This assignment will hopefully help you break down the various topics of discussion you’ll need to explore and illustrate in your Companion Essay, which you will draft over the weekend. Remember that the Companion Essay is where you, in an academic essay form, will do a rhetorical analysis of your own creative project, explaining to me your understanding of the conventions of the genres of form and content you’re using, how you applied those conventions in your text, what they’re meaning is, and how they successfully communicate the story/legend you want to communicate by establishing ethos, logos, and pathos to capture and persuade our audience.
In your essay, you will not be able to focus on EVERY last aspect of your project and of the rhetorical triangle. But in this assignment, I’ll ask you to, so that you can see which parts are most important to discuss in terms of demonstrating your understanding of genre. I’ve separated the analysis into two sections for CONTENT and FORM.
1. CONTENT:
- What are all the genre conventions of Online Legends that you are focusing on specifically for this project? If you need a refresher for all the different things you’re probably working with, here’s that big list of conventions I made up after your group presentations early in the class. Remember that while one of your genre conventions MUST be Plausibility and Realism, you certainly are not expected to use ALL of these.
- Give one concrete example from your project for each of these conventions.
- Explain HOW your project uses each convention effectively by answering the following questions:
- Is this convention meant to convince or communicate to your audience using ETHOS, LOGOS, PATHOS, or more than one? Explain in detail.
- Are there any underlying messages or themes you’d like your audience to understand based on this legend? How are you using the conventions of content to communicate those messages or themes right now?
- If you haven’t finished enough of your project yet but have plans for how you’ll use certain conventions in the future, explain those hypothetically and use this as an opportunity to plan for what you need to add to your creative project.
2. FORM:
- What are the conventions, or common traits of your chosen form? Conventions should pertain to both STRUCTURE and STYLE, so examples of everything from your writing style/diction/tone/POV to how the form is constructed (ie: main post with comments/conversations if you’re doing a forum thread, common traits of blog posts and personal blogs if you’re doing a blog, in the comments/use of multimodality/etc).
- What are your main MODEL TEXTS? Give two if possible. How do these model texts use the conventions you discuss above. How did you imitate the model text in terms of applying these conventions to your own project?
- How are you using each individual convention of your chosen form to tell your story to your audience? Examples of what you might discuss:
- How are you adapting your story to fit the character limit if you’re using a Twitter account?
- How do the comments function in your story if you’re doing a social media account, blog, or forum threat? Are they providing feedback/advice or growing the story by adding to it with their own experiences?
- If you’re doing a wiki, how do the different posts or sections of your wiki build the story in their own way? How are you using introductory/expository information to build up the background or origin of your story and its relationship to your chosen legend?
- How are your multimodal/visual aspects enhancing the experience of your text? Be specific and give actual examples. If you are not using multimodal aspects, how does your text succeed just using words, descriptions, and writing style?
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