Major Assignment Prompt: Genre Analysis Essay
As your first of two major writing projects this quarter, the GA asks you to produce a sophisticated essay on online folklore as a genre, using rhetorical analysis of texts from the quarter. This essay is roughly 1500-1800 words in length and will be drafted at least twice.
Outcomes and Expectations for the Essay
Develop clear and cogent analyses and convincing arguments about rhetoric and online legends
Identify and articulates concepts related to genre
Select credible and relevant material from readings from our class to support a point or argument
Situate, integrate, and contextualize different types of evidence effectively while distinguishing your voice from those voices in your sources.
Demonstrate effective organization and academic style for a particular purpose, within a particular genre, to a particular audience, ie: uses an academic ethos
Rewrite and edit language, style, tone, and sentence structure according to genre and audience expectations
Plan and execute a revision process that does not rely only on direction from me, your instructor, developing ownership and originality of both the writing process and final product to revise purposefully
Assignment Prompt
In this essay, you must answer the following questions:
What are Online Legends, and what are they for?
Your answers to these questions will be the foundation for a thesis-driven essay that develops a central argument of your choosing. Extremely general topics you might focus on include (but are not limited to): belief, morality, social impact, technological advancement, or cultural/historical commentary, as they relate to online legends. Of course, you may choose to focus on something totally different pertaining to online legends, how they work, and what theyre for. You might look at how two of the above topics influence or are interrelated with one another. Etc. etc. These questions are purposely vague, and how you address them is ultimately up to you and your perspective on the topic.
Assignment Explanation
In this essay, youll deepen your exploration of the online legend genre as a distinct genre of storytelling, entertainment, and digital media. This essay uses the premise that online legends share a set of genre conventions that are distinct from other kinds of stories, in terms not just of their content, but their form as well. Further, this presumes that online legends relate to reality in such a way that influences how they, as stories, are told, to whom they are told, how they are told, why they are told, and why they are believed. Finally, this essay assumes that online legends come in a variety of forms, each with their own distinct conventions (ie: textual vs. visual, and everything in between). Your task is to define online legends as a whole and to make an argument for why your definition helps clarify both what an online legend is and what it is not. Your definition should do more than simply explain what constitutes an online legend, but also why they exist, ie: their cultural/historical/philosophical relevance, per their academic study.
