PROJECT 4: WRITERS TEACHING WRITING

the assign m e nt
We have approached research-based writing as a vehicle for critical
thinking, a form of creativity, and a way of engaging with the wider world.
This final assignment asks you to teach next year’s class some of what you
have learned. You will create TWO lessons through which to teach TWO of
the major topics we have explored this term. These topics include:
• How to invent an argument by analyzing an artifact.
• How to present arguments creatively in visual, musical, or literary forms.
• How to invent an argument by formulating and testing a hypothesis.
• How to conduct effective ethnographies, case studies, interviews, library
database research, or internet research.
• How to use your rhetorical imagination to change a community through
writing.
• How to make truly significant, thoroughgoing, and effective revisions.
(You may create a lesson on another writing-related topic from class, but you
must clear that topic with me first.)
On the last day of class, we’ll post your lessons on The Rhetoric Rewritten
(http://rerhet.blogspot.com/), an online handbook for students learning
about rhetoric, writing, and research, and to the Writing Program Portfolio.
what to include
Be as imaginative as you can when designing your lessons, but be sure that
each one includes the following:
• A clear and complete definition of the relevant concept (or concepts).
• Specific, step-by-step “how to” instructions.
• A detailed illustration of how you used the concept in one of your own
projects for class.
• An original assignment for your students, so that they can learn by doing.
Your lessons should aim to be self-contained. That is, you should feel
confident that someone who completes your lessons online (i.e., without you
in the room to guide them) will have learned how to do what you set out to
teach them.
due dates
1 OF 2 A first draft of both lessons is due in class on Tuesday, May 25. We will upload
your revised lessons to the blog and to Portfolio on Thursday, May 27. You
may revise your lessons yet again for final submission to me on Friday, June 4,
along with all of your other final drafts.
PROJECT 4: WRITERS TEACHING WRITING

y o ur au dience
Your audience consists of students who will enroll at DU next year. We’ll
represent that audience via these three figures:
1. PALOMA will start at DU in the fall of 2011. She plans to major in Business or
Public Policy. Through her church, Paloma has become a volunteer at The
Carron Center, where she works with developmentally disabled adults. She
loves this work. Paloma has never much cared for writing papers in school
because, as she put it, they’re “too dry and abstract.” However, she does
quite a lot of writing on her own: she has entered several short story and
poetry contests; she keeps a journal; she writes long emails to her
grandparents every week or so; and she is a regular contributor to the senior
class blog at her high school.
2. DANIEL will start at DU in the fall of 2011. He plans to major in biology and,
later, to go on to medical school, like his parents, a neurologist and an
oncologist. At his prep school, Daniel has done exceptionally well in science
and math, but less well in his literature and history courses, where he typically
earns Cs and the occasional B. Daniel describes himself as “great with
numbers and in the lab, but a terrible writer.” He says that he doesn’t “see
the point of writing,” except to convey “factual information, like in a lab
report.” He describes writing literature or history papers as “agony.”
3. JINGFEI will start at DU in the fall of 2011. She was born in Singapore but
moved to the US with her parents at the age of 8. Jingfei plans to major in
English and to become either a teacher of English as a second language or
a journalist or a novelist or all three. This year, she is taking an AP English class,
where she has been introduced to fundamental principles of rhetoric and for
which she will write a 25-page research paper on Plato’s Gorgias. In her
urban anthropology class, she is conducting an ethnographic study of the
teenagers who play basketball every afternoon at a public court downtown.
She is also taking a philosophy class that she likes so much that she’s
wondering whether she should major in that instead of English.

Good Luck! 2 OF 2