Handout
11: Final Project
EXPECTATIONS AND GRADING FOR YOUR WORK ON PROPENCITY
Course Project (ProPenCity) is Due December 6
In addition to submitting your Dreamweaver File to the Implementation
Team, you must submit to me a print copy of your review article and the
Teamwork Analysis statement. Read details below.
General information
Half of your grade for this project (part I) will correspond to team
work and the other half (part II) to my assessment of your review as a
stand-alone piece of writing. Credit for the contract and for handing
in drafts on time will be folded into your "meeting deadlines"
grade.
Part I: Teamwork
Teamwork accounts for 50 percent of the allotted credit or about 13.5
percent of your course project grade.
The ability to work as a contributing member of a writing team not of
your own design is crucial to your success in the professional writing
field. Working together to produce a new edition of ProPenCity will give
you some sense of the complexity of team writing, of the importance of
meeting deadlines, and of the balancing acts that combine personal initiative
with collaboration in complex writing environments. The product you produce
(a website) is a resume item that will enable you to claim experience
in team writing and in web development.
I'll use my own observations, your progress reports, your contract information,
and your own report (see number 4 below) to determine the richness and
success of your team contribution. It goes without saying that successful
completion of this part of the project assumes that you meet the editors'
and manager's deadlines, that you complete your review to the editors'
satisfaction, and that you hand in your completed and proofread article,
saved in the appropriate Dreamweaver file, to the implementers by the
designated date.
I'll determine your teamwork grade in three ways:
1) my personal observations
2) your weekly progress reports
3) successful completion of contract items
4) your written analysis of the complex writing
environment you've experienced and of your two team roles: team member
and content provider (article writer).
Guidelines for completing number (4) above successfully:
- You may write about the differences between your initial conception
of your team's role and your revised conception, after the fact.
- You may describe your team's goals and the processes you devised together
to achieve these goals.
- You may offer some critique of these processes, naming the difficulties
you encountered, whether these matters fell within your control or were
beyond remedy.
- You MUST provide analyses of team interactions, both those that worked
well and those that proved problematic. What were the conditions and
mechanisms that allowed you to interface with other teams and with each
other well? Poorly?
- You should give credit to classmates, including yourself, who facilitated
good team work. What did you do personally to assure the success of
others? Who took leadership? At what point in the process?
- You should certainly discuss how you would revise your team processes
were you to work on such a project again. What will you do differently
the next time you work on a group web project? Can you think of different
team models that might work better for similar work?
- You should argue for your own contribution to team and project well
being, bringing to light any work that may have gone unnoticed as well
as that work appreciated by all.
- You MUST consider this part of the assignment an analysis: how did
the parts fit together? How did this fit work? Why?
- You would be wise to document your contribution to the project as
you see fit.
Generally speaking, I'm asking you to analyze carefully your very short
experience working as a writer in a complex writing environment.
Part II: Review
My assessment of the quality of your review article is worth 50 percent
or 13.5 percent of your course project grade.
Your individual grade for the review will reflect my best judgment of
how successfully you've handled the standard "moves" that review
writers make: shared context, overview, summary, details, and evaluation.
You'll find discussion of these moves on the web (Handout 10), and we've
gone over them in class. You have in hand two sample reviews for your
perusal. Recall that these are not models of excellence for you to emulate
but rather samples of how two reviewers have implemented these moves.
You have all received substantive feedback from me regarding the strengths
and weaknesses of your first draft, and I have been and will be available
during office hours and by appointment for further consultation.
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