English 200W
Spring 2023
Overview
For your introductory literacy selfies, you’ll produce a short text that introduces yourself and your writing/literacy background to the class. These texts can be created in a range of different modes—visual, aural, or textual. You can then share this text with the class via Google Drive, Jamboard, Slides, Flipgrid, or any other means of your choosing. You’ll give the class an introduction to yourself and share “why I write and how I write.”
The Goal
You’ll want to communicate who you are, describe some element of your writing process, purpose, or history, and reflect on your experiences, thoughts, and feelings about writing. What you create can be positive or negative as long as it has been significant or influential. The goal of this assignment is to allow you to answer “why I write and how I write” for yourself.
What this could be
You can accomplish this purpose in a variety of ways. You might, for example, tell the story of an especially important event later in your life that profoundly shaped you as the literate person you are today. Or you might describe an important educational or non-educational experience that influenced how you write in some way. Or you might focus on a specific event in which writing played a crucial role and describe the process. Or you might do some combination of all of these.
You’ll also need to pick a medium or mode for your text. You can choose a more traditional essay using alphabetical text. But you can also create a slideshow, a video, a series of videos, an audio recording (and I would encourage and be excited by any of these choices!). Think about what will be the best way to communicate what you want it to.
How to get started
The assignment is flexible enough to accommodate a range of possible texts and to give you the freedom to explore a form and structure that seem most suitable to you as you try to present your literate self. You’ll probably want to start by taking a look at your informal writings to see if there’s something you’d like to develop. Feel free to experiment, if you’re so inclined. But keep in mind the purpose of the assignment as well as your audience.
Advice
Good writing depends on choice, namely choosing the details to show your readers. The most successful essays will be focused on a particular idea and have a clear purpose and goal. Make sure that you not only tell a good story about how your writing has been shaped, but one that makes a point, one from which we can learn something about writing.
Requirements
Your text should include:
- an introduction and conclusion
- at least one image of yourself
- a description of your writing process, motivations, philosophy or goals in a compelling, interesting, and focused way
- a clear organization that follows the various points you want to make
- an interesting title
Length: 1000-1300 words (equivalent of 4-5 pages without the images), 10 slides, 5 minutes of video (this could be a bunch of short videos or 1 long one) or audio or whatever might be equivalent in the medium of your choosing
Papers in alphabetic text should use Times New Roman or Garamond (no fonts like courier please), 12-point type, double-spaced with one-inch margins.
Zero Draft: 2/3
Final: 2/10
What’s a zero draft?
A zero draft is a very rough draft of your assignment. This will help you find the raw material that can be refined and further developed into your formal draft. It can be rough and messy. The point is to explore potential ideas, even if you’re unsure where they will lead. You don’t have to worry about spelling or grammatical errors—just keep going. It can be in multiple languages! Whatever works best for you in your thinking process is what you should be doing here.
In this zero draft, you can:
- Write a few sentences about what kind of image of yourself you want to present
- Freewrite about how and why you write. This can expand on the informal writing and discussion answers.
- Freewrite any connections or responses to the texts we read and viewed for class
- Freewrite about any relevant stories or experiences
- Write a few sentences about what kind of medium and structure you might be able to choose for this piece.
After you’ve worked through some of these ideas, end with a paragraph where you sketch out a possible plan for this assignment. Put your zero draft in your Author folder.
Draft of assessment rubric:
(as a class, we will discuss this criteria and how it might be measured)
- Does the text have a clear focus?
- Does the audience have a dynamic sense of the author and their relationship with writing?
- Do the language choices of the author match the project?
- Does the text meet the requirements of the assignment?
- Does it effectively engage the audience?
