Academic discourse is where experienced, professional researchers enact civil and productive conversations about the challenges we face as a society, but the conventions of those conversations—logic-heavy arguments, structured writing, academic-style prose, etc.—in some ways inhibit what we are able to say about our topics and who we are able to say it to. The result is that, like the previous sentence, academic writing is usually of zero interest to anyone who is not an academic. This unit is your opportunity to escape the confines of the academy to reach out to an audience of people who, while not being professional researchers, are nonetheless affected by or implicated in your project, and to do so in a way that both you and that audience might find engaging.
In short, for this unit, you will identify a group of non-scholars who would be interested in the topic of your Unit 3 essay, and you will rework that essay into something that would be more appropriate/persuasive to that audience.
Depending on your audience, you might compose a PowerPoint presentation, you might deliver a Ted Talk, you might compose a documentary, you might choose some alternate, non-scholarly way of writing, or you might choose an approach not listed here. Whichever route you choose, the important part will be to make composing decisions based on the specific audience you identified.
Here is a brief overview of that process:
First, you will to identify an audience of non-scholars who are affected by or implicated in your research, and to reflect on what non-scholarly genres or modalities (e.g. styles and forms of composing) might be most appropriate for reaching that audience.
Then, through analysis of this new rhetorical situation–this new audience, purpose, and context–you will try to gain a sense of what matters to your audience, what you hope to accomplish with them, and how you might best persuade them, as well as other useful insights into the context surrounding your project.
Finally, through a series of drafts, you will develop a text that an audience affected by or implicated in your research will find persuasive, useful, and/or engaging.
