This project along with the course readings is focused on connecting your past experiences with writing to the new information you are encountering in this course and the, perhaps, very different understandings of writing you are developing from your interactions with what writing scholars have learned through their study of writing. From your early experiences in the first few weeks, your past experiences, and our class discussions, I will ask you to write an open letter. An open letter is a unique genre; it is ostensibly directed to a particular person or persons, but it is published in a publicly available place. Because of this, it is written as if directed to its stated audience but with an awareness of a broader public audience. It thus works to make a public argument, but does so by addressing a particular person or group in a letter. I want you to address your letter to someone with some level of influence over high school writing education, whether a past English teacher, principle, school district superintendent, school board, state or federal department of education, or Arne Duncan the US secretary of education. You will need to choose where this letter would be published: high school newspaper, hometown newspaper, the New York Times, a community newsletter, Huffington Post, etc., which will help you determine who your readers are and make decisions about what they might find persuasive and how you can connect with them. In your letter, you will attempt to persuade your audience (the addressee, but also the public) to come to agreement with your new understanding of writing and a proposal for changes to how writing is taught in high school based in that understanding of writing. Your explanations about writing should be based in published scholarship, including but not limited to our course readings. You should also use your own past and current experiences to help ground your argument in specific real world examples.
A well-written open letter will
In the introduction
•Address the ostensible audience while also getting the attention of the wider public audience
•Clearly indicate what the letter is in reference to (writing instruction) and why that subject is important
•Briefly summarize past and current conversations about writing (include both public conversation and the findings of writing scholarship-which tend not to agree, providing an exigency (need to write) for the letter
•Clearly introduce what this letter will argue. This should be specific enough not to be vague, even if it only hints toward details that will be fully explained later.
In the background
•Summarize and synthesize what writing scholars have learned about the nature of writing and writing instruction from your sources, integrating quotes and paraphrase into your own language skillfully and ethically (avoid incidental plagiarism).
•Compare and contrast this account of writing with how writing is often taught in high school (standardized tests, focus on literary analysis and story telling, conflation of writing instruction with English teaching more generally, etc.), preferably drawing on your own experiences while connecting them to educational trends (which you know and present from your research and class readings).