Step 1: Pick a new genre for your work. You’ll have to decide what genre is most appropriate for your topic and purpose. To pick a genre, you want to start by considering who could benefit from your work/message (AUDIENCE). Be specific as you imagine your audience. Then, think about HOW you could best reach that audience. Would your audience read a newspaper, listen to speech, receive a letter, etc.?
Choose from one of the following:
a letter
a speech
an Op-Ed piece for the Post and Courier or other daily or weekly publication
a cover letter to a petition for others to sign
a wiki entry
a mini-TED Talk
an advice column letter and response
CHOICE- SPEECH
Step 2: Do some research (yes, research) about that genre to determine its characteristics and norms. You’ll want to know about the expected format, appropriate tone, and standards of style. Find some examples of the genre and pay attention to how the author crafts and presents the message.
Step 3: Make a plan for how you will convince your new audience of your stance on the topic. You’ll likely use the same sources that you used in the research paper, but recognize that you’ll be using them in different ways. Citation styles might be different, and this audience might be convinced by different types of sources (more emphasis on credible news organizations, less on peer-reviewed journals). Consider the rhetorical strategies that you will use (ethos, logos, pathos, tone, word choice, etc).
Step 4: CREATE a new work. There is room for creativity here. Explore a new voice and style.
Step 5: REFLECT : To go along with your reworked research paper, write a thoughtful and detailed reflection in which you explain the choices you made as you crafted your remix. This is where you are offering an analysis of your own rhetorical choices. You might even review some of the questions for rhetorical analysis.
Your reflection should respond to the following questions:
Who was the target audience of your Research Remix? Offer a detailed descriiption of your target audience. You might consider the following: size (a speech to 20 people might differ from a speech written for 1000), location, age, socio-economic status, gender, interests, occupations, etc.
What was the purpose of the text you produced?
What type of text did you produce for the Research Remix? How was this the best decision in light of your chosen audience and purpose?
What generic expectations would an audience have of the type of text you chose for the Research Remix? How do you know this? Describe some of the conventions of the genre (you might have to do a little research and reading). In what ways did you comply with these expectations? In what ways will you purposely violate these expectations? What did you do? Why?
How do you want your audience to respond to this text you composed for the research remix? What specific choices did you made to reach your audience? Point out examples of ethos, logos, pathos, tone, etc.
Your reflection should help the instructor understand how to experience the Remix.
Writing Tips
Shape your writing to fit a particular rhetorical situation
By far the biggest task ahead of you in this paper is to understand the rhetorical situation you’re facing. It is radically different from the one that drove your research paper. Your audience is different: you are no longer writing to academics. Your purpose is different: you are trying to persuade more than to inform. And your genre is seriously different: you are not writing an academic essay with everything that goes with it.
Use a variety of strategies to generate ideas, create a first draft, revise ideas and organize and edit paragraphs and sentences.
You will want to approach this paper differently than you did the research paper. A large part of your grade will be based on how well you address the genre you choose. Hence, you are going to need to research that genre. Read a lot of examples, find sources that discuss effective writing of that type, and talk to me.
Identify and evaluate the underlying values of arguments.
A popular audience is convinced by different types of sources than an academic one. While we academics like to see material published in peer reviewed journals and scholarly books, the populace puts more emphasis on reports from credible news organizations and quality magazines. That doesn’t mean that peer reviewed pieces have no role in your paper – they just shouldn’t dominate the sources that you use.
You will also really want to think about how to convince this particular audience. What will students at TTC find convincing? What will get your hometown residents motivated? The arguments that you use will, by and large, determine the effectiveness of this paper.
Earning the Grade
When I review your assignment, I’m looking to see that your remix and reflection show:
an understanding of your audience
clear rhetorical strategies for achieving your desired purpose
an understanding of the generic expectations for the type of document that you are composing. Hence, it is important to do some research to see examples of successful pieces in that field/genre
a clear articulation of the decisions you made and why you made them. Refer back to some of the rhetorical choices we learned about for our rhetorical analysis assignment.
