Prompt: A Journal of Academic Writing Assignments

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modern rhetorical theory ×

February 2025

  1. Feels Good Man: Memes as a Framework for Teaching Circulation, Remix, and Writing Transfer
    Abstract

    This essay introduces a circulation analysis assignment, blending together insights from multimodal composition, remix/assemblage pedagogy, and circulation studies to encourage writing transfer. The assignment asks students to document the origins and evolution of a cultural meme (as coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins) as it is adapted for different rhetorical situations, modeled for students in the titular documentary film Feels Good Man. By completing this analysis, presenting it in multimodal contexts, and reflecting upon how they adapted that presentation for their audience, students begin to develop the metacognitive, cross-contextual thinking necessary for successful writing transfer.

    doi:10.31719/pjaw.v9i1.208

February 2024

  1. Constructing Disability: Creating a Keyword Portfolio
    Abstract

    The Keyword Portfolio assignment is a semester-long project in which students trace their developing understanding of disability concepts, drawing together terms from class readings and discussions with an identification of these concepts at work in their daily lives. Students compose multiple entries across the semester. In each entry, students first define the chosen disability concept using their own language, and then present and explain an example of the concept in action. After assembling their term entries, students write an introductory, reflective cover letter where they describe their chosen audience for the portfolio and explain their composing choices and organization. In these letters, students generally report that they use their own experiences with terms and positionality and so seek to help students ‘like them’ to access disability tenets and to gain comfort with the material more quickly. Students also describe elaborate webs of connections among their chosen terms, illustrating that they gain broader knowledge of disability concepts and their inter-relationships through the assignment.

    doi:10.31719/pjaw.v8i1.158

January 2019

  1. "The One Who Knows the Tricks Wins the Day": Cultivating Mētis in an Undergraduate, Mixed-major Professional Writing Course
    Abstract

    This assignment demonstrates how writing instructors can cultivate students' mētis, a flexible and adaptive way of thinking, by requiring participation in naturalistic rhetorical situations that arise outside the classroom. The assignment, developed for an undergraduate, mixed-major professional writing course, asks students to pursue external professional opportunities. The affordances of naturalistic situations and the requirements of the assignment work together, enabling students to develop three key features of mētis: vigilance, tricks, and multiplicity. Exercising mētis improves students' chances of success when they pursue opportunities in competitive industries.

    doi:10.31719/pjaw.v3i1.35

June 2018

  1. Revising the Faculty Manual: The Client Project in Your Backyard
    Abstract

    This client project is a culminating assignment in an upper-level professional writing course designed to help students understand the nature of audience-based writing in an unfamiliar writing context. The specific task is for students to revise a substantial section of the university *Faculty Policies and Procedures Manual*. Students researched their audience, analyzed samples of university manuals at other higher education institutions, exercised document design strategies, and practiced syntax revision during the project, ultimately presenting a sample of their work to faculty for feedback. Employing design workshop strategies, this assignment requires students to interview faculty in order to understand multiple users' experiences of the university Faculty Policies and Procedures Manual. In addition, an essential component for student learning in this course is reflection. This reflection is centered on the rhetorical situation of using and revising genres (Devitt, 2009) in the context of a professional environment (Clark, 2005; Kain & Wardle, 2005) in order that students avoid perceiving the class as a march through memos, reports, and emails as static formats (Miller, 1984). This project engages students independently, as they are responsible for their own revisions of 30 pages, while class time is used collaboratively on learning new ways of viewing the document's potential and the genre's function.

    doi:10.31719/pjaw.v2i2.25