This document provides guidance for a final assignment in a writing course that asks students to reflect on their writing over the semester and develop their own theory of writing. Students will analyze concepts from their coursework, readings, and projects to discuss what writing is, how it works, and how their views have changed. They must support their analysis by referencing specific examples and evidence from essays they wrote during the semester. The purpose is for students to reflect on their progress and challenges as writers in a way that introduces their portfolio to instructors and faculty. The assignment requires a 1,250-1,750 word essay that students will write a rough draft and final draft of according to the provided due dates.

1. Literacy Narrative
What is a literacy narrative?
A Literacy Narrative is an autobiographical project that explores your experiences
with and relationship to various forms of communication, broadly defined. This can
include oral/aural modes (speaking, listening), textual modes (writing, reading), or
visual modes (images, videos) of communication, or even some combination of
these. When narrating about literacy experiences, it is important to clearly
communicate the significance of those experiences in your development as a reader,
writer, creator, and consumer of content. You will examine your own literacy
history and lead readers to a conclusion or a main theme based on your narrative.
You will tell a carefully constructed narrative that makes a point about your literacy
experiences.
Requirements:
• Length: 750-1000 words
Format:
Font: 12-point, Times New Roman
Spacing: Double, no extra space between paragraphs
Margins: 1-inch
• Point of view: 1st person (I, me, my, mine, we, us, our, ours)
Suggestions:
• Keep it focused: Try to keep the scope of your narrative fairly narrow and
focused. Zero in on a single event or a small number of connected events that
have impacted your relationship with literacy. Avoid narrating all of your
experiences with literacy from pre-k until now.
• Be specific: Try to be as specific and concrete as possible in your descriptions.
Small but impactful details can really help you to pack more punch in your
narrative as well as to make it more believable and relatable.
• Be real: Try to stay true to your real-life experience. It’s far easier to describe
real events and people in detail than to make them up. While you could make
everything up and your classmates and I might be none the wiser, you’d probably
be making your job harder and the results may not be as effective. Besides, this is
composition course, not a creative writing course.
• Follow a thread: While life events are often fragmented and our memory of those
experiences are often imperfect, a narrative re-telling of those experiences should
strive to be more coherent for the audience. To do that, keep an eye on the
common theme, pattern, and meaning that ties everything together. These
constitute the “narrative thread” that helps you weave a story so you don’t end up
with scattered pieces and patches of the fabric.
Important Dates:
Rough draft due: Sep. 17
Revisions due: Sep. 24
Final draft due: Oct. 1
*Final draft must be submitted
on Canvas by 11:59pm on the
due date.

2. Assignment Summary
Discourse communities are groups of people joined in membership, values, goals, and
methods of communication. John Swales outlines six distinct characteristics of discourse
communities; according to him, discourse communities have:
1. Common goals
2. Participatory mechanisms
3. Communication exchange
4. Community-specific genres
5. Specialized terminology
6. Generalized expertise
For this project, you will profile a discourse community you are involved in, with special
analysis of the different aspects of it. To understand your community, you will gather
primary research, such as interviews, surveys, observations, document analysis, and/or
evidence from personal experience.
Goals
• Identify a group that qualifies as a discourse community
• Collect primary research on your chosen discourse community
• Learn genres and communication conventions of that discourse community and
how they help the members of the community achieve common goals
• Create claims and support them via evidence
• Critically reflect upon and analyze a discourse community
Topic
Choose a discourse community you are a member of or might be interested in become a
member of and have easy access to. You’ll have to engage with other members, your genre
of writing, and the overall exigency of your group. If you wish to elaborate on a group
mentioned in your literacy narrative, you are welcome to do so. Make sure your group is a
discourse community.
Textual Requirements
Your final product must be at least 1,000-1,500 words or the digital equivalent. Formatting,
design, and other aspects of how you deliver the project are for you to determine. You are
encouraged to incorporate multimodal aspects, such as images, video, and other media in
your final product. Separate from the word count, include relevant notes and documents
you may have created during the process of your paper, such as interviews or surveys. You
must include a piece of independent, personal research in your paper.

3. Assignment Summary
As writers, you have composed numerous pieces of writing, from
literacy narratives and discourse communities in this class toe dozens
of other papers in your academic career. Moreover, you’ve created
different written products for the real world as well, such as emails,
incident reports at a job, social media posts, or more. For this
assignment, you will revisit a past piece of written you created—
whether for a class or for the real world—and remix it for a new
audience and/or a new mode.
Multimodality: What’s a New Mode?
Gunther Kress refers to multimodality as a theory of communicating
and interacting through multiple modes. For our purposes, you will
have the option to blend writing and other modes, such as speaking,
gesture, visual, audio, etc. The point of the remix assignment is to
explore different modes and writing styles to reach different
audiences with the same content.
Goals
 Understand communication as more than just text
 Develop processes in composing in multiple forms
 Compose ideas for different audiences
 Analyze the rhetorical strategies used to remix the assignment for
a different audience and/or mode.
Textual Requirements
You will compose a project based upon a remix of your past work, in
a medium you select. Along with the project, you will write a 500-word
rhetorical analysis (double spaced, Times New Roman 12-pt font,
1-inch margins) to discuss your methods, revision strategies, and
design choices.
Elements to Consider
Before you changed the medium, review the original assignment:
• What aspects can you improve upon?
• What makes you want to revise this project?
• Is your focus more on the reaching a new audience or
transformation into a new medium?
Important Dates
Rough draft: Nov. 5
Final Draft: Nov. 14
R
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PROJECT
THREE

4. Theory of Writing
So far this semester, you have reflected on your own literacy histories; examined the conventions
of a particular discourse community; and remixed an old piece of writing for a new audience,
genre, and/or mode; and analyzed how the rhetorical situation and your rhetorical choices shaped
your writing remix. Now it is time to step back and look at the big picture—to reflect on the
writing you have produced this semester, making connections to key rhetorical concepts to
create your own theory of writing.
This project asks you to draw on the concepts, conversations, projects, readings to think and
write about your understanding of “what is writing,” “how writing works,” and “how my views
of writing have changed.” Your analysis should connect to your writing, so you must use
examples from your work in this course for support. In other words, you will use your own
writing as evidence to support your points, so you must include specific examples from the
essays you have written this semester.
Purpose
This final essay will serve as a reflective introduction to your portfolio that provides important
information about the progress, attempts, and challenges you have experienced as a writer this
semester. This analysis of your writing also provides a final example of your written work.
Audience
Your audience for this last essay includes UWP instructors and BGSU faculty members viewing
your Canvas e-portfolio who wish to understand you as a writer and your written communication
skills. They are familiar with some of the concepts and terms, but they are not familiar with you,
your writing, and what you’ve done in this class, so you will need to provide background
information about your writing.
Length: 1,250-1,750 words or digital equivalent
Rough draft due: Nov. 19
Final draft due: Dec. 5