Throughout the semester, we will complete a number of in-class writing exercises. Activities will be graded on a credit/no-credit basis. This means that students putting forth a good-faith effort to complete the activity will receive credit. There will be ten such activities, and each is worth one point, meaning that in-class writing exercises make up 10% of your grade.

During most weeks, you will have an assigned reading that must be completed prior to coming to class. All students will be given a paper copy of the reading, and all students are required to annotate that reading. This means underlining significant passages, writing notes in the margins, and writing down questions you have about the reading. During the first few weeks of class, we will discuss some ways to approach annotation.

At the beginning of class, students will hand in readings so that I can assess whether or not they have completed their annotations. Annotations will be graded on a credit/no-credit basis. This means that students putting forth a good-faith effort to complete the activity will receive credit. There will be ten such activities, and each is worth one point, meaning that reading annotations make up 10% of your grade.

Once during the semester, each student will work with me to plan a class session. Student-led sessions will involve choosing a reading for discussion that is relevant to our course topic and that is relevant to the student's own research project, leading a discussion of that reading, and preparing activities for classmates to complete during the class session. This assignment is worth 10 points and is thus worth 10% of your grade.

When providing grades for this assignment, I will be asking the following questions:

• Has the student worked with me to choose an appropriate reading, develop discussion questions, and design in-class activities?
• Does the class session provide evidence that the student has prepared by carefully reading and taking notes?
• Does the student work to both introduce the rest of the class to the reading and to invite classmates into a conversation about the reading?
• Is the class session well organized and has the student kept time constraints in mind while planning the session?

The main piece of writing that you will produce in this class is a research project proposal. You will submit this proposal three times, and each submission is worth 15% of your grade. Therefore, the research proposal, in total, is worth 45% of your grade.

We are completing a proposal because it's very difficult to conceive of and execute a project within the condensed, 14-week time frame of a semester. Instead of trying to rush through and complete a full research essay, our goal is to take the semester to conceive of and plan a research project and to begin to develop a justification and approach to that project. If you get to a point where you can actually complete a draft of your research project, that is a huge bonus. However, our primary goal is to develop a detailed proposal. There is no specific length requirement for this proposal, but if you are doing the detailed work I am asking you to do it will likely be more than 10 pages (potentially much more).

You will work on this proposal throughout the course of the semester. We will do a number of writing activities designed to generate material for the proposal, and you will write and revise this lengthy document throughout the semester. At certain points during class, I'll ask you to pull up your current draft of the proposal and work on it. We'll also have opportunities to share our proposal drafts with one another during class.

You will submit your proposal 3 times. The goal is to continually revise the proposal throughout the semester, and when I provide feedback on it I will be focusing not only on your end product but also on your writing process. Are you incorporating feedback from me and others as your revise and rethink the project? This is an important thing to consider throughout the semester.

The Project Proposal is broken into the following sections.

Research Question
What do you want to ask, and why? Are you trying to solve a problem? If so, what is the problem and how are you proposing to solve it? Are you proposing to ask a question that others have asked? If so, how will your approach differ from previous approaches?

Genesis of Research Question
How did you arrive at this research project and research question? Is this an ongoing project that you have been working on for a while, or is it a new project? Is there a reading, author, or class that helped you develop this question or that helped clarify your thinking around it? Is this part of a longer creative or research trajectory in your work? Is it a break with the kind of work you usually do? These are the kinds of questions you can address in this question, but your primary goal is to give us context for the project and research question you want to pursue.

Literature Review / Annotated Bibliography
Who else has conducted similar research? This section allows you to show how your work is part of a broader conversation. This section will be written as an annotated bibliography (a list of sources with brief summaries of each source).

Audience
Who is the primary audience for your project? Many times, this section is linked to the previous one (Literature Review) since the people you cite in that previous section could be your audience. However, this is not always the case. Sometimes, your audience is different from those who have conducted similar research or carried out similar creative projects to yours. Regardless, your goal in this section is to explain who you're trying to address and persuade in this project. One way to think of this is in terms of publication. What publications would be ideal for your project? You should avoid answering this question with something like "the general public." Be as specific as possible when you think about your intended audience, even if those outside of your intended audience might encounter your work as well.

Material/Data
What material will you be working with in your analysis? If this is an archival project, what archives would you be drawing upon? If this is a data analysis project, what data will you analyze and how will you get that data? If you are imagining interviews and ethnographic work, who would you interview and what other materials would be part of your analysis? This section is about the "stuff" you're going to be researching.

Method
How do you propose to conduct your analysis and/or creative activity? Why? What method will you use? Describe that method (citing appropriate sources), and explain why this method is the best fit for the question you want to ask. Are you mixing methods? If so, describe the methods you're mixing and how/why you're planning to mix them. In addition to describing your method of analysis and/or production, be sure to justify your choice of method. Why have you chosen this method? What does it allow you to learn about your material, and how does it allow you to pursue your research question?

Medium/Form
What form or forms do you expect the project to take? Is it an essay or a paper? Explain why writing is the ideal medium for your project? Is it a video? An audio project? A videogame? Something else? This section should be where you describe what you plan to write and/or make and why that media form is the best fit for what you're trying to accomplish.

Expected findings, conclusions, and/or results
This is just a proposal, so you don't know what you will find or what the results will be. However, this section allows you to speculate a bit about what you think you will find or perhaps even what you hope the results will be. In this section, you might even talk through what you hope the audience will take from your project.

Each submission of your proposal is worth 15% of your grade. When responding to your proposal, here are the questions I will be asking:

• Does the proposal provide a detailed account of your project?
• Is the proposal detailed and specific?
• Have you described in detail, what you propose to do, how you propose to do it, why you propose to do it?

  (Are you getting the idea that the document is supposed to be detailed?)

• Is each section organized and is the document as a whole organized? In other words, do the sections make sense both on their own and in relationship to one another? More specific versions of this question might be: Does your method match your goal for the project? Does your medium make sense in terms of your method and goals? Does your literature review provide the broader "conversation" that your project is trying to join?
• Are your research questions clearly articulated and justified?
• Does the proposal reflect that you have spent a great deal of time researching your project and considering work that is similar to it?
• Do your re-submissions reflect that you have significantly revised the proposal and incorporated feedback from me and your classmates?
• Is the document prepared in such a way that it could be credibly used to begin work on your proposed project?

During our last class meeting, we will conduct a symposium (a small conference) during which all students will deliver a 10-minute presentation about their research project. That presentation should be a detailed synopsis of the student's research proposal. Students will need to carefully design a slide presentation (we will discuss approaches to slide design in class) and will need to be prepared to answer questions from their classmates. Students will also be assessed in terms of how they participate as an audience member. So, an effective presentation is only one part of this assignment. Students will also need to pay close attention to other presentations and ask questions about those presentations.

When grading these presentations, I will be asking the following questions:

• Is the presentation detailed, providing as much information as possible about the project?
• Does the student observe the time limit?
• Are the slides well-designed, following the principles we discussed in class?
• Has the student been a good audience member and asked detailed questions of other students?

There is one extra credit opportunity in this class, and it is worth 5 points. That opportunity is participation in a reading group. Students wanting to participate must notify Professor Brown via email by February 4 and must obtain a copy of the book by February 11. Meetings will take place on six Wednesdays during the free period (11:20-12:20). The dates of meetings are:

February 18, March 4, March 25, April 1, April 15, April 29

In order to receive credit, students must attend 5 meetings, they must arrive with notes and/or annotations in the text, and they must be actively engaged in discussion. Because this is an extra credit opportunity, there are no "excused" absences. Students can miss one of the meetings, and they do not have to provide a reason for missing. However, anyone who misses more than one meeting for any reason will not receive credit.

The use of AI/LLM technology during reading, note-taking, and discussion is not allowed.

The group will discuss the book Enshittification by Cory Doctorow, and all participants must obtain a paper copy of the text (no ebooks).

The reading group discussion will be about the book itself, but it will also be a discussion of your experience of reading the book. When did you read? Where did you read? What was difficult, challenging, or rewarding about the experience? Given media reports about the struggles of many college students to read entire books, the goal of this reading group is to provide you with space to read a book start to finish and to reflect on the book as well as on your own capacity for the attention often required for this kind of activity.