Author Bio

The goal for this assignment is to decide how you want to be seen by the people who find and read your work this semester.

Step 1: Explore Your Digital Presence

Imagine yourself to be the ideal reader of the material you plan to produce this semester. This ideal reader could be a future employer, a customer interested in buying a product you’re selling, a new colleague, or some other ideal reader. Now, as this ideal reader, google your own name to see if anything you’ve already written online or done in the world shows up in the results. Remember that even if the work you’ve done doesn’t show up in the top page of hits in google, your work may still be findable on the Internet. Complete the following steps in your own doc (you’ll draw on this when submitting your final project):

• Write down how many of your social media accounts are publicly viewable and linked to your name. Include blogging sites like Tumblr in this list.
• Write down how often you’ve appeared in the news under your own name (check the university website!)
• If you decide to pursue anonymity, do these same checks on the name you propose using to avoid any accidental overlaps with someone else.

Step 2: Find a Model

Find a piece of digital writing you find compelling. It can be anything and it can be published on any platform. Click around to find a bio for the author/s. Note that while this bio might be on the platform they’ve published on, there might be a different or more complete bio on another site (potentially their own digital portfolio). Read the bio and go through the following steps in your own doc (you’ll draw on this work when submitting your final project):

• Include the links to the bio or bios that you found.
• What can you learn about this person?
• Can you find the actual person?
• What connections can you find between any training/experience they describe and the work they’ve produced? Does this matter?
• Does the bio change the way you read the piece of writing that drew you to this author?
• What sort of photo or avatar accompanies the bio? How does it change your view of the author?

Step 3: Compose Your Author Bio

Remember that author bios can be different lengths and include all kinds of different information. Have fun and think about your ideal reader. What will make them excited to read your work?

Format of Submission

Your primary purpose with this assignment is to communicate who you are as a writer and your audience is anyone else who finds and reads your work. At this point (before you’ve settled on a platform for your digital writing), I will ask you to share your bio as a blog post on our course website (you’ll have the option to keep it private). I’ll offer guidance in class on the process of creating an OpenLab account and joining our course website as an author.

Be sure to include:

• A summary of your exploration of your own name (and/or pseudonym) and another author (the two sets of steps above)
• The name you would like to use on the platform/s you publish on (remember, it can be a pseudonym)
• The image you want associated with your bio for the platform/s you publish on
• A bio that shares just the right amount of information to establish credibility and provide the amount of privacy you desire

Frequently Asked Questions

When is this project due?

The course schedule in our syllabus includes deadlines for this assignment. I strongly encourage you to follow this schedule so you can benefit from our class conversations about the writing process. 

How can I get feedback on my draft?

You can get feedback on your work at any stage in the process in a variety of ways:

• In class: My absolute favorite way to provide feedback on drafts is by workshopping the draft in class. To do this, make sure you have the most up-to-date draft in your word online document or in Kaizena so I can pull it up easily from the classroom computer.
• One-on-one: Make an appointment with me by e-mailing or talk to me before or after class.
• Online: Join our course group at Kaizena and share your document (or just post a message about your ideas) in a conversation with me or the whole class. I’ll demonstrate how Kaizena works in class.
• At the Writing Center: Tutors at the writing center will encourage you to talk through your ideas and read whatever you’ve got written aloud. These 45-minute appointments are a fantastic way to improve your work. You can sign up for an appointment using the online schedule.

How do you grade?

In order to truly learn, I think we all need the freedom to make mistakes. In the past, when I’ve graded student work by assessing its quality, I’ve found myself inadvertently discouraging students who were trying very hard but had made a mistake or gotten stuck on something. While low grades have occasionally motivated my students, I have been troubled lately to find that some students get so discouraged that they stop engaging in the work of the course. I don’t want this to happen ever again.

While I will be providing copious feedback on your work and assigning mid-term and final grades for this course, you will also be evaluating your own work this semester. At the middle of the semester, you will write a midterm self-evaluation that reflects on your work to that point. You will complete a similar self-evaluation at the end of the semester. Having your account of your process is a very big part of how I will assign grades. After you submit each project, I will ask you to decide if you’d like me to create a video responding to your work or if you’d like to join me while I respond to it in person. Whatever you choose, I’ll create a video that I share with you through Canvas Studio (If we meet in person, I’ll record our discussion).

I’ll ask you to watch that recording and insert comments with any questions or responses you have. You can find instructions on accessing your video by clicking on “Feedback Videos” in our Canvas navigation. After doing this, I will ask you to compose a project reflection and to assign yourself a grade for that work. Each assignment prompt will include the questions I will ask you to consider for this reflection (my questions will become less specific as the semester progresses, giving you more freedom in how you reflect on your process and decisions). As I will mention often, you will not be evaluating what you created, but your writing and revision process. The grade you give yourself is the grade I will enter in the gradebook for the assignment.

You will hear from me if I have concerns about your self-evaluations and project reflections, but I don’t anticipate this will be an issue (if anything, I suspect I’ll have to give higher grades than you’ve given yourself). My intention here is to help you focus on working in a more organic way, as opposed to working as you think you are expected to. If this process causes any concerns, please send me an e-mail.

If you find it useful, I can also give you a spreadsheet that I call the “framework for feedback,” which might help you identify how your work could improve. This framework breaks a writing project down into seven sections and offers descriptions of work within each section. In the past, this has helped my students identify areas of focus for future writing projects. Below, you can see an example framework for feedback (though they are more customized with each project).

Claim

Writer has not developed a claim that responds to the assignment. The project is a series of observations or attempts at ideas.

Writer has struggled to develop a claim that responds to the assignment. One or more ideas could become the primary claim of the project, but the entire project does not work to support this point

Writer has developed a claim and introduced it to the reader somewhere in project, but that claim is significantly lacking in complexity and originality.

Writer has developed an original claim, but has not accounted for counterclaims as he/she revises the project. The claim could be more complex by addressing counterclaims.

Claim exhibits complexity and nuance through the writer’s consideration of counterclaims.

Process

The writer has turned in a final project, but has not participated in the drafting and revision process

The writer has composed a draft and made surface changes before handing in the final draft. The writer has not participated fully in the drafting and revision process.

The writer has participated in the revision process in a superficial way. The writer has not used the revision process to full advantage

The writer has participated actively in the process and made substantial revisions from rough to final draft, taking full advantage of feedback from instructor and peers.

The writer has participated actively in the process and made substantial revisions from rough to final draft, taking full advantage of feedback from instructor and peers. Furthermore, the writer has continued with this process of revision until the final product is as strong as possible.

Analysis

The project does not engage the text in any meaningful way

The project references one or more sections of text as appropriate for the assignment, but misunderstands the text or introduces sections of the text that are irrelevant to the goals of the project

The writer draws on sections of the text that are implicitly relevant to the project, but does not offer explicit analysis in individual paragraphs to make the relevance clear to the reader. There is a logic to the ideas introduced, but the reader has to guess why they have been chosen.

The writer has demonstrated that he/she can offer analysis of one section of the text to support his/her project, but has not done this consistently in the project

The writer has offered thoughtful analysis of all sections of the text introduced and demonstrated how those sections support the goals of the project. In so doing, the writer has offered a truly inventive angle on the assigned text.

Organization

The project reads like a list of unrelated ideas. The writer would benefit from more careful attention to logical arrangement of well-structured paragraphs with transition sentences

The project reads like a list of unrelated ideas. One of the ideas might have the potential to become a primary claim, but it is not presented as such, and the other unrelated ideas do not support that claim.

Ideas are introduced in a logical order, but the writer has not taken advantage of paragraphs with clear topic sentences and transitions between ideas

The writer has demonstrated that he/she can construct a persuasive paragraph with a clear topic sentence and careful analysis related to one distinct point, but has not done this throughout the project.

The writer has organized his/her project thoughtfully, offering carefully ordered paragraphs that contain clear topic sentences. Transitions between these paragraphs are logical and the reader is able to understand the purpose of all components of the project.

Citation 

It is difficult to tell if the ideas in the project are the ideas of the writer or something the writer has read. This is the grade given when the instructor believes the errors in citation are not deliberate cheating but a misuse of sources

Writer references the work of other writers and indicates in some way that those ideas are not the writer’s own ideas, but the writer does not include in-text citations.

Writer includes in-text citations and a works cited page, but struggles to indicate through sentences that the ideas of others are not his/her own.

The writer has demonstrated that he/she can introduce the ideas of others clearly, but has not done this with every text referenced in the project.

The writer has introduced all ideas from other writers and has even made it clear how his/her ideas forward or counter those ideas to say something new

Clarity

The project is impossible to understand because of sentence-level issues

The project is difficult to understand because of sentence-level issues

Multiple sentence-level errors make the project confusing in places

Occasional sentence-level issues interrupt an otherwise easy-to-understand project

The writer has expressed his/her ideas clearly

Audience

The project exhibits no attention to an audience for the writer’s work.

The project makes occasional moves that might be effective with a particular audience (or perhaps moves that would be effective with different audiences), but this does not seem to have been done deliberately.

The writer makes a sustained effort to appeal to a particular audience, but makes poor decisions that would likely prove ineffective or counterproductive. The project would be stronger if the writer considered the values and expectations of his/her audience

The writer has demonstrated that he/she can appeal effectively to a particular audience, but hasn’t used this sense of audience to full advantage

The writer has appealed consistently to a specific audience, anticipating potential counterarguments and demonstrating the relevance of the project to the values or concerns of the audience.