At the heart of 380 are
student projects, in which students individually propose, plan,
and produce academic and professional writing to reflect their
interests and post-graduation career plans. Projects help students
practice the skills they learn during lecture and immerse students
within particular fields and discourse communities. Ideally, projects
respond to the needs of organizations and businesses at the University,
within the local community, or beyond Charlottesville. Depending
on their scale, projects might last the entire semester or just
a few weeks; some students end up completing two or three projects.
The first step to any project is the proposal letter, in which
students describe the project and the weekly breakdown of writing.
Projects tend to fall into one of several rough categories:
1. Community-Based Service Learning Projects: In these projects,
ENWR 380 students produce documents that fill a need for a UVa or
Charlottesville group, business, or agency. The client and writer
set the scope of the project, and the writer delivers a useable document
by the end of the semester. These projects tend to be the most useful
for the students, since they're often particularly motivated not
only by their interests but by a desire to please and impress their
clients, and clients give good feedback about professional conventions
and the project's success.
Some examples of these projects include
* Writing documents for Charlottesville Legal Aid to help their
young clientele understand the legal process
* Producing for a NoVa daycare center a range of documents--from
procedure sheets for new employees to brochures used to market the
center to prospective clients
* Designing, administering, and analyzing pre- and post-occupancy
surveys for Habitat for Humanity
2. Student-Group Projects: In these projects, students produce
a document for a campus group to which they already have ties (fraternities/sororities,
Madison House, University Singers, etc.). These projects look much
like community-based service learning, although the writer's contact
person might have little helpful feedback to offer. In fact, writers
often develop and execute such projects with little or no direction
from other members of the group. Accordingly, you'll need to make
sure that these projects stay focused and that the writers remain
motivated.
3. Professional Scenarios: Students write the sort of documents they
are likely to produce after graduation. Examples of this sort of
project include briefing memos, feasibility reports, magazine article,
marketing analyses, etc. Make sure that students working on this
sort of project don't fixate on genre at the cost of attending to
rhetorical analysis and structure.
4. Job/School Search Preparation: Students write documents and do
research in order to find a job or apply for graduate schools. These
include resumes, cover letters, personal statements, and writing
samples.
5. Undergraduate Essays:
For current courses: Students write and research an essay for another
course. Students must draft a letter to the other professor involved,
explaining the proposed use of the paper in ENWR 380 and including
an approval form for the professor to sign and return.
For previous courses: Students may analyze and revise papers originally
written for other classes. If they choose this route, students
must draft a letter to the other professor. This sort of project
is a
last resort -- there's not much motivation for students -- but
it is useful for fleshing out a portfolio that contains another
short project or two.
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