ASSIGNMENTS
Throughout this course, we’ll look at and produce writing across a variety of genres. But because this is an academic writing course, much of what we write will resemble or share characteristics of traditional essay writing.
That’s not to say anything we do needs to adhere to a formula or particular medium of expression, though! With each assignment type below, there’s plenty of opportunity to play with language, form, and content because our primary focus is analysis and argumentation.
Weekly exercises
These assignments will be regular and generally quite short (500 to 750 words). They’re designed to get us comfortable with the kind of critical thinking and analysis that we need to navigate and participate in the larger discourse surrounding this course. Individual prompts for these assignments will vary, but they’ll most often be extensions of class discussions or readings.
Occasionally, these exercises will be used to help you jumpstart your thinking around longer pieces of writing (think: outlines, proposals, pitches, etc.). In these cases, we’ll workshop the prompted writing to get feedback and perspective to grow our thinking and inspire more robust work.
You can find the prompt for each assignment here.
Workshops
Workshops will happen during class time, though some outside of class time may be necessary if your workshop group requires extra time. Think of these as really dynamic peer review sessions––feedback giving, feedback receiving, question asking, hyping up, cheerleading, supporting, etc.
We’ll do three (3) to four (4) of these throughout the whole of the course, so you’ll get a chance to become comfortable with the process and see how it benefits you and your peers. And though this class is designed to be flexible and accommodating, these workshops are effectively *mandatory* because they’re really only successful if everyone participates. If you’re unable to attend a workshop, please let me and your group know as soon as possible!
Deep dives
Deep dives are essentially just critical analyses, or focused investigations into the choices and strategies observed in a given text. Because we’ll be looking at a lot of different kinds of texts (news articles, subreddits, scholarly essays, comments sections, etc.), being able to identify the behaviors of other peoples’ arguments is vitally important––they can tell us a lot and allow us to determine the accuracy, credibility, and validity of the information being shared.
Because these deep dives are meant to literally go deeper than our other assignments, they’ll be a bit longer than the weekly exercises (1,250 to 1,500 words). But don’t worry! We’ll only do two (2) of these throughout the course and you’ll have a couple weeks to write them.
You can find the prompt for each assignment here.
Final portfolio
Because this is a writing class, there will be no final exam or test. Instead, you’ll put together a sort of best-of collection of your favorite work, ideas, and thinking from the course. You’ll have a lot freedom around how your assemble this portfolio, but the essential pieces are
- Three (3) Weekly exercises;
- One (1) Deep dive;
- And two (2) bits of feedback that you provided (to others) during workshops.
You can choose to include more than just these, but think of this list as the bare minimum. But everything you choose to include needs to be an evolved version or subsequent draft of what you initially submitted, meaning you’ve revisited your work and integrated some feedback from me and your workshop group mates. This portfolio will be due after the last day of class, but we’ll definitely spend time in class preparing it.
You can find the prompt for the portfolio here.
