To recap today's lesson: polish up your professional email request to your prospective "informant" (the person you'd like to interview for our course project). Some good ideas:
- try to establish a polite, formal tone
- be super-clear about what it is that you want from them
- anticipate any questions that they might have (this might require clarifying terms that they're not familiar with, i.e., "artifacts")
- get to the point as quickly and concisely as possible
- consider using the 3-tier structure (opening/intro, body, closing) that is outlined in Ch 8
- include a "signature" at the bottom
Remember, you might get a "Sorry, but I can't help you" response from them, so it's very important that you email them as soon as possible (like, tomorrow!) just in case you need to find/contact a new informant.
Your next assignment (due June 18th) is the artifact analysis. Basically, you're analyzing the artifacts that you've found -- any types of documents (hard copy or digital) with written language -- to determine the conventions of its genre and its rhetorical features (audience, purpose, tone, context, argument). Use our upcoming reading on "Rhetorical Analysis" as your guide. There a ton of questions in there that can get you thinking about how to take a long, hard look at these documents.
To get writing artifacts for this project, there are basically two ways you can get them:
- publically (online or available/free in someone's store... or a museum, even)
- privately (your informant would have to email them to you or give you a hard copy)
Ideally, you want both, but both aren't necessary.
Please know that I'm not looking for perfect sentences, sharp transitions, and well-structure paragraphs in this assignment; I'm just looking for your ideas. Don't put any added pressure on yourselves. Use your first-order thinking, and you'll do just fine.
Here are some videos that can probably help you think through your artifact analysis. I hope you dig 'em!
No comments:
Post a Comment