RA Exploratory Draft Do by classtime on Tuesday. Make sure you read the RA prompt before doing this!! This brainstorm assignment need not be well organized
RA Exploratory Draft Do by classtime on Tuesday. Make sure you read the RA prompt before doing this!! This brainstorm assignment need not be well organized or follow any particular format. The goal here is to express your ideas as fully as possible without worrying about the finer details or things like fancy structure and organization. We’ll get there. For now, get it all down so that you can LEARN about what you know and what you still need to know. Think of your ideas as seeds that will grow into a bigger, more well-structured and robust tree, with time. Writing itself is a discovery process (I say that in all seriousness) and this will hopefully help you begin to understand what it is you want to say when it comes time to write the actual essay next week.First, try to broadly define online legends as a genre. You may alternately refer to them as “creepypastas.” The terms are used interchangeably for the purposes of our class. Perhaps it might be useful to try this mental exercise: If one of your other professors were to ask you what an online legend is, how would you answer? The answer should be at least a paragraph length, however, if you feel you need to write more than that you should keep going. While doing this reconsider our discussion about sandwiches, which may seem like a trivial subject, but which illustrates an important concern. Since no perfect, or “correct” definition can exist that everyone will agree on, it’s incumbent on anyone coming up with a definition to explain their reasoning. This requires considering alternative definitions and acknowledging the drawbacks of your own definition.Make a list of three online legends you know of and/or have read about for this class. Briefly summarize each one. Then spend at least one paragraph summarizing the key similarities between these texts. In what sense can it be persuasively argued that they all belong to the same genre? Then spend at least one paragraph summarizing their differences. Obviously they refer to different events and feature different historical actors, but they might also be different in terms of their themes, the kinds of people to whom they appeal, their style, tone, the kinds of evidence and arguments they depend on, the weaknesses of their claims, the strengths of their claims, etc.Try to summarize in a paragraph or two the online legend you’d like to focus on as your CORE example in the Rhetorical Analysis essay. Include information about the origins and context that gave rise to the legend, and any important information on how it all “began,” including key creators, online websites/forums/etc., and important contextual (time/place/historical) matters. Also think about how this example relates to other examples and to the larger genre of online legends as a whole. Finally, ask yourself, why have you, personally, picked this example to focus on?
