Flyer/Hype Poster Materials

For our Monday meeting, your group is tasked with creating a promotional flyer or poster to hype your documentary and the R2C2 Film Festival.

Bring 5 copies of this flyer with you to our meeting on Monday! 

After the meeting your group will be tasked with hanging up your promo poster around campus. This flyer should be creative and unique, should make a solid, visual and textual argument for why people should come see your film, but also must include the following elements:

1. Film Festival Event Details:

R2C2 Student Documentary Film Festival
Thursday, May 5
5 PM
Pizza and Beverages provided by Student Senate

The above event information must be included on your group's flyer/promo poster.

2. The R2C2 Documentary Film Festival logo (see below), which should be downloaded from this page and pasted onto your group's promotional flyer/poster.

Documentary Particulars

As this documentary is a type of final product, demonstrating your mastery of the unit materials, it is graded rather heavily in the final evaluation of your grade.

There are two parts of evaluation for this final product. The pre-work for the documentary, which counts as 50% of this documentary project, and the finished product, which accounts for the other 50% of the documentary.

Remember that if your group is planning on using interviews, the permission form must be used prior to filming work is done! You must get the permission forms signed and dated or your documentary will not be eligible for showing at the festival!

In this pre-work students must bring evidence of completion of these elements:

1. Students are required to situate their documentary in a sub-genre of documentary styles and be able to identify why their documentary fits into this sub-genre.

2. Create a storyboard and tag lines of commentary for the documentary on the storyboard sheets posted to the class blog.

These elements of the pre-work for the documentary will be turned at the same time the instructor and documentary groups meet to review the final rough draft of the film on Monday, May 2--time to be determined by group and instructor.

The finished product will be evaluated for the following:

1. All group members must engage in the documentary-making process, whether it is by conducting interviews, script-writing, filming, editing, or participating in the film.

2. At least two members of the group must be present during the showing of the documentary and stay until the end of the presentations in order for that group to be eligible to win; in addition, at least two group members must be present for the group to receive credit. If you leave the presentations, your group cannot win.

3. Documentaries must be submitted to the instructor for review no later than class meetings on Monday, May 2, for M-W-F courses, or on Tuesday, May 3, for T-Th courses.

4. The documentary must be a minimum of 3 minutes and a maximum of 5 minutes.

5. The documentary must display these rhetorical principles and elements of the 4 Cs: a) a clearly defined main argument; b) a concise and professionally produced final product that demonstrates thoughtful application of pre-work, research, counterargument, and the four rhetorical appeals discussed in class; c) concrete research that adds to the scholarship on the topic; d) a current or flow through the documentary's "storytelling"; and finally e) application of the four rhetorical appeals: ethos, lexos, logos, and pathos.

6. A list of sources must be at the end of the documentary on a final, end credits-like slide that includes the locations where you did research and found images, who was interviewed for the documentary, and other pertinent research information.

Best of luck with these and if there are any questions, please let me know.

Storyboard Sheets

Download, save, and print these storyboard sheets for your visual outlines of the documentary.

Writing Project 3: Research Paper

Writing Project 3's initial due date is: for MWF classes, Wednesday, April 20 and for Tu-Thu classes, Thursday, April 21 at the start of class.


The "project" of Writing Project 3 will be to write a thoroughly researched, meticulously documented research paper that demonstrates a superior vetting of your sources. In writing this final research paper, you should touch upon the three main aspects of the course--establish a concrete, main argument that revolves around a CREW-like structure; demonstrate an understanding and use of the four rhetorical appeals; and provide some ethos driving "proof" of your conspiracy theory.


As this is an individual research paper, you are asked to write a four page paper that demonstrates knowledge and time given to the 4Cs of writing discussed in class: clear writing that has been proofread for errors and content; concise writing that has no fluff and is based in a good understanding of word choice and sentence structure; concrete writing that has evidence and supporting reasons to back your main research claim; and finally, writing that has some current/flow, which ensures that each subsequent paragraph leads into the other.  
 
These research papers should be double-spaced using 12 point Times-New Roman font and have 1.0" margins. Your annotated bibliographies, previously known as Writing Project 2, should be at the end of the document. 

Structure: there should be a title page, which is followed by an abstract presenting an overview or main point of your research paper--this can be treated as this research paper's extended "thesis statement." This abstract should be 4-7 sentences long and be in italics and single-spaced. Then, your individual four page research papers should follow. Rounding out the document will be the annotated bibliography.

Regarding sources: in your four page paper, you will need to CITE--use either APA, MLA, IEEE, or Chicago-Turabian; and in-text citation style should match the annotated bibliography's format--at least six different sources. Of these six sources, at least three sources need to be primary sources, meaning something obtained from an on-line archive, an autobiography, newspaper article of the time, similar repository, or an oral history interview. Also, your individual paper must have at least three different types of sources, an example: you may use a book, vetted web site (.gov, .edu, .org--as a primary source), scholarly journal, oral history, and image. Lastly, your four page paper may contain only one, appropriately sized image that should have a caption and source.


And lastly: be sure to remember to use sound rhetorical principles in the paper, identify your audience; make a strong, but balanced and supported argument, if you write with bias be sure to make that bias transparent and include a counterargument; include the four rhetorical appeals: ethos, lexos, logos, and pathos in your writing. Also, be sure to employ the 4 Cs (clear, concise, concrete, current/flow) in the writing, while using some of the techniques we discussed in class to make your writing more readable.

Writing Project 2: Doing a Research Proposal

Write a Research Proposal

This Writing Project is due Wednesday, March 30 for the M-W-F class and Thursday, March 31 for the Tu-Thu class, at the beginning of class!

Effectively communicating your thoughts and ideas regarding research is a key component to getting funding for important projects in the academic and scholarly community. At some point in your academic careers, you may be asked to write a research proposal to fund your own research. 

The task for this writing project is to help your group put together an UNSOLICITED RESEARCH PROPOSAL to "study" your selected conspiracy theory. As part of this writing project, your research group should get together, in person or virtually, and plan out how to accomplish the goal of writing a research proposal and then give each member of your research group a section to write of the actual research proposal. 

Have a gander at the University of Illinois' page on research proposals for help if needed at: http://www.library.illinois.edu/learn/research/proposal.html 

As an example: one person in your group might write the abstract, table of contents, and introduction; while the next person in your research group might write the background on the topic, and the third member of your group might write the description of proposed research. Many of you have already done the #8, a description of resources, which is your annotated bibliography.

How your group splits up the division of labor is up to your group, but each research proposal MUST have numbers 1-6 of the University of Illinois (see above) parts of a proposal covered in your group's written research proposal. 

Then after each person has written their section of the research proposal, combine the various sections in numerical order (parts 1-6) and make ONE complete document that will be handed into me.

The "specs" for this writing project are that each person should write at least two pages, but no more than three pages for their section of the research proposal. Your group's research proposal should be double-spaced, written in 12 pt Times New Roman font with 1" margins. 

The goal of this writing project is to outline your future research as we move ahead in this course with your group's chosen conspiracy theories. This document will act as a guide for your group in the coming research phases of your chosen research topic. Spend some time together, again in person or virtually, going over sources: primary, secondary, and tertiary, and make sure to vet sources for ethos or credibility. Doing some good, solid work on this now will save time later in doing the research needed to write your FINAL research paper!

Be Sure to Post Your Thoughts on Conspiracy Theory

For posting your thoughts on the Teach the Teacher conspiracy theory, be sure to look for media and questions under your class' time slot, Section A, B, or C, in one of the three tabs at the top of this page.

The Tuesday-Thursday class' media and questions will be posted next week.

Writing Project 1: Annotated Bibliography

The initial due date for these writing projects is: for M-W-F classes, Wednesday, March 23 at the beginning of class; for Tu-Thu class Thursday, March 24!

Actions for Writing Project 1--Making an Annotated Bibliography

For your first writing project, I am asking each of you to compile an annotated bibliography on your research project--your conspiracy theory. So, essentially the job here is to locate at least 10 sources (remember no tertiary sources) and then construct a bibliographic entry for each, along with some narrative thoughts regarding each source. 

An annotated bibliography is a way for researchers to gather together and evaluate sources. It can be an essential part of the research project, especially for projects that require the assembly of a large numbers of sources. The basic idea is to list each source you are using in a bibliographic format and then write a paragraph (4 to 7 sentences) or so about the source, which should include any history regarding the source, the relevance of the source to your research, and its ethos or reliability. 

For information on how to format and assemble an annotated bibliography, check this link to Purdue University's On-line Writing Lab or OWL: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/614/03/ 

Each person in your research group should come up with at least 10 sources, and the 10 accompanying paragraphs of analysis on each source.

These writing projects should be in 12 pt. Times/New Roman font with 1 inch margins all around. These can be either single or double-spaced.