Assignment 3 English 320 - Writing in an Electronic World Spring 2002

Web Site Chosen April 9
Topic Chosen April 9
Draft composed April 16
Peer Reviews TBA
Final version May 2

Assignment 3: An Online Essay 30 points

This essay is open topic. Choose an issue you have some interest and expertise in and design a short essay for submission to one of the websites supporting public discourse. To earn credit for this assignment you must submit your essay; you do not need to get it published. I am hoping for some acknowledgement of receipt by the webmasters-but we'll see how that goes.

I provide below the URLs for possible choices and corresponding submission guidelines for several possible sites, and of course you may choose sites not on this list. In fact I will appreciate your sending me URLs of promising publication venues you find on your own. The first task is to review the sites you're interested in, which includes looking carefully at the guidelines and reading some of the published work to see what kinds of writing are acceptable for a particular website. I consider this part of the exercise extremely important, and you all have had extensive experience this semester examining websites in detail for structure and content, for "culture" and tone.

The topic and the "form" of your essay will be driven by the stated and unstated requirements of the website you have in mind, so I'll ask you to settle on the site early on. You certainly may change your mind but it would be somewhat of a waste of time to work on an essay without having shopped around for an appropriate venue.

Deadlines:
Tuesday April 9: Bring to class and turn in your choice of venue(s) and your topic and form ideas.
Tuesday April 16: Bring to class a draft of your essay, 2 copies, and prepare to read the work of others.

I recommend writing about something you know plenty about already and have a strong urge to write about. You may draw your knowledge from any source-personal experiences, courses, academic sources, "experts" you trust whom you've met in your discussion groups, and of course your own reasoning processes. You may work with text you've already produced-I just need to know about the genesis and see the progressive stages of this text. Writing something, setting it aside, and resurrecting it are legitimate acts of writing.

Possibilities:
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/
On-Line Opinion is an Australian publication whose editor (Graham Young) emailed me when his software detected that I had placed a link to his page on my website. He welcomes your submissions. The site design is very friendly-a list of topics/types of essays in the left frame. Guidelines are at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/Sections/Guide.htm. Note Young's critique of the lack of space for readers who are also writers-confined to letters to editor and other small spaces.

http://www.thepaper.org.au/
The Paper-Independent News and Opinion. Note call for the inclusion of images, carefully selected and credited.
Guidelines:
http://www.thepaper.org.au/writing_guidelines.php3

http://www.amherst.edu/~Eprism/
Amherst Publication (collegiate). Paper and E pub. You'll have to write for the guidelines and report back.

http://www.progressive.org/default.htm
The Progressive Media Project. Accepts Op-Ed pieces. My sense is that this one will be difficult but if you are so moved, do submit.
Guidelines:
http://www.progressive.org/guideline.html
http://www.progressive.org/pmpguide.html

http://www.alternet.org/index.html
Alternet. Accepts very few unsolicited pieces. Guidelines:
http://www.alternet.org/guidelines.html

http://www.indymedia.org/
Indymedia. Appears to publish anything, but you may get relegated to the hidden pages. Quality variable. Talk to me before you take this one. Multimedia accepted-and if you're interested in multimedia, this may be for you.
Guidelines:
http://www.indymedia.org/publish.php3 then go to Go to the Form. I couldn't get the story management page to open.

http://www.salon.com/index.html
Salon.com. I see a large number of open form essays that are well within your reach. This is a high prestige pub-so if you are feeling upper class, try it.
Guidelines:
http://www.salon.com/about/submissions/index.html

Vision for this assignment: You are accomplished web writers. You know a lot about different sorts of web sites and are able to bring critical judgment to bear on a given site. You don't want to place your fine words in ugly places, yet you do want to be heard. I want you to decide how to balance the urge to be published and read with your standards for excellence. Many good sites, as we have learned, do have gate-keeping devices and I want you to write through these gates by attending to official guidelines and to the unstated cultural imperatives. Craft your essay with great care so that the gatekeepers become eager to publish you. Ideally, your writing gains readership and makes a difference to someone. Ideally, you'll gain a little following-people who will say, "Oh-I read something by Prudencia Pillow and liked it-I'll try this writer again."

Grading Criteria yet to come. Do count on the following components:

1. You will submit a rhetorical analysis of the website and offer a rationale for selecting the site you select. Let me know what the "matches" are between the editors' criteria and what you write. This exercise includes reading around on the site a bit, exploring the "discourse" of the site, selecting available categories, reading the submission guidelines for length, style, other points.
2. You willattend to my suggestions and your peers' suggestions.
3. The paper will be grammatically flawless and stylistically sharp. For this paper only, you'll edit a peer's paper and I will do a final pass before you submit
4. We'll discuss word length once you make your selections. I had 1500-2000 words in mind-so maybe we'll compile the various parts of the assignment, formalize the analysis and rationale, and add in the word count of the article itself.