NOTE:

Students in English 2010 Online Plus created three major projects over the course of the Spring
2020 semester: a flash memoir, an informative profile, and a persuasive project using a
persuasive genre of their choosing. These three projects all focused on a single “local, social
issue” chosen individually by each student according to their own research and writing interests.

The final signature assignment for the class was a “public-facing website” that featured all three
major projects, revised and adapted to suit the rhetorical circumstances of a website designed
for a local audience.

Below are the project guidelines for the final signature assignment, followed by the guidelines
for each of their 3 major projects.

Public-Facing Website Guidelines 

We started this final module on revision with this big idea:

Meaningful writing is achieved through sustained engagement in literate practices (thinking,

researching, analyzing, conversing) and through revision.

We hope by now that you’re starting to see the rewards of this sustained engagement in writing,
researching, and composing in this class. So far you've created three major projects and ten
notebook entries that all relate in some way to the local social issue you elected to study and
write about this semester.

The public-facing website is the culmination of your reading, writing, and research in English
2010. ​To complete it, you'll produce and publish a polished, public-facing website that
feature​s ​all 3 of your major writing projects from this semester, plus additional content
that you'll create using your notebooks and any other materials you'd like to add.

You'll complete this project either 1) on your own or 2) with a partner, and it will serve as your
signature assignment for this class, a multimodal digital showcase of your writing and
composing in English 2010, and a public-facing website that focuses on your semester-long
local social issue and presents that issue to a relevant public audience.

What do we mean by a "public-facing website?"

When it's done, this won't be your English 2010 website any longer. (It's ok if your website URL
mentions this though). Instead, it's a published collection of articles, images, videos, podcasts,
infographics, and other media (for example) dedicated to your issue and targeting a local,
public, real-world audience.

This means any traces of writing that identify this class and its projects, assignments, etc. will be
removed and replaced by material that is rhetorically appropriate for a public-facing,
issue-focused websites

In this sense, your website project is actually two things at once:

1. A final portfolio of your work in this class, displaying your ability to work with genres,
mediums, and rhetoric to craft authentic and effective writing for a specific public
audience.
2. A public-facing website that engages deeply with your local social issue and seeks to
serve the needs of the community and audience it targets.

Ultimately, this project is an opportunity for you to decide how to best represent your local issue
by arranging, organizing, and strategically revising/adapting the writing you have done this
semester. At least one of your major projects should be multi-modal--more than just a text
document. Strong websites will make use of multiple mediums throughout, combining text,
images, and other forms in order to best reach their intended public audience.

The Wix or Weebly site you've been adding to all semester can serve as the starting point for
your public-facing website, or you can create a brand-new website using a theme or template
that better suits the rhetorical goals of your issue.

Key Features for Every Project

● A title and homepage that contextualizes and frames your issue for a public audience
● An "about" page (you can call it whatever you want) that identifies you as the website
author and contains a bio or other fitting info. Your mission statement may go here, or on
your home page, or on it's own page.
● At least 3 major feature pieces (articles, reports, videos, podcasts, infographics, etc), all
related to your local issue. (a "feature piece" can be any of your 3 major projects, or a
hybrid piece created from 2-3 notebook entries.)
● At least 3 notebooks repurposed to fit the rhetorical situation of your public-facing
website. (see below for a note on using notebooks)
● Clear, intentional and rhetorically fitting navigation features that allow your website's
readers to easily move from one piece to the next.
● Multimedia work, either throughout the website, or prominently featured in one major
project/piece/article/etc.
● Frequent and clear in-text citations for all sources and full citations in works cited or
reference sections at the end of each piece.
Notebooks

You have some flexibility in how you use your notebooks on your final project. You might:

● Turn them into a series of blog posts that relate to your issue.
● Select a few of them to craft into mini-articles about your issue, and feature them
together or separately on your website.
● Combine 2-3 of them into a more developed feature piece for your website.
NOTE: If you choose this route, you may substitute this new feature piece for one of your
major projects, or simply include it in addition to your 3 major projects.
● Keep them on a single page, but reframe the page for your public audience. (How will
you explain their presence here? What value do they offer your audience? how will you
make them "fit" the situation and circumstances of a public-facing, issue-focused
website?)
● Repurpose them in some other way that fits the needs, interests, and use of your
intended audience. Be creative and take risks with how you use your notebooks!

The public-facing website is worth 25% of your final grade for this course. You must create
hyperlinks to your website articles in your​ final course reflection.​ ​This reflection ​MUST​ be posted
(not uploaded as a file) on the ENGL 2010 page of your college ePortfolio in order to earn credit
for the project.

Details of the Parts of the Assignment

● Collaboration
● Revision
● Design and Layout
● Mission Statement
● Technical Details

The Collaborative Part:​ While you're working on your public-facing website, we’ll put you in
collaborative workshop groups for purposes of several stages of feedback. These will
essentially be peer-review and project-support groups designed to help you complete your
website.

● You’ll get and give feedback on the pieces you and your group members have chosen to
revise and/or adapt. This feedback should help you think beyond your work’s current
status, and to reimagine its mediums and modes, its voice(s), its style and polish.
● You’ll get and give feedback on your mission statement This will help you get a sense of
what others are doing, and to extend your thinking about how your work, taken as a
whole, speaks among the genres, the mediums; how your research has functioned; what
kinds of appeals your work has made; and other larger rhetorical questions.
● You’ll get and give feedback on the design and layout of your website.
The Revision Part:​ You will be working with pieces that have already undergone at least one
revision (previously in the course). So what kinds of revisions should you be looking to carry
out?

● You’ll look at the feedback you received on your revised work for ideas that will help you
polish your work further.
● You’ll consider and reconsider the mediums and modes of your work.
● You’ll think about how your work might make connections within the context of a website.
● You’ll think even harder about audiences, and how readers might respond to your
writing, revising with that in mind.

The Design and Layout Part:​ Build your public-facing website using Wix, Weebly, or another
free website-building platform of your choosing. ​See the Technical Details tab for specific
information about duplicating your existing English 2010 Wix or Weebly site​, and using
that duplicate as the foundation for your public-facing website. Or, you can start a brand new
Wix or Weebly site with a new theme or template that best fits the design, feel, and approach of
your issue.

You should take a look at lots of public service websites, online magazines, and credible news
sources to come up with a look for the site you’re designing. Look at things like type/font;
spacing; style features such as indentations and spaces between paragraphs; pull quotes; titles
and subheads; interplay between images and text; captions; and so on. Think carefully about
the template you choose as a framework. As you build your website, work on making consistent
choices that will best showcase the work you’ve so carefully revised, edited, and adapted.

It's important to remember that your public-facing website will be different from the website
you've been adding work to all semester. True, both are websites. But your English 2010 site
served as a multimodal composition space and a place to house your projects-in-progress for
this class. Your final website is a polished, public-oriented, published website dedicated to your
local issue. Your duplicate English 2010 site is a solid start, but you'll need to add, cut, change,
and adapt it.

What are the key features of issue-oriented websites? You'll explore that question directly in the
What's a Public-Facing Website? ​discussion, where you'll browse through both professional and
student examples and figure out what makes them tick.

The Mission Statement:​ Your website will include a public-facing introduction on either the
homepage or another prominent page. Use the Mission Statement to introduce the website and
help the reader see the key themes, features, and ideas of your work, and as an opportunity to
subtly announce and display the design. For the mission statement, you could:

● introduce the issue to your various readers.

● highlight features of the website.
● weave connections among the various elements of the website.
 ● show rhetorical awareness by inviting the reader into the public space.

The Mission Statement should be no more than 500 words long. You may title it "mission
statement" or "about" or "editor's note" or whatever seems to best fit your audience.

The Technical Part: ​You'll create your public-facing website using Wix, Weebly, or another free
website platform of your choosing. To build your website, you have a couple of options:

1. Start a brand new website on Wix or Weebly (it can be under your same account) using
a new theme or template that best suits the rhetorical needs of your issue.
2. Create a new, duplicate copy of the English 2010 website you created at the beginning
of the semester (Both​ ​Wix​ and​ ​Weebly​ let you do this for free) and then edit, cut, add,
and sculpt this new website into your public-facing website.

Each approach has its advantages.​ Creating a brand new website ​allows you to start fresh.
Now that you have a couple of months of web design under your belt, you'll likely make more
effective choices for layout, design, and other elements.

Creating a new, ​duplicate​ copy of the English 2010 website and then adapting it can also work.
If you have already done detailed layout, design, and multi-media work inside your English 2010
site, you may want to preserve that work. But bear in mind that your public-facing website will
end up looking quite different from your original English 2010 site. One was a simple class
website for hosting your English 2010 projects. The other targets a public, local audience and
intentionally guides them through a clear conversation about your local social issue.

If you are working in pairs, you have a couple of options:

1. Start a brand new website on Wix or Weebly (consider creating a new account so you
both have editing access to it) using a theme or template that best suits the rhetorical
needs of your public-facing website.
2. One ​member creates a new, duplicate copy of their English 2010 website, and the other
member brings their content onto this new site. Then both members work together to
edit, cut, add and sculpt this new website.
● Duplicating your Wix Site
● Duplicating your Weebly Site

Minimum Requirements
● Revise and adapt your work substantially in order to earn a passing grade. ​Take
peer review suggestions, instructor suggestions, and your revision group members’
suggestions seriously when revising. The biggest contribution to your revision choices,
however, will be your own ideas for making your content as strong as it can be in order
to reach your audience.
 ● Meet the minimum source requirement for each revised paper​. Reread the
assignment descriptions for each paper to ensure that you understand and meet the
requirements.
● Use an appropriate citation format/means​ ​for each piece​ (you can default to MLA
in-text citations, but you may decide, in addition, or instead, to use hyperlinks or other
methods of acknowledging source material—this should be a conscious decision, based
on your rhetorical purposes, that you can explain).
● Meet the minimum length/design requirements for each revised piece.
● Meet the visual design requirements for each revised piece.
● Create an engaging and informative Home/Welcome page.​ The Mission Statement
can go here or on another page that is "early on" in the navigation of the website.
● Use an appropriate and engaging design.​ Look at your favorite online news sources
to give you ideas. Professional examples:​ The New York Times,​ ​ ​Slate,​ ​ T
​ he Atlantic​,
Rolling Stone.​
● Create a reference strategy for the whole website​. Professional websites use credible
sources and you need to show your research. You should credit all your sources,
including images, for all of your articles. Ultimately, how you organize this is a rhetorical
choice that you should make with your audience’s needs in mind. You might choose to
create a dedicated reference or resource page, or you might choose to create robust
attributive tags and hyperlink each source.

Special Note:

Please do not use a document viewing tool like SCRIBD to embed documents onto the page. In
addition, avoid linking to Google Docs or posting Word files that need to be downloaded to be
read. You can use Google Docs or Word to draft your work of course, but when it’s time to post
your work on your website, copy and paste it directly onto the page using a textbox.

Ultimately the goal is to make your content directly and immediately visible on the webpage,
instead of making your audience follow links to other websites, download files, or use
cumbersome document viewers. 99% of the time this will be easy to do in Wix and Weebly.

When it comes to other mediums like images, video, and audio, embedding can work well to
make your content visible on the page. Embedding YouTube videos, SoundCloud players, and
Piktochart or Infogram visuals directly on your site makes your content directly accessible to
readers. Use the tools that Wix and Weebly provide. Consider your audience, and make choices
that will create immersive and engaging viewing and reading experiences for them.

Flash Memoir Project Guidelines 

The Occasion, Audience, and Goals 
Each project this semester provides distinct ways of approaching, researching, and 
writing about your local issue as well as new occasions for practicing writing. In your 
first project, you will try out the narrative effect—using story as the forward frame in 
your writing—by producing a flash memoir. 

Memoirs are an important genre with an unquestionably strong presence in the 

contemporary book publishing industry as well as literary and art circles. In short, 
memoirs are so important because they allow for individuals to connect to others 
through the shared experiences, challenges, and triumphs of being human. 

While memoirs hold an important place in our public eye and are particularly good at 
foregrounding human experience as a point of connection, the occasion and main 
goals for writing your flash memoir should begin on a more personal level. 

You will use the memoir—the acts of imagining, drafting and revising it—to establish a 
personal connection with your local social issue and you will write for an audience that 
includes you, your peers, and instructor. Connecting to your issue is an important part 
of enlivening your writing about your issue and invigorating your research and general 
pursuit to understand it. As you begin drafting your memoir, your primary goals are to 
demonstrate to your audience that you’re working on creating the narrative effect in 
memoir. Therefore, you need to focus on a moment in your life that connects to your 
issue and use storytelling qualities and techniques discover and reveal those insights in 
your memoir. Finding your story, and exploring how to tell it slant, is the art, practice, 
and experience of memoir writing. 

Requirements 
● Your memoir should be at least 400 words and no more than 500 words. 
● You should integrate at least one outside source into the essay. You must 
document your sources in such a way that a reader would be able to trace 
back, find, and examine them. This includes some form of in-text citation for 
every source, and some form of works cited or references section at the end. 
MLA 
● Links to an external site. 
● and ​APA 
● Links to an external site. 
 ● are two academic citation systems you can use if you want to follow a 
specific guide.  

The Narrative Effect 

Writers employ the narrative effect when they use story as the primary method for 
making meaning in their writing. Because narrative writing primarily relies on 
storytelling techniques to convey meaning, the narrative effect will require attention to 
your story’s details and how you strategically create and convey meaning to readers 
through the details. As you begin composing your flash memoir, you’ll find that you’re 
first in pursuit of identifying the story you need to tell. As you continue drafting, 
periodically return to the story you’re telling to consider how it evolves and takes shape 
as the meaning and message of the story come into clearer focus and become more 
defined. 

Remember that the story itself—the elements and details of the story—are the primary 
method for making meaning. Therefore, give ongoing attention to the available narrative 
techniques you are employing to craft your story. 

The Genre 
You are composing a flash memoir, a type of text anchored in memory and one relying 
on storytelling qualities (e.g., scene-setting, description and detail, characters and 
dialogue, and musing) to engage readers on an emotional level so that they come away 
with a deeper understanding of the writer’s experiences and the issues the writer 
spotlights while narrating the experiences. Flash texts gesture toward the importance 
of brevity and focus in a text, and therefore flash memoir writers must work to perhaps 
cover less ground with purposeful detail.   

Try This Out 

Adding an outside source may be counterintuitive, as memoirs are so focused on 
personal experience and perspective, and the style and features of memoirs seem an 
odd place to integrate something so formal seeming as research but try integrating the 
outside source in different places and in different ways in your memoir. Observe 
others’ memoirs in this module: when and where and how do you see research woven 
into the memoirs? What is the source and the basic idea it engages? How does the 
source’s information advance the writer’s story and meaning (or not)? As you read, can 
you imagine moments in the story where additional research could illuminate 
something or where the writer’s source may be more useful or effective? 

By the end of this module, maybe you’ll have something to say about this: What role 
can outside research play in a memoir? Keep these questions close by as you learn 
more about the narrative effect and memoirs. 

Profile Project Guidelines 

From our first narrative effect project, the flash memoir, we now move to ​the profile​ (the second
narrative effect project). This page will help you understand the nature of profiles and some of
the requirements for the project, but you will learn more about this project as you draft, receive
feedback, and revise it over the next few weeks.

The Occasion, Audience, and Goals

In your second major composing project for this class you’ll be creating a profile--a genre of
narrative and informative writing that describes and narrates a person's experience in a focused
way, providing a snapshot or portrait of their life with a particular interpretive angle and for a
particular occasion.

Profiles use narrative strategies such as description, dialogue, and scene setting; but profiles
also typically use sources—often comments that others have made about the profile subject, or
background research on issues or projects related to the profile subject. Successful profiles use
both storytelling AND information-sharing to illuminate their subject and communicate
something meaningful about their issue.

Profiles seek to engage the reader, absorbing the reader with a vivid portrait of a subject—a
person—who has matters because of his or her involvement in what's new or relevant at the
moment (or in your case-your local social issue). As the writer of your profile, one of your
priorities will be to help the reader see why your portrait and story of this particular local person
is meaningful, and why it is meaningful right now when it comes to understanding your local
social issue.

Your profile subject should be a local person of your choosing, someone who’s working on,
experiencing, or connected to your issue locally in some substantive way. Local experience,
local news, and local organizations can inform your choice. Your profile’s subject can be a friend
or family member, someone you’ve read about in local news, or an employee/volunteer/client of
a local organization you’ve identified as connected to your issue, in addition to anyone else
whose connection to your issue is significant or interesting.
Take some time to consider who might be a strong subject for your profile. (It's probably the
most important choice you'll make for this project) While someone directly connected to your
issue might be the most straightforward choice, you could also choose somebody with strong
opinions on your issue--someone who can speak about your issue at some length and provide
you with material to work with.

Here are some basics​ on finding someone to focus on (your profiles ​subject)​ and conducting
interviews. Consider bookmarking this resource to use later!

Choosing a Medium
You can compose your Profile Project either in text-form, OR another medium of your choosing.
(Either your Profile or your Persuasion Effect Project must be multimodal--that is, more than just
text) Depending on the medium you choose, your draft should have varying lengths:

● Text + image drafts should be about 1,200 words (this could be a word-processed
document or a web text published on a page of your Wix or Weebly site). You should
make graphics and other images yourself. You should only use someone else's images
if absolutely need to. Check with your instructor of record and be sure to credit the
image.
● Video-based drafts: shoot for 3 minutes. You should record and edit the video yourself.
You may include short clips from footage created by others, but you must credit any
material you did not make.
● Audio-based drafts: shoot for 3-4 minutes. You should record and edit the audio
yourself. You may include short audio clips created by others, but you must credit any
material you did not make.
● Image-based drafts (like photo essays, infographics, comics, or political cartoons): shoot
for at least 10 images and include at least 50 words of descriptive/explanatory text per
image. You should take the photos or draw/generate the comics yourself. You should
only use someone else's pictures if absolutely need to--if you need a picture of a famous
person, for instance. Check with your instructor of record and be sure to credit the
image.
● Plan to make substantive use of 5-7 sources in this project. Document your sources in
such a way that a reader would be able to trace back, find, and examine them. This
includes some form of in-text citation for every source, and some form of works cited or
references section at the end.​ ​MLA (Links to an external site.)​ and ​APA (Links to an
external site.)​ are two academic citation systems you can use if you want to follow a
specific guide. Regardless of the citation system you choose, use consistent citation
throughout your project and make sure you ​do not​ include a list of pasted URLs at the
end of your document. If you need more help with citation, check ​this resource (Links to
an external site.)​ provides a basic overview for text-based citations, which can be
adapted for multimodal projects.
The resource on our course homepage entitled​ ​“10 Mediums You Should Try in this Class”
might be useful to you as you think about what medium you would like to use for the profile.

Try This Out

Try beginning your profile draft with a richly detailed scene, where the profile subject is actively
engaged in doing something related to the local issue you’re researching. Give us descriptive
details of time and place. Show the profile subject doing something that isn’t particularly focused
on the writer/interviewer. Aim to let the reader really ​see​ the profile subject, before doing any
explaining or set up. Narratives often seek to immerse the reader in a story-world—beginning
with a scene is one way to engage the reader without a lot of ‘In this profile I aim to…’
introductory throat-clearing. A well-framed narrative—even just one or two paragraphs at the
beginning—arrests the reader with the pleasures of narrative, a much more inviting beginning.
Here's an example:

Mr. Finley’s two-story house in South Los Angeles used to be headquarters for a swimming
school but the pool was drained long ago to make way for greener dreams. Potted cactuses,
bags of organic fertilizer and gardening equipment cluttered the shallow end. Graffiti
emblazoned its once-white walls. Old shopping carts planted with succulents lined the pool’s
edge. (​from "Urban Gardening: Appleseed with an Attitude" by David Hochman)​

Try This, Too

Profiles often zoom in, like a camera, for a closeup: a closeup of the person, through words,
actions, description; or a closeup of a scene, through setting, description, time and place
markers. But they also step back, giving background, context, other perspectives, and so on.
Think of this, again, as a kind of camera move—zooming back out, to show the larger
landscape into which the profile subject fits. Try making the zoom in/zoom out dynamic one of
the structural moves of your profile. Try the closeup/step back two-step at least a couple of
times. Bonus: the zoom out/step back is a perfect opportunity for you to use your research.
Here's another example from same source as above:

His gardens have spirals, color, fragrance and curves, and, to him, soil is sensuous. “How much
more sexy can it get than you eating food that you grew?” Mr. Finley asked.

In a city where an elite few fuss over $13 plates of escarole wedges, too many others eat at
98-cent stores and drive-throughs or go hungry altogether. Mr. Finley estimates that the City of
Los Angeles owns 26 square miles of vacant lots, an area equivalent to 20 Central Parks, with
enough space for 724,838,400 tomato plants.

His radical fix is to take back that land and plant it, even if it’s the skinny strip between concrete
and curb. (​from "Urban Gardening: Appleseed with an Attitude" by David Hochman​)
And here's another example from a previous semester's student in this class:

The representative at Section 8 housing told Kaitlynn the wait for housing would be
about two years – there were 78 other families who were already on the wait list. “It felt
like everywhere I turned, I just ran into another closed door,” Kaitlynn said. The wait
was excruciatingly long. According to Affordable Housing Online and the Utah Housing
Authority, the average person, once approved for Section 8 housing, will spend ​25
months​ on a wait list. That’s a long time to wait, especially when you’re risking
homelessness.

It’s not just renters like Kaitlynn looking for low-income housing who are struggling to
find a place to live. Utahns everywhere are scrambling to keep a roof over their heads
in the midst of the affordable housing crisis. Rent is high, income is low, and people are
flooding into the valley from all over the country. Since 2012, the number of households
in Utah has increased by over 160,000 people, but the number of available housing
units has only gone up by around 1 ​ 11,000​, leaving almost 50,000 families with nowhere
to go. (f​ rom "A Families Story" by Kimberly Webb)​

The examples above come from text-based profiles, but they could easily be adapted for
different mediums. In an upcoming discussion you'll have the chance to explore profiles in other
mediums, many of which use these same techniques to connect with their audience.

Persuasion Effect Project Guidelines

This page will help you understand the requirements for the persuasion effect project, but you
will learn more about this project as you draft, receive feedback, and revise the project over the
next few weeks.

The Occasion, Audience, and Goals

The Persuasion Effect Project gives you the opportunity to explore a range of viewpoints,
opinions and arguments surrounding your local social issue, and to imagine how you might
enter an ongoing public conversation about that issue, working rhetorically to craft your own
argument and support it with evidence, logic and storytelling. Persuasive genres often seek to
sway, influence, or otherwise move their audiences—not necessarily to change their minds
completely about an issue, but to invite them to fully consider the merits of a specific point of
view.

The audience for this persuasive project is up to you, but it should be specific and well-defined.
Ask yourself: who is discussing this topic in the public sphere? Who is making arguments? Who
are the various stakeholders, or groups and individuals with “skin in the game?” Who needs to
hear what I have to say? Who needs to change? Who out there can I hope to have an effect
upon? These questions should help you focus the audience for your project, and make
rhetorical choices as you draft and revise.

Persuasive writers adopt a wide range of authorial stances, from the deeply personal first
person point of view, to more outwardly focused informational/logical perspectives. Select an
authorial tone, voice and stance that you think will best work for your project.

The message of your persuasion-focused project should be your central argument, your main
point, your big idea, your thesis, your compelling story of how you came to think and believe
what you do. Start with a rough working message, and refine it as you research and write.

You should specify the occasion and context for this project based on your audience, your
message, and the current state of the ongoing public conversation you are seeking to join.
Persuasive writers often seek to craft timely arguments that respond to recent events or recent
commentary on an issue.

The medium for your project is up to you. Think rhetorically to choose whether you’d like to
produce a text-based, video-based, audio-based, or image-based project. What medium would
best suit the needs of your intended audience? What medium excites, intrigues or terrifies you?
Choose that one.

Minimum Requirements
Your Persuasion Effect Project can, depending on the medium you choose, have varying
lengths.

● Primarily text-based documents should be about 1,000 words or 4 double-spaced pages.

● Video-based drafts: 3-5 minutes. You must record and edit the video yourself. Do not
simply make a compilation of clips.
● Audio-based drafts: 3-5 minutes.
● Image-based drafts (like photo essays, infographics, comics, or political cartoons): at
least 10 images accompanied by 50 words of descriptive/explanatory text per image.
You must take the photos, make the graphics, and draw the comics yourself. You should
only use someone else's images if absolutely need to--if you need a picture of a famous
person, for instance. Check with your instructor of record and be sure to credit the
image.

All projects, regardless of their medium, must make substantive use of 4-6 sources. You must
document your sources in such a way that a reader would be able to trace back, find, and
examine them. This includes some form of in-text citation for every source, and some form of
works cited or references section at the end.​ ​MLA​ and​ ​APA​ are two academic citation systems
you can use if you want to follow a specific guide. You can also look at example texts to see
how they do documentation when it’s not in MLA format. Regardless of the citation system you
choose, use consistent citation throughout your project and make sure you ​do not​ include a list
of pasted URLs at the end of your document. If you need more help with citation, check​ ​this​ out.

The Genres
Some persuasive genres include: academic argument essays in various forms, position
arguments, proposals, newspaper and magazine commentary (op-eds), public service
campaigns, political speeches, campaign ads, political cartoons and comics, manifestos,
memes, white papers, performance/product/work evaluations and book/movie/film reviews (to
name some of the most common). You can likely think of a few more.

Try This
Some pieces of persuasive writing use micro-blasts from other genres, such as profiles, or
narrative, to create a vivid effect and more strongly connect with readers. Is there a particular
place or person who might illustrate some dimension of your argument? Could you insert a
mini-profile, or a micro-scene description, into your persuasive piece? Try beginning your
argument piece with one of these micro-genre-blasts. Or try ending your piece this way. Or—be
daring! Be bold!—try beginning and ending using these micro-genre-blasts.

Or Try This
Have you identified people who strongly disagree with you as the audience for your persuasive
piece? Try thinking about what you have in common with people who strongly disagree with
you. What shared ground might you have? How might that shared ground help you craft an
approach toward these readers, so that they might, if not change their minds, at least consider
the merits of your argument? What would help you, as a writer, invoke that shared ground?
Some ideas: citing a source that connects with your audience; affirming some dimension of the
audience’s beliefs (the part that you share or find meritorious); taking a reasonable and
thoughtful tone; inviting the reader to consider some dimension of the issue that you think they’ll
find compelling.