Writing toward your public, well educated audience

I’d like you to take one of the strategies we discussed today and try it out, cultivating an appropriate approach for your public, well educated audience. Working from your responses to the invention exercises that you completed over the weekend, write a paragraph in which you open up a discussion about the issue you’ll be writing about. It could be the beginning of an introduction to your essay, or it might be a body paragraph. Regardless, I want you to begin writing, developing your focus for this paper, keeping your audience in mind.

Defining the public good

Based on today’s reading, how would you define the public good? In what ways might your final essay respond to, incorporate, or in some way relate to your emerging notion of what the public good is (or could or should be)?

Reflecting on your mapping project

Now that you’ve completed the second major project for this class, I’d like you to take a few minutes and reflect on this assignment. First, what was it like to do qualitative research, i.e., observations and interviews, for this project? What distinguishes this kind of research from our first project? What did you learn as a researcher from this assignment?

Second, what was it like to write in this genre, i.e., in the format of a social-science study? What did you do differently as a writer to successfully meet the expectations of this situation? What did you learn as a writer from this experience?