Online legends

Major Assignment Prompt: Genre Analysis Essay
As your first of two major writing projects this quarter, the GA asks you to produce a sophisticated essay on online folklore as a genre, using rhetorical analysis of texts from the quarter. This essay is roughly 1500-1800 words in length and will be drafted at least twice.

Outcomes and Expectations for the Essay

Develop clear and cogent analyses and convincing arguments about rhetoric and online legends
Identify and articulates concepts related to genre
Select credible and relevant material from readings from our class to support a point or argument
Situate, integrate, and contextualize different types of evidence effectively while distinguishing your voice from those voices in your sources.
Demonstrate effective organization and academic style for a particular purpose, within a particular genre, to a particular audience, ie: uses an academic ethos
Rewrite and edit language, style, tone, and sentence structure according to genre and audience expectations
Plan and execute a revision process that does not rely only on direction from me, your instructor, developing ownership and originality of both the writing process and final product to revise purposefully
Assignment Prompt

In this essay, you must answer the following questions:

What are Online Legends, and what are they for?

Your answers to these questions will be the foundation for a thesis-driven essay that develops a central argument of your choosing. Extremely general topics you might focus on include (but are not limited to): belief, morality, social impact, technological advancement, or cultural/historical commentary, as they relate to online legends. Of course, you may choose to focus on something totally different pertaining to online legends, how they work, and what theyre for. You might look at how two of the above topics influence or are interrelated with one another. Etc. etc. These questions are purposely vague, and how you address them is ultimately up to you and your perspective on the topic.

Assignment Explanation

In this essay, youll deepen your exploration of the online legend genre as a distinct genre of storytelling, entertainment, and digital media. This essay uses the premise that online legends share a set of genre conventions that are distinct from other kinds of stories, in terms not just of their content, but their form as well. Further, this presumes that online legends relate to reality in such a way that influences how they, as stories, are told, to whom they are told, how they are told, why they are told, and why they are believed. Finally, this essay assumes that online legends come in a variety of forms, each with their own distinct conventions (ie: textual vs. visual, and everything in between). Your task is to define online legends as a whole and to make an argument for why your definition helps clarify both what an online legend is and what it is not. Your definition should do more than simply explain what constitutes an online legend, but also why they exist, ie: their cultural/historical/philosophical relevance, per their academic study.

In order to write this essay, you will need to identify generic conventions of online legends, based on our reading, research, and analysis this quarter, and illustrate these conventions by using evidence from strong sources. In your essay, you should cite multiple online legends as evidence to help you discuss and prove your claim. Any legends that we look at as a class are fair game. You should also include citations for the academic articles we read in class to help you define the online legend genre and its conventions. You MUST cite at least two of the articles from class in your essay (by then we’ll have read at least three).

It is important in this essay that you dont simply present a disconnected list of observations about online legends. Rather, you must show how the various parts of your essay connect to one another to form a larger argument about what makes online legends unique, and what defines them, according to your point of view. Further, it is not necessary to treat each aspect of your analysis (ie: each objective discussed in the previous paragraphs) in equal measure. Your essay may choose to focus more on one set of conventions, or even just one convention, over the others. For example, you might write an essay that attempts to very narrowly look at the horror convention, and related messages these legends send about the nature of human beings, or the world in which we live. You might spend more time focusing on form, and how the internet is related to the definition of online legends, or you might focus on content instead. Basically, what this means is, you should not write about everything. You have the freedom to pursue a more narrow point of view on this topic in whatever way you feel is most interesting and insightful to YOU. I need you to show me that you understand what online legends are and what

Last Completed Projects