Recommendation/Review

For this paper, you will write a recommendation/review of some specific element of pop culture in response to the very specific rhetorical situation of right now in the world. Detailed Explanation With your group, assess the rhetorical situation of a (likely media) recommendation for living in a world in the wake of COVID-19. Through the full writing process–brainstorming, discovery drafts, initial draft, revision drafts–write a recommendation, recommending a specific artifact or activity (book, TV show, movie, game, podcast, Twitch stream, activity, news source, sports alternative, hobby or past time, blog, “radio” station, artist, Tiktok challenge, etc.). Your recommendation can be from museum, high, or low culture; mainstream pop culture of counterculture–it doesn’t matter so long as it fits the writing contexts you write for. Within the paper itself, state clearly what your recommendation is, but you will spend the bulk of the paper explaining why (spoiler free!), the thing is right for these circumstances. This means not only will you identify clearly those contexts, but you will then also how–with concrete examples–your arguments to be true. Try to respect the genre and keep things spoiler free for narrative artifacts. You’re not really going to spoil artisan bread-making. As always, the academic contexts are operating the background of this assignment, so while you can choose any medium that suits your contexts, you may want to keep in mind this will ultimately be something read by your writing professor for a grade, so maybe don’t choose a medium that normalizes emoji as genuine communication because that’s just not a good medium to do the other thing this piece of writing has to do. A letter to a good friend, a blog post or website, or a podcast transcript could all work fine. Similarly, you will also want to reasonably follow the conventions of academic writing outlined on pages 6-8 of our textbook, namely a clear, appropriately qualified thesis (name your topic and your stance on that topic), good reasons supported by evidence, a confident and authoritative stance (choose a topic on which you can be authoritative), an indication of why your topic matters, and careful attention to correctness. Suggested Structure Because you will writing to an audience presumably unfamiliar with the topic (because if they already know or knew about your thing you wouldn’t need to recommend it), you will need to both introduce them to the topic and explain/argue why that thing is something they should try. There are a few approaches to the structuring, but know you have to operate in both these modes: familiarize the audience with the topic and argue why it’s worth a go. You could summarize (spoiler free) the basic idea of the artifact immediately after the introduction, then argue for the rest of the paper. You could work through your reasons in some logical order summarizing an idea, then arguing it’s relevance or importance in turn. You could move through the artifact or experience chronologically, pausing periodically to discuss the relevance of the given stopping point. The structure is up to you, but just keep in mind, your reader is unfamiliar with your topic, and you will need to give perhaps more time than you think you might describing the artifact and explaining why it’s good for these times. Format and Requirements Format (genre and general medium) is up to you, but make sure it also satisfies the implicit rhetorical situation of this being a writing class 750 words You are not required to use sources or cite in MLA for this paper, but if you decide to use others ideas or words, you need to acknowledge them in the text. Make it crystal clear WHO said that thing and where a reader could find that original source. ————————————————————————————————————————————————— Outline/Structure For this outline I’m asking you to write, I’m going to ask you to do the following: 1.Write down your topic and your stance (the same topic and stance you’re written in your writing contexts). 2.Write down the ideas you want to put in your paper. Fill these ideas out with a little more detail how and when it occurs to you. Generally, think about filling in finer and finer detail. You can think about asking yourself, “What do I mean by this?” or “What are some examples?” 3.Look at your listed ideas and assess their relationships. See which are similar, which are totally different, and which depend on some kind of order (for instance, you need to say one thing before another will make sense). Group them in response to these necessary relationships, perhaps labeling the groupings if necessary. 4.Compare your listed ideas to the general parts/outline of much academic writing, detailed below. Mostly, I point this out to remind you that in most arguments, readers need a bit of background. In something like a recommendation, you will almost certainly need to provide readers with a bit of essential summary, description, or categorization of your chosen topic. 1.Introduction 1.Thesis (stance on topic) 2.Background 3.Major Points 4.Conclusion 5.Put your ideas in an order that makes sense—not the order you thought of them, but one that really makes some kind of logical sense, thinking about all you just learned about the relationships between your ideas. Think about your rhetorical situation as you decide on the order of your ideas. 6. Lastly, write a thesis statement that declares your stance on your topic and, if you can manage it, your outlined support.