Genre Shift
After you’ve created a text for the genre shift, you will turn in a Writer’s Statement that aims to inform and persuade an outside audience of the rhetorical savvy of your genre shift. Artist’s Statements (or in our case, a Writer’s Statement) often accompany a work of art and function as descriptions of the art from the artist’s perspective. They allow the creator to put the text in context for its audience. As such, it is both a chance to explain your rhetorical choices and an opportunity to convince your audience that your choices are sound. If you had to present and defend your genre shift to a panel of critiques, what would you say?
Audience:
This Writer’s Statement is a public-facing document. In other words, you are writing for an audience beyond your instructor and even your classmates. Because you are writing for a broader, outside audience, you will need to provide enough context so that your audience understands the significance of your genre shift. After reading your Writer’s Statement, your audience should have a good understanding of the choices you made, why you made them, how they reflect the expectations of your selected genre, and how the choices that you made for your genre shift differ from the choices you made for your text from Module 3.
Task:
You will write a detailed persuasive description, at least 700 words long, where you demonstrate critical thinking about your research process and the rhetorical choices you made while completing this project. You will also include the ways in which your work all semester has informed your choices for this final project.
Discuss the specific rhetorical situations of your text (in other words, the audience, purpose, and genre). For example, you could consider the following:
Identify the audience, purpose, and genre of your text(s). Then, describe the specific relationship(s) between the audience, purpose, and genre of your text(s). In other words, why is the genre(s) in which you worked an appropriate choice given your particular purpose and audience? How might another genre have been less effective for achieving your purpose and reaching your audience?
What design choices did you make as you designed your project? How did the genres in which you were working affect your choices? For example, how did you establish your voice? What visual rhetorical did you use? What choices did you make about structure and organization?
How do you think the decisions you made with design, genre, visual rhetoric, structure, and/or organization impact your audience and their interactions with your text(s)?
How were your ideas about audience, purpose, and genre shaped by the conversation you wanted to join?
Discuss the process of translating your work from Module 3 into other genre(s). For example, here are some of the things you could discuss:
What information from your research did you decide to leave out? In what specific ways did you consider your audience and purpose when making decisions about what to include?
How did you establish your own credibility in your text. In what ways was it similar to/different from the way you accomplished this in Unit 3?
What were some differences in the ways you used and cited your sources as compared to earlier assignments in this course? How were these decisions impacted by the differing genres in which you worked? How might these decisions impact your audience and their interactions with the text?
Discuss your experiences putting your research and writing into action and the rhetorical nature of research (for this section, consider both your final project and the class as a whole). Use the following prompts to help you generate ideas:
After having worked with your research in multiple genres and for various audiences and purposes (Unit 2, Unit 3, Unit 4), what do you now understand about the ways in which research is a rhetorical process shaped by audience, purpose, and genre?
What do you now understand about research as it exists beyond the classroom, and as it exists in non-academic contexts?
You might consider what we learned about the conversations we studied in Unit 1 and what that revealed about research, and/or you might consider the ways that your unit projects, including this final one, tried to reach beyond the classroom.
What do you now understand about the potential for research to spark meaningful change?
How has the work you completed this semester affected your ideas about/understanding of research?
How has the work you completed this semester affected your ideas about/understanding of writing and rhetoric?
