Proposal and Evaluative Writing Tamara Cooper

Proposal Writing Call for action by: Convincing readers that a particular problem or opportunity exists and requires action (Introduction) Propose a specific solution or course of action and offer reasons for proposing it (Proposal) Defend your solution or proposal as better than others (Justification) Just a definition to get started

Types of Careers Any field of research vying for grants Anything with clients; i.e. architecture, construction, interior design, etc. Businesses that require investors Political careers—even just writing to city council To get our students interested… possibly the most important type of writing for non-research careers

Students need to dissect examples before they can try their hand at writing. This is not a political debate: they will be purely looking at what was done well or not. http://www.minimumwage.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ad21.jpg

Letter to the Editor Citizens can help, too I believe citizens should become engaged in the education of our youth by being allowed to see our schools in action and support the educators in their classrooms. Students and educators should be accountable to the taxpayers. Citizens with abilities to assist in education should be enlisted to participate in the education of our youth if they wish to volunteer their time and meet certain requirements. I am an associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington in the Division of Nephrology. I have taught medical students, residents and fellows for more than 15 years. I wrote the Seattle Public Schools superintendent when I moved to Seattle eight years ago to work in a health class to support the educator and share my expertise. I never received a reply. I then wrote the principal at West Seattle High School, and I worked with one of the teachers for two years. Because of that teacher’s retirement and the turnover of other health-class teachers, I have tried to communicate with the third principal at that school in eight years, but to no avail. I think the problem is that our schools think they are islands unto themselves — citizens can help them. — A. Eric Anderson, Seattle Another short example of a proposal

Audience Awareness Who is your audience? What do they believe in? What beliefs do you share with your audience? Most important part I will cover. I have created my own worksheet that I will send to you. You can either print them off to hand out or post them online. Or both if you want. I think a word doc is really valuable. I also have some youtube videos to get us talking about it. I plan on taking about ten minutes here because it applies to all writing, not just proposal.

Evaluative Writing Two main types: Requires criteria Categorical Ethical Requires criteria Common types: Mitigating circumstances, commonplace vs. ideal, choosing between two goods or two bads, etc. Definition of evaluative writing. This one will be mostly activities, so I don’t have any slides. I will show two famous commercials: one that boosted sales and one that didn’t and actually made sales plummet. I won’t tell them which and I’ll have them discuss it for a few minutes. We will then discuss their findings and criteria that they used to come up with it. I’m going to see if I can find or make a worksheet on developing criteria for evaluations. Next, we will look at a film analysis- I will find good and bad reviews for it (I’m thinking Dark Knight Rises, but I might go with Star Wars) and use your worksheet to look at it. Finally, I figured we would end with the chocolate exercise. Leave a good taste in their mouths. Please let me know if you have any suggestions!