essay must reflect on how the student used various ideas, concepts, theories, and class discussions in the development of the project. This means I expect you to cite at least 3 sources and refer to other readings and discussions as you think through your work.
The project reflection essay is worth 10 % of your final grade.
1-Minute Speeches
You will have ample time during the semester for formal and informal public speaking opportunities. You will be graded on five formal speeches that will assess your ability to speak successfully to a group under different kinds of contexts and variables. The first four are called “1-minute speeches” and are exactly what the name implies: short 1 to 1½ minute speeches that will test you not only on effective delivery but also efficiency by giving you a short amount of time to prepare. The range of preparation time will vary from a couple of class sessions to several days, depending on the topic. Each 1-minute speech will assess different aspects of speech making and delivery, and the rubric for each will change based on what you need to focus on for that particular speech.
The two speeches that will change the format a bit will be the second 1-minute speech (the “Project Pitch”) and the final Project Presentation speech. With the “Project Pitch,” you will have more time to prepare and deliver the speech. This will be a persuasive speech and ask you to persuade the class and instructor that the individuals you have chosen to profile in your semester project are a good fit for the project medium and scope. At the end of the semester you will present your final documentary project to the class and have a brief moment to introduce and explain your project's successes and failures.
Together, these four 1-minute speeches are worth 20 % of your final grade.
Attendance/Participation
Our class is centered on inquiry and research. The goal is to make you curious, encourage you to ask questions, and make connections between things. In this class we are using concepts of communities to explore these kinds of questions and make these connections. In order for any genuine and significant inquiry to be accomplished in this way we will have to do our research in ethical ways. Ethical inquiry begins in the classroom between students and instructors developing an environment of learning for everyone in a way that students take ownership of the class. This doesn’t mean that the instructor takes a backseat, in fact the instructor plays an important role in pushing for that learning to take place. The role of the student is to push back in constructive ways, not in resistance, but in mutually productive ways. This kind of learning can only be done when the student is not only present in the classroom, but prepared, engaged, and continually revising thoughts and ideas.
Participation understood in this manner means much more than attendance, and even more than making sure to ask a question in class every once in a while, or responding to a prompt in a discussion (although it means this as well). I will be asking you to continually take notes inside and outside the classroom. These will not be for quizzes, but for a record of your own learning, a learning journal of sorts that demonstrates the development of your thinking in class. I will ask periodically to look at your notes as a way for me to help you forward in any way you may need; I will also ask you to turn in these notes at the end of our class, so please be diligent about keeping them – they are part of your participation grade.
While regular attendance will earn you points, so will regular discussion contributions. Significant contributions to workshops will also be required; this means not just saying something is “good” or “needs some work,” but offering positive and constructive feedback. There may also be free writes and reading quizzes that will provide a way to help you practice and perform the skills and concepts we are learning in terms of critical inquiry. These will make you responsible for the material in the class, as well as move you toward taking ownership of the class.
Participation is worth 20 % of your final grade. You will receive 10% of this grade at midterm and 10% of this grade at the end of the course.
SELECTED ASSIGNMENTS
Below are a sample of assignments from this course.
"THIS I BELIEVE" SHORT SPEECH
In a 60-90 second speech you must present, in speech form, a persuasive argument for something that you believe strongly in that is directly or indirectly connected to your final project. I.e. I believe that the people in front of you are more important than those connected to you electronically. You need to tell a story, using concrete details from your life or observation
A successful speech will fit into the rubric below. Generally speaking it takes 3-5 solid pages of writing to come up with enough material for a speech of this length.
In presenting your speech you should use no more than 1 note card with a brief outline, if necessary.
PROJECT PITCH PROPOSAL AND SPEECH
Overview
Research/Assignment Topic: Every person and every community has a story that formulates and influences who they are, and every person’s story is different. What person or community whom you know has a story that surprises, saddens, delights, or is otherwise compelling? What person or community do you know who is somehow different from the “norm”? Choose one person or community in your life that is representative of difference to explore in images and text on Tumblr. You will gather research, and images, for their story over the course of the semester.
No matter what kind of project a producer wants to make, be it written or otherwise, they must always learn to be pitching their ideas to various people who will be helping to fund and work on the project. This assignment will give you an opportunity to pitch an idea for your final Tumblr to the instructor and your peers to persuade them that it should be made. The Tumblr project will be a response to the question of what person in your life has an interesting story and why it should be captured in images and text. Your purpose here is to argue for the importance of your answer to the question and why your Tumblr should be produced. You will give the basic version of your argument here, understanding that it will be refined throughout the project. You will have an opportunity to actually pitch your idea to the class.
Guidelines: Proposal
The project pitch will include three elements:
a tentative title and slogan
a brief summary or abstract
abstract will be used as your actual pitch to the class. You will use this summary to argue for why your Tumblr should be produced.
a more comprehensive treatment of the project
longer treatment will provide the details for your vision, how you will go about doing it, what it will look like, where you might have to go for research, and anything else that will explain why this is an important project and needs to be made.
The summary should be as long as needed for a one-minute speech (in this case you can go up to two minutes) that you will present to the class. The additional treatment must be minimum 2000 words. There will be some redundancy between the summary and the treatment. The pitch must also include at least 5 citations from relevant outside sources, formatted correctly in MLA style. These must be sources that reference your person or community’s story directly (one can be a quote from the person or community you are focusing on) and add valuable insight into what you are studying. Your research must show what other work is being done on the topic that you are focusing on and on stories similar to the one you are telling. (See Sample Assignment for details about layout and format.)
Guidelines: Speech
After you have chosen a topic, you will have the opportunity to pitch the idea to the instructor and to the class in a brief speech to prepare for writing the longer assignment. You will have a slightly longer time window, 1-2 minutes, to convince us as your audience that your topic sounds viable and doable for this project. We will give you adequate feedback so you can make any necessary adjustments to move on to the next phase of the project.
TUMBLR DOCUMENTARY PROJECT
Short Documentary Overview
For the most part, Tumblr documentaries are meant to do what their name implies: create an archive about particular issues and subjects. They can make overt arguments about an issue, or they can assume more subtle approaches. The argument of a documentary develops in the editing/composing stages using elements such as image choice, juxtapositions, layout, color, text, etc. Your Tumblr will be a response to the following question:
What person or community in your life has a different story and why it should be captured on social media/Tumblr?
This is a documentary rather than a narrative Tumblr because you will be presenting a visual exploration of your subject as well as incorporating elements of narrative interest, and in so doing you will be creating different kinds of arguments about that person's life and about life and narrative as a whole as you compose your statement around images. This also means more than simply writing down your thoughts. You will need to experiment with images, layout, audio/video, and much more. What matters most is that you explore the possibilities of using images to tell your story and make your argument. This means that you can use any type of images (professional or amateur, video or still, etc), as long as you understand the rhetorical nature of these choices. We will discuss what these are in class together.
You will have an opportunity to present your project to the class before it is finalized and answer questions. As with most any project, you will do most of the planning and development work in writing, but the final project will take the form of a self-contained multimedia story that readers can view on the web. By “multimedia” we mean that the story must be told using more than one medium of communication, such as a combination of text, still images, layout, background, etc.
First Cut of Documentary – 10% (documentary grade)
This should not be a work-in-progress but a finished project with the realization that it will be drastically altered by the critiques of your classmates, your instructor, and yourself.
This draft will be worth 10% of your Tumblr documentary grade.
Final Cut – 10% (documentary grade)
The final project will be turned in at the beginning of the last week of class. It should take into account the critiques performed earlier and be drastically refined from the previous draft. You will present the project to the class, and the Tumblr should be 15-22 images accompanied by short commentary of 100-200 words each. The final turned-in project will be worth 10% of your Tumblr documentary grade.
Presentation – 10% (documentary grade)
You will need to present, as a formal performance, your Tumblr and your research experiences, as well as explain generally your rhetorical choices. In other words, how did you come to make the decisions you did? Why did you choose this particular image and these specific aspects? This is a formal presentation, so you will be expected to answer these questions and discuss your experience, show an overview of the Tumblr, and answer a few questions afterward. This presentation is worth 10 percent of your Tumblr documentary grade.
Reflection – 10% (final grade)
In addition, each of you on an individual basis will be responsible for submitting your own reflection essay (1000 words) on your own specific rhetorical choices, the effectiveness of your work habits, and especially any challenges you faced and how you were able to overcome them (or not). The purpose of this essay is to reflect on your role and make your own assessments about all of your work.
Parameters
As set forth in the introduction, it is the medium that matters here, not the instruments. Therefore, you can use whatever technology you have access to in order to make your Tumblr. I will approve your proposals along the way to make sure you are using the technology in effective ways.
You should consider a time limit between 15-22 images (with an ideal target of 18 images). This should give you enough posts to make a case for your subject's story and to argue for why it is compelling and worthwhile to tell.
You can include (and are encouraged to whenever appropriate) to use other stories or photos, if appropriate, you did not yourself create. This is true as long as the majority of the Tumblr is text and analysis that you yourself created. Please remember: any images/text you use that is not your own must be credited and cited appropriately – otherwise, it is plagiarism. Audio and video may be used, but they are not required.