Decision Making & Production.
“Students will be able to produce writing that demonstrates their ability to navigate choices and constraints when writing for specific audiences, genres, and purposes.”
Evidence #1
For this assignment, we were asked to take our academic essay and adapt it into a completely new genre for a different audience. My original essay analyzed the five-paragraph essay as a writing construct and argued that, although it is useful for beginners, it becomes limiting when students outgrow it. The goal of the remix assignment was to understand how purpose, audience, and genre influence the choices a writer makes. Instead of simply rewriting the essay, we had to rethink the entire message and present it in a form that matched the needs and expectations of a specific group of readers. I chose to create an obituary for the five-paragraph essay as a creative reframing of my original argument. This genre allowed me to critique the writing construct in a symbolic and humorous way while still connecting back to the main ideas of my academic essay.
Creating the obituary required deliberate decision-making because I had to consider how an obituary traditionally sounds and what readers expect from that genre. I focused on using a formal and reflective tone while still incorporating subtle humor to show the limitations of the five-paragraph essay. I decided to personify the writing construct as if it were a real figure with a life, a history, and a cause of death, which helped me translate my academic argument into a more creative and accessible form. I also made choices about organization, such as including a life summary, the reason for its decline, and what “survives” after its passing. These decisions were necessary to make the piece believable as an obituary while still delivering my critique of the construct.
By making choices that matched the expectations of this genre and shaping my message for an audience that could appreciate both its creativity and its purpose, I demonstrated Outcome 4. I had to think carefully about what information to include, what to leave out, and how to present my argument in a way that fit the new genre without losing meaning. My decisions about tone, structure, phrasing, and style show that I can adapt writing to different rhetorical situations and produce work that aligns with the needs of a specific audience and purpose.
Camila Ferraris Portfolio 