Remember that the goals for this project include participating excellently and being an excellent scholar. To that end, as your classmates pitch their ideas, please listen politely. Your attention should primarily be on your classmates, and not on your computer screen. As appropriate, you may ask questions about another student’s project, make suggestions, and offer support.

Project 3 Checklist

There are a lot of little things due as you work on Project 3, so I have made a checklist in Google Docs to help you keep track of what you have (or still need) to do. We can talk about it at more length next week.

For now, you can view the checklist online, and then go to the File menu and choose Make a Copy to save a copy to your Google Drive. Be sure to change the document name to include your first name, and add your name in the body of the document. Once you have a copy, you can either track things online, or print it out and track it on paper. At the end of the project, you will have a list of everything you have done.

Writing and Homework

• Be sure to write and publish a blog post for today that talks about what you have accomplished since your last post and why you did what you did.
• For Tuesday, April 1, be sure you have read Chapter 6. Most of the class time will be spent working on the project. By this point, you should be ready to work on mock-ups and storyboards in class, as described in the chapter.

Course Sign-up Reminder

It’s course request time for Fall 2014. Please be sure to sign up for your classes now to ensure that the courses are available when you need them! Courses that don’t “make” after course request period are often cancelled.

Additionally, if you are a professional writing major or minor and need to take technical writing (English 3764), I will be teaching two sections of course online this fall. I also have an online section this summer that still has seats available.

For Tuesday, March 18, you will focus on what you will do for Project 3 (the content) and how you will do it (the form and design). At the end of your work for this session, you should have completed the project’s “Step 1. Choose a story.” You can look back at the description of Step 1 in the assignment for tips on focusing your ideas. Here are the tasks that I want you to complete for Tuesday, March 18

Reading

Read Chapter 3 of Writer/Designer. For Tuesday, you will focus on everything but “The Pitch.” We’ll come back to that idea later, but go ahead and read it all now.

Thinking and Planning

If you haven’t thought about your project over break, spend some time doing so now. You need to choose a story and decide on the kind of project you want to make.

If you are having difficulty deciding how you want to retell your story, check out the list of Story Remix Possibilities. It is not an exhaustive list. There are many more possibilities. If you want to add ideas to the list, you can add a comment to that post.

Writing

You need to write a blog post about the decisions you’ve made so far and what you were thinking as you made them. What you write for 3/18 should help you as you plan the pitch you will present on 3/27. As I explained before break, your blog post for each class needs to have two parts: (1) What I Did, and (2) Why I Did It. Here’s what I will be looking for in each section of your blog post:

• What I Did
  Tell us what story you have chosen to focus on (the content), and tell us you how you will do it (the form and the design). If you have done extra work to choose your story or look at alternatives, you can list or describe that information here too.
• Why I Did It
  You can subdivide this response into two parts. First, tell us why you chose the story you did and why are focused it the way you have.
  Second, tell us why you have chosen the form and design you have. Think back to the list of modes in Chapter 1—linguistic, visual, aural, spatial, and gestural—and the design choices in Chapter 2—emphasis, contrast, organization, alignment, and proximity. Apply any of those ideas as you describe and explain the reasons for your choices.

Some tips for your blog post

• Some of the WordPress themes are not displaying the HTML tables properly, so if you run into trouble just use headers for this week.
• Don’t stress about your posts. They don’t need to be perfect. They are public, so make sure you write things you are comfortable with others reading—but don’t spend hours writing them. I would expect you to spend no more than 15 to 20 minutes writing (30 as the absolute maximum if you have lots to say).
• If you’re not sure about something, make your best guess. Try your best, and you’ll be fine.
• Your choices are not permanent. If you realize later in the week or even next week that you need to change something about your focus, the form, or the design, you can adjust. People often need to revise their plans once they have begun work on a project.

Sharing

Once you have written your blog post, add the link to your blog post for Tuesday in the Project 3 discussion area. To help organize the posts, add the date and a few words on your topic with your link. For instance, I might post something like “For 3/18, I am focusing on the story of The Gettysburg Address.”

Choose the posts for 3/18 of at least 2 other people, and read their related blog posts. Add a response on G+ to their plans for Project 3. You can give them encouragement, share some ideas, ask questions, and so forth.

I want to make sure everyone gets a response, so please comment on the link of one person who hasn’t had any replies yet and one person who has had no more than 1 comment. You may read and share feedback with more than two people, of course. Participation and collaboration will help with this project.

Getting Help

I will be on the road Tuesday, March 18, so I may not see any questions you have about this activity until late in the evening. Email me if you have a question, and I will respond when I can. Generally though, just do your best work. Guess if you’re not sure. You have until 11:55 PM on Wednesday, 3/19 to get things done.