The goal for this assignment is to gather and share insights into the wide range of platforms available for digital publication. You will begin by selecting a piece of digital writing you admire and analyzing how the platform it is on shapes your experience of it. Each of you will then choose a platform to explore by publishing a single work on it. You will each then analyze the experience according to elements we determine together. You will share your analysis with the class to help your classmates make better decisions when publishing their work.
Step 1: Find A Digital Work You Admire
You might already have an idea of a website you regularly read or an author you admire that could guide you in finding this, but if not, I encourage you to search out topics you are interested in (perhaps related to the subject you plan to focus on this semester, but not necessarily). Don’t stop on the first piece you find, but instead read widely before settling on the one that impresses you the most. Keep track of the pieces you read (perhaps with Zotero?) as this will be an important thing to include in the analysis you share with the class.
Step 2: Analyze The Text
I will offer some examples of this sort of analysis in class, but we’ll begin by considering how the following features of digital publication platforms impact your experience of this digital text:
Advertisements
Is the author making money each time you visit a page? Are they selling you something? Are the advertisements distracting? Does this matter to you?
Author Recognition
Where and how is the author acknowledged on the page? Does it seem like the work was not created by an individual person?
Publication Process
What do you think the author had to do to get the selected piece published? Was anyone other than the author involved in the process?
Other things?
Step 3: Explore Possible Platforms for Your Work
- Wikipedia (for a slightly unconventional approach to authorship–a fascinating publication platform to consider)
- WordPress (WordPress.com, WordPress on OpenLab (using default block editor (Gutenberg) or Elementor)
- Medium
- GitHub Pages
- Exhibit.so
- Vocal
- YouTube
- Google Sites
Step 4: Publish a Piece of Your Own Writing on the Platform
This could potentially be the first piece you’ve written for this course. You might want to wait to write this piece until you’ve made decisions about the platform (platform can often help get the creative juices flowing!), but you might also want to write your piece much earlier and then have it ready to copy/paste into the platform of your choice when you’ve finally found it. We will all be interested to hear how your choices on this front played out, so please include this in your analysis.
Step 5: Analyze the Publication Experience on the Platform
Interaction with Readers
How do readers interact with authors on this platform?
Collaboration with Other Authors
How to authors find and/or interact with other authors on this platform?
Available Templates (or, design customization options)
Can an author make design decisions on this platform? If yes, are templates available to provide guidance? How do these work?
Help with Search Engine Optimization
Does this platform help authors optimize their work to make it findable on social media? How does using this platform increase or decrease the discoverability of a publication?
Format of Submission
Your primary purpose with this assignment is to share insights you’ve gained and your audience is your classmates this semester. It is likely that future students of this course will find what you’ve done useful and, for this reason, you might consider making your analysis public on our course website. The easiest way to do this is to create your presentation as a blog post on our site, but I can also link to any other platform if you build your analysis somewhere else. You might decide that you want students to read your analysis before class or you might want to share it during class and talk everyone through it (this will depend on whether you want your work to be read or heard, primarily). The possibilities are endless, and we will discuss all of them as we work on this project.
Frequently Asked Questions
When is this project due?
The course schedule in our syllabus includes deadlines for freewriting, drafting, and revision 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. |
