instructor: Jentery Sayers 
~ classroom: smi 309 
& ougl 101 ~ TTh: 9:30-11:20
Major Paper Two: A New Campaign (Speaking "With") [ Submit It Now! ]
Due: Tuesday, March 11th (length: at least six pages)
The end is near, team 121. By the time you write your second major paper, you will have composed six response papers, one collabcast, and at least five blog entries and three podcasts. No doubt, you should have a pretty solid idea of how sonic culture, media activism, and service-learning intersect. In your second major paper, you’ll collaboratively unfold those intersections through a new campaign for your local Boys and Girls Club.
The goals of the second major paper are:
- To compose a sustained and persuasive academic argument that is based in a risky, arguable, and complex claim.
- To use the course material, writings by you and your peers, and conversations from sequences one and two in the service of research and composition.
- To demonstrate the skills that you developed in sequences one and two response papers, blog entries, podcasts, and in-class workshops.
- To use writing to mobilize social action and address the needs of your local Boys and Girls Clubs.
- To exhibit an understanding of how media practices influence everyday life and communities.
The critical question for your second major paper is: How might a media campaign for a particular local Boys and Girls Club draw awareness to that club’s specific needs, increase community-club interactions, and give Boys and Girls Club youth a (louder) voice?
To answer this question, each of your groups should collaboratively write a formal, academic argument of at least six pages in length for the existence of a new Boys and Girls Club media campaign. The campaign should:
- Be for a particular local Boys and Girls Club (e.g., Central District or Wallingford),
- Emerge from that club’s culture and needs (e.g., more youth-adult interaction, more community involvement, more technology-oriented curricula, and/or better access to instructional materials or technologies),
- Focus on using media (e.g., pamphlets, a website, radio, or video) to foster the club’s interactions with nearby communities, and
- Be multimodal, comprised of at least two media approaches, and include your 2.2 audio PSA as one of those media approaches. (While you actually composed your audio PSA, you need not—but certainly are encouraged to—compose the other media for your new campaign. Composing your approaches and implementing them will only strengthen your paper and your e-portfolios. Plus, you’ll have more evidence.)
By “media approach,” I mean a strategic use of media aimed at a particular audience (e.g., youth, adults, or the UW community) to mobilize social action and encourage participation with a Boys and Girls Club.
Ultimately, your second major paper should:
- Be collaboratively written by everyone in your sequence two group.
- Make a complex claim about why your new campaign matters and how it intersects with the needs of your local Boys and Girls Club.
- Be supported by intertextualized evidence from the following materials:
- Documented interview(s) with at least one community partner at a local Boys and Girls Club,
- Your 2.2 “collabcast” or audio PSA ,
- Evidence from existing Boys and Girls Club materials (e.g., website, pamphlets, or the like),
- At least one peer-reviewed journal article or academic text relevant to your claim, and
- OPTIONAL: Other media that function in your new campaign.
- Articulate, for each media approach, your target audience and how the media will circulate.
- Demonstrate an awareness of your campaign’s rhetorical strategies and conventions ..
- Use rhetorical strategies that are proper to academic writing to argue why your campaign matters.
- Include an appropriate title.
OPTIONAL: Significant extra participation credit will be given to students (in groups or individually) who implement their campaign in the community. Before you implement, however, please discuss your idea(s) with me and obtain written permission and recommendations from our community partners at your local Boys and Girls Clubs. (Recall our conversations about speaking for others.)
Actually implementing some or all of the approaches of your campaign will most likely strengthen your claim, your evidence, and the stakes of your argument. For this paper, experiential learning counts.
Your Major Paper 2 audience is academia, which includes me, your classmates, UW staff and faculty, and President Emmert. Keep in mind that your audience is varied in many ways. As such, be sure to consider what information each reader requires to follow your argument. What terms need defining? And what does your audience probably already know prior to reading your paper?
Depending upon your campaign and the trajectory of this course, your collaborative Major Paper 2 may be forwarded to Boys and Girls Club staff. As with your collabcasts, the ultimate goal here is the actual use of your compositions and media by the club itself, as well as by future 121 students. As such, keep asking, “What’s next?”
Targeted Outcomes
At this point in the quarter, we are going for diamonds. All four outcomes are targeted in your major paper. Do your best to address them. To prepare, re-review the Outcomes for English 121 and re-visit the response papers, podcasts, and blog entries from sequences one and two, including comments from me and your peers.
Dates and Times, Loud and Clear
Your second major paper should be at least six pages with one-inch margins, typed using MLA and twelve-point Times New Roman font, double-spaced, and spell-checked. No title pages, please.
Please submit the paper to the class drop box by Tuesday, March 11th.
While you have deadlines for writing, your inquiry should be an ongoing process. Part of that process is addressing any questions that you have. That being said, let me know immediately if any part of this assignment is unclear. Thanks!
uw english | jentery at u.washington.edu
