Addressing a Secondary Discourse Community: A Multimodal Assignment
Essay Genre:
This project asks you to illustrate your understanding of the argumentative and persuasive writing genre and extends your functional, multimodal, and rhetorical literacies. This first writing task asks you to write a persuasive argumentative essay to convince a specific audience. In this case, that specific audience is a member of one of your discourse communities.
To construct a persuasive argument you are expected to use appropriate and persuasive rhetorical moves. This will involve thinking carefully about who you are addressing and why you are addressing them. Some of the rhetorical moves you should include are as follows:
Showing your experience with the topic through the use of discourse specific language and conventions,
Appealing to the audience’s emotions via descriptive and poignant language and stylistic choices,
Developing logical arguments by recognizing counter-arguments and avoiding logical fallacies,
Addressing your audience using an appropriate medium.
This essay gives you the chance to explore documentation styles. You must still give credit where credit is due, but instead of relying on MLA or APA, you can stylistically and/or creatively cite your sources in a way that reflects your understanding of and participation in your discourse community.
Assignment Guidelines:
First develop your rhetorical situation. This includes determining 1) who you are addressing and why? 2) what are you trying to persuade them to do, feel, think, etc.? and 3) how do you fit into this community? What is your authority as the creator?
Once you have determined the rhetorical situation, you should also choose a medium (website, infographic, brochure, essay, poster, etc.) and how you want to share this message to your group (social media, a website, etc.). For instance, if you are addressing the online gaming community in the attempt to convince them that a certain game is excellent, then you should create a colorful text using specific language, references, and images associated with that community and share it with the other member using an online medium such as Reddit.
What follows is a list of rhetorical considerations that you should think about when creating your text:
The Message—what are you trying to do? This is essentially the “argument.” You need to decide what you are writing about (the content) and what you are trying to accomplish. Some ideas:
Convince someone to join your discourse community
(e.g. urging freshman to choose English as a major)
Argue for a change of thought in your discourse community
(e.g. arguing for more ethical choices in the healthcare community)
Pick a side in an argument about certain practices/products/conversations in your discourse community
(e.g. one band’s album is better than another’s)
Or your idea here:______________________________________________________
The Audience—whom are you trying to convince? Think about specific aspects of the audience such as their age, gender, native language, experiences, hobbies, etc. The message and the audience are closely related.
The Medium—what do you want the text to look like? Is a blog, a website, an infographic, etc. more appropriate for your discourse community? How do you want to share the text? Think of how you communicate with other members of the community.
The DocumentationStyle—how will you cite your sources and avoid plagiarism? The documentation style is very closely related to the type of medium.
The Language—what language(s) are you using? Think about the language of the discourse community you are addressing and integrate that vocabulary appropriately.
Rationalizing the Assignment:
I believe that starting with communicating with a discourse community that you’re already of a member of will help you learn how to communicate with an academic discourse later in the course. Learning to appropriately choose language, tone, documentation, style, and medium for any given discourse community will serve you in your other Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) courses, too.
Our Process
This project will be completed over the course of two and a half weeks. We will begin by brainstorming and creating a Discourse Community Map, which will help you choose your audience and your purpose. We will then move into outlining, reflecting, and drafting. Eventually, you will be given time to closely edit your work before turning in the following materials:
Project Activities 1, 2, & 3
A Rough Draft of the Text
A Final Draft of the Text
A Reflection
Texts will be evaluated on the following:
Completion of all the process materials in a timely manner
Thoughtfully designing your text to include rhetorical moves to persuade your discourse community
Thoughtfully choosing language that reflects your membership in the discourse community
Thoughtfully choosing the medium that will provide members of your community the opportunity to “talk back”
Thoughtfully choosing documentation that reflects the medium and the language of the community