Photo by Mansur Khojaev on Unsplash
Media
- “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” (short story), or
- Arrival by Denis Villaneuve (film)
Develop a magazine/newspaper review that discusses both texts in several stages.
- Begin with 1000 words of unstructured, brainstorm writing on one of the texts (phase one).
- Turn it into three body paragraphs (phase two).
- Collaborate with an author who has reviewed the other text. Discuss points of overlap in your observations and decide on a common approach. Revise the body paragraphs and compose an introduction and conclusion together.
- The resulting review should be collaboratively written review of both texts using 6 paragraphs: an engaging and timely introduction paragraph, four body paragraphs, and a conclusion paragraph that includes evaluation and extension of your idea (phase three).
For more on my approach to writing phases, see these posts.
Length: 6 paragraphs, the middle four should be longer
Citing primary sources: Name the film and short story authors and titles in the first or second sentence; throughout refer to them by author last names; no hyperlinks to source material necessary.
Citing secondary sources: None are necessary, but if you decide to use them, use the author’s name, title of the source, and hyperlink to the source on first mention; last name on subsequent mentions.
Heading: Standard MLA heading, centered title, and blog style paragraphs (no indention, skip a line between paragraphs).
Reviews due Tuesday, June 23.
Submit to the appropriate thread in #activities channel: one document with your pre-writing and drafts and a separate document of your final draft that includes “Film/story review” as the title and cites both of you as authors.
Editor/Designer cycle
After the text of the reviews come in, your team will shift to an editor/designer task. You can accomplish both jobs together or you can divide and split the editor and designer tasks with each other.
- Editor: Using the guidance on my Phase Three post and taking responsibility for arranging the review in the way that makes the most sense, complete a full edit of the other team’s review text.
- Designer: Design a WordPress post for the review and, when it’s finished, publish it. The published post on one of the designer’s WordPress site should include
- An interesting and accurate title (as the “title” of the post) title,
- An ethically chosen and correctly cited image (see your notes from last week’s classes and the Week Three post),
- Bylines for all four people that worked on the post (writers, editor, designer) using the format of first name last initial (like this: Pete R.),
- Accurate, working hyperlinks for material that the review references
- Any other design components that you want to experiment with that do not impede a reader from the review.
Published review posts are due as a link in the #activities channel on Thursday, June 25.
