Is your audience realistic and specific (i.e. does this audience actually exist)?
This assignment is a companion piece to your contribution paper (you will be using the same argument and relying on the same research for this second portion). Your job is to decide which claims, ideas, arguments, and themes in your contribution paper are important or relevant for a lay (not academic) audience.
While the only requirement for the audience is that it is non-academic, I want you to be specific about who your audience would be and why your topic is important to them. Who besides those reading your paper needs to know about your argument?
Since these people are unlikely to read your paper, how could you communicate your argument to them? What genre will work best for this audience? It could be a website, a billboard, a pamphlet, a video, a podcast, etc. You can be as creative as you want to be, but keep in mind that different audiences will pay more attention to different kinds of mediums. The only requirement is that this piece needs to be a multi-modal composition. It must include visual, aural, or graphic design elements.
As you shift your audience, I want you to think about the kinds of members of your audience that may not have the same accessibility to the medium you choose. We have read about increasing accessibility, but how can you apply it to this composition? With each of these elements (visual, sound, graphics, design), think of an alternative way to present the information to improve accessibility. How can you make sure that every member of your audience will have access to the material you are presenting? How can you build in a variety of ways to access information?
The key to a successful Element 2 assignment is that it fits both the audience and the topic then shows particular care in accessibility set-up.
Grading
This assignment is worth 40 points. I will evaluate both your choice of audience and your choice of genre or medium using rhetorical criteria:
- Is your audience realistic and specific (i.e. does this audience actually exist)? Is your contribution important to this audience?
- Is your choice of genre or medium effective for this audience? Does the tone, text, design, style, etc. match the genre?
- Are your design decisions effective? Have you taken the design principles we studied in class into account?
- Does the document make an argument? Is the argument the same as the contribution paper?
- Has the student taken accessibility into account? Are there alternatives for viewing material? Are the options equally useful?
- ContributionPaper_Risksofself-drivingcars.docx
