A multi-genre research project is a collection of pieces written in a variety of genres, informed by your research on a particular subject that presents one or more perspectives on a research question. Since you have a wide range of choices about how to put the project together, it’s more engaging for you to write and for your readers to read than a tradition research paper, but it is still incorporating the research and the message from your research this semester. It’s also targeted toward a SPECIFIC audience, and your decisions about that audience will lead you to make careful choices about how you communicate with them. The MGP also asks you to be creative—about how you communicate with your audience, how you use your research, and what you create.
Create genres from one of each of the five categories below, for a total of 5 genres. (REMEMBER: these are things that you will write, not locate—that is, if you choose “magazine feature,” you will write a magazine feature.) Within the 5 genres that you create, you will need to include evidence from:
your scholarly sources (from your ethnography)
your interview (also from your ethnography)
your observations
It will probably be much easier to figure out where you’re going to incorporate evidence once you decide what you’re going to write! You will not be citing the information in the genre writings instead you will be including that information in the genres and then including a reference page with your presentation (this can be put somewhere on your presentation or just placed next to it.
As to what you will be writing about, you will be continuing to work with the research question and community that you have been learning about all semester, or a focused research argument you want to make that is related to the community and research you have been studying for the past month. Pick one genre out of each category to write/create.
The lists in each category below are suggestions/starting places. If you want to do a genre that isn’t listed on the following page, you must first get it approved by me.
Be creative with this—remember that you have the power to choose what you’d best like to do here. If you want to use a genre that’s not included here, propose it to me! The idea here is that you should choose the forms that you most enjoy working with, think about your audience and what they might like, and work with those forms. Additionally, think about how you want to present your collection of genres.
Before writing and designing any of your genres, I strongly recommend that you look up samples of the genre to determine how to best write, organize, and design that genre. Additionally, the genres should be designed visually to fit the conventions of the genre. Pay close attention to style, tone, organization, formatting and layout, font choices, etc.
Group One — Newspaper/magazine/web writing (at least 1 full page*)
Serious “hard news” story
Sports story
Editorial or series of editorials
Magazine feature
Feature story
Obituary*
Series of at least three letters to the editor
Wikipedia page
* This could be a fictional obituary about a person based on your observations or an obituary of an object/place. For example, a former student did an obituary for a shopping mall because their research was on the decline of shopping malls.
Group Two — Imaginative writing
Monologue (~2p.)
Dialogue (~2p.)
Scene from a play/movie/tv script (~3p.)
Children’s story (~2-3p. or longer for a picture book)
Poem (~ ½ - 1p.)
Creative nonfiction piece (~2-3p.)
Song lyric (~2-3p.)
Group Three — Workplace/professional writing (at least 1 full page*)
Memo
Workplace report
Resume
Resignation letter
Group Four — “Personal/Private” writing
Series of journal entries (~2p.)
Letter or email exchange between 2 or more people (~2p.)
Series of diary entries (~2p.)
Recipe (~1p.) **
Photo album/scrapbook (w/ captions) (~5p.)
** This should not be an actual food/drink recipe, but a creative recipe. For example: a recipe for dealing with difficult customers.
Group Five — Multimodal / Visual
Video***
Stop animation video***
Artwork
Movie Poster (for a fictional movie about your community)
Comic Book (~2-3p.)
Zine (~5p.)
3D model of community
Interactive visual element
***If you choose a video, you will need to have a method for delivery (e.g. laptop or tablet) that you can set up during the presentation event.
Reminder: these are NOT “found” genres. If you chose “Video,” you will need to create your own video.
*Note: The page limits for everything but Groups One, Two and Three are based on single spaced writing (since that would be the proper formatting for these genres).
This is not a “stand in front of the classroom” presentation, but instead a display of your Multi-Genre Project. Think of it more like a science fair then a speech.
You are going to build a display that displays the genres you created and pulls together the theme of the presentation. Tri-fold boards work well, but you can be as creative as you want here.
Think about the conventions, purpose, audience, and style for each genre and how they can work together in a presentation. Also consider showing how some of these decisions that were made., such as through little notes around your board or a pamphlet to go along with the presentation. At a minimum, the design of the presentation should feel cohesive and tie together the topic and community. Just be sure to think about the design. You will not receive full credit for projects that have little to no design, such as being placed on blank poster boards (or poster boards with only the genres and titles of the genres). See the Public Google Drive folder for previous class presentation examples.
We will then have a Multi-genre Event Day, where everyone in the class will put out their presentation and we will get to go around and see what everyone else researched and has been working on all semester. Beyond the minimum requirements, have fun with this! You can present your MGP in any way that works for you (as long as it can be displayed within the confines of the classroom).
☐ Genres that you wrote/created for groups 1-5 (you will need to write/create one genre for each group)
Each genre must be created/written by you (not a "found" genre).
Each genre must be written and designed to fit the common conventions of the genre. (Look at samples to ensure that you are following the expected conventions of that genre).
You do not need to have your name/date/etc at the top of the paper like you might find in an essay. Format the genre as expected for that genre.
☐ A well-designed display for your presentation
☐ A reference page for the sources you used to create these genres.
As a reminder, you do not need to use APA in-text citations on your genres, since that wouldn't fit the conventions of these genres, but you should still have a reference page to show that you pulled ideas from those sources when creating your pieces.
The reference page can be placed anywhere on or with your presentation. It just needs to be somewhere.