Writing 100 / Fall 2014
/ Darling
Final Paper Project
Your task in completing this project is to write a paper
that takes on the larger themes of community and citizenship and engage with
visual and other media. You will need to
focus in on an issue, idea, element/example of social activism or social
engagement, and decide what it is you want to say about this to your audience. You
might focus on a particular social/economic/environmental or other issue, an idea
about (or example of) social activism, a type of social engagement, or a
specific idea or argument that connects some of the texts and topics that we
have discussed over the semester. The paper will be stronger if you work from
your own personal interest, experience, and reflection. Because the project
will be “published” on the web (in your eportfolio), it can include graphics,
images, video, links to other web pages, and/or other media. Sources used can
be from class readings or other, and you may use interviews or surveys if you
choose. You should think about issues or
topics relevant to our contemporary world and with which you can engage and
reflect upon. Be creative and make it into your personal writing project.
To begin, you should think about how you might define and
discuss Community and Citizenship. Next, think about a specific topic, idea,
aspect, example that you are interested in and what kinds of things you might
have to say about that. For example, you might write about a time that you volunteered
in a soup kitchen through which experience you learned about hunger or poverty
from a perspective you hadn’t considered before; you could then focus your
paper on this issue in contemporary America and also what individuals can do to
help. Or you might think about the current election season and wonder why so
many people are unhappy with the state of the state/country/world, but at the
same time so many people don’t vote or participate in government. You might
consider answering some questions like: what is the relation between
citizenship, voting, and social engagement? How might citizenship go beyond
concepts like “patriotism” to think more about kinds of activism that can make
society better for more people? Should citizens be responsible to participate
in society? How? What are the effects and consequences of low voter turnout?
What would society look like if more people voted and participated actively in
their communities, got involved in local and larger issues and causes?
Writing the
Paper:
You have a wide variety of options for writing this paper.
This means that you also need to spend a lot of time freewriting, drafting,
organizing, and focusing. As you pre-write, draft, revise, rewrite, remember to
pay attention to the following:
Focus:
What, specifically, are you going to focus on in your paper? Spend some time
introducing the “topic” and explaining your relationship to this topic, what
you want to say about it and why, and what you want your readers to learn. What
message, point, main idea do you want to get across?
Organization:
What kinds of information, examples, evidence, and sources are you going to use
in this paper? How do you want to present the information so that the paper is
interesting, effective, and accessible for readers? In what order will you
present your points (paragraphs, body of the paper)? How do you see order and
organization as important for the particular body of content that you want to
include in the paper?
Development:
How will you develop examples, evidence, and reflections in the paper as the
support for your main idea/focus? What kind of tone, language, style of
writing, etc. are you going to use? Will your essay be narrative or more
academic, informative with a particular message, or persuasive in some way? How
will the various types of content (evidence and examples, etc.) contribute to
the “personal, cultural analysis” nature of the paper?
Coherence: How does the paper flow from
beginning to end, within each paragraph, and within each sentence? Work on
grammatical and syntactical cohesion at all levels. If you have problems with
focus and clarity in your paragraphs or sentences, then you may need to go back
and refocus the whole paper from the beginning.
The final paper
should have 7 pages of written text as well as whatever additional elements
you want to include. Any sources should be cited in MLA format in the text and
in a bibliography at the end.
Due Dates: See
Syllabus for due dates of proposal, drafts, revisions
Add a one page reflection after the bibliography page: Discuss your
writing process and anything you learned about yourself, the world, the writing
and construction of an argument/thesis-focused paper that you didn’t know
before.
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