01.13.09

Project 3: Annotating McLuhan

Posted in Assignments at 2:57 PM by JohnWalter

RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION: MEDIA AND THEIR EFFECTS
ENGLISH 150-H
Spring 2009

PROJECT 3: Annotating McLuhan

Goals/Objectives
The goals for this assignment are four-fold. First, this assignment will build upon what we have learned about the rhetorical situation. Second, this assignment will apply what we have learned about summary, analysis, and commentary. Third, this assignment will introduce us to research. And, finally, this assignment will continue our engagement with composing visually, document design, and the interaction between words and images.

The Assignment
Although creative and non-traditional, your first two projects asked you to engage in some of the practices of traditional academic writing. With this project, we will move towards more formal academic writing, focusing on the practices of summary, paraphrase, quotation, response, and analysis.

For this third project you will want to select one, two, or three short passages from The Medium is the Massage to annotate. (By short passage, I mean a unified, standalone section. There is no hard and fast rule here. For instance, an individual page or pair of pages might be considered a unified, standalone section by one of you and be considered part of a larger unified, standalone section by someone else. Examples of what I would call unified, standalone sections include pages 8-9, 11-13, 12, 26-41, and 27-33.) The goal is to provide insight into and explain McLuhan’s text through annotation. For the purposes of this project, these annotations can include contextualization, summary and explanation, and commentary and response. Keeping with the spirit of McLuhan’s text, your annotations can also include or consist of new quotes and images that you believe will add insight into the text as well as textual information authored by you. Annotations might be as short as a single sentence or as long as a couple of paragraphs, they might consist of a single image or of a set of images, or they might be some combination of text and image. In short, you’re not just annotating McLuhan’s book, you’re using its performance of electronic composition in print as a model for your own writing.

Your project should include the following:

  • 6-8 annotations,
  • the use of at least three published sources (books, journals, magazines, newspapers), only one of which may be an encyclopedia or dictionary, and one of which must be scholarly.
  • the use of at least one web source, and
  • A minimum of 1,000 words of original text, which is roughly three pages double-spaced typed. While original text means text composed by you rather than direct quotation (including from dictionaries and encyclopedias), it can include summary as long as you cite your sources.

As you compose your project, keep in mind the various readings in The Everyday Writer, especially the sections on the rhetorical situation (Ch. 4b), writing strong paragraphs (Ch. 8), style (Ch. 21-27), visual composition (Ch. 5) as well as our readings from They Say/I Say. The audience for this project will be students like yourselves who are coming to The Medium is the Massage for the first time, and your goal with this project is to help them (or your earlier selves) understand the passage(s) you have selected. You will want to document your use of images and sources.

Format
As with Project 1, we will take this project through three distinct stages, a peer-review draft, an instructor-review draft, and a presentation draft.

Peer-review and Instructor-review Drafts: For this draft you will want to create a .doc of .rtf file with all your text and images. Since each annotation will, presumably, stand-alone from the others, your document is not going to look like a traditional essay. You will want to clearly identify to which section of the book each annotation refers. (For example, if you wanted to include the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “nose-counting” to help people reading the page Your Government, in your peer-review draft you might preface the definition with “For p. 22, definition of nose-counting” so that your peer reviewers will know the context. Likewise, if you are adding an image and text to give an additional example of a medium as an extension of a human faculty, you might preface that with “For pp. 26-41, another example.” Commentary, of course, might be labeled as “commentary” and so forth.

Presentation Draft: For the presentation draft, you will want to prepare the project for presentation. The easiest way to do this might be to photocopy or scan the relevant pages and make a booklet (print or electronic) or poster board presentation. You will want to make sure that the annotations are clearly linked to the text through placement or other graphic representation.

All versions should have a Works Cited section.

Keep All Drafts
Keep all prewriting and drafts of your project. If you are in the habit of revising and proofreading from the computer screen, save each version of your project before you begin the revision/proofreading process. Not only do I require all drafts of a project to be submitted with the final version, saving multiple drafts of your work can be just as important as saving your work often. (You do save your electronic work often as you work on it, don’t you?)

Peer-review Draft
Your peer-review draft should be a complete, revised, and edited version of your annotations, which means you should have taken your project through at least two complete drafts. Please come to the peer-review with an electronic copy of your project (saved as a .doc or .rft file) for upload to Comment.

Instructor-review Draft
Based upon your peer-review, revise your project at least once. Please submit the presentation-review draft of your project with or in a folder with the following material:

  • All drafts between the peer review and the final version, clearly marked to indicate what version each is,
  • A copy of your peer-review draft, with comments,
  • All earlier drafts of your project, clearly marked as to indicate what version each is,
  • And any prewriting you may have.

Project3 Instructor-review Postwrite
Accompanying your project should be a postwrite that does the following:

  1. Briefly identify and explain the key decisions or choices you made during the composing process and identify where these decisions show up in your text.
  2. What changes did you make to your project after the peer review?
  3. What did you struggle with during the process of composing this project?
  4. In one or two paragraphs, analyze your project in terms of your task or assignment. How does your project fulfill the goals of assignment? Please be specific.
  5. In one or two paragraphs, analyze your project in terms of your purpose. How does your project fulfill the purpose of your assignment? Please be specific.
  6. In one or two paragraphs, analyze your project in terms of your audience. How is your project shaped to reach your audience? Please be specific.
  7. In one or two paragraphs, analyze your project in terms of your rhetorical stance. How does your project develop its rhetorical stance? Please be specific.

Presentation Draft
Based upon your instructor-review, revise your project at least once and prepare it for presentation (see Format above). Please submit the presentation draft of your project with or in a folder with the following material:

  • All drafts between the instructor-review and final version, clearly marked to indicate what version each is,
  • All drafts between the peer review and the instructor-review draft, clearly marked to indicate what version each is,
  • A copy of your peer-review draft, with comments,
  • All earlier drafts of your project, clearly marked as to indicate what version each is,
  • And any prewriting you may have.

Sample Projects

Peer-review Draft: Uploaded to Comment by 10:30 AM, Friday, April 3.

Instructor-review Draft: Due in class, Monday, April 6.

Presentation Draft: Due in class, Friday, April 17.

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