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UNC English Composition 12 Project - Designed and used by Jill Craven, Instructor, UNC English 12 Advanced Composition Class

Students in English 12 during fall, 1998 had the following project as a class assignment.  Click here to see some examples of what they created.
 

Project 1--Probing the Limits of Virtual Reality
Suggested Length: 8 or more web pages

Unit Project 1 will expand your work on Virtual Reality by looking at specific questions in more detail. You and your group will do further research on an assigned question. You will compose your answer to that question on a set of web pages that you will publish on the UNC web. The questions will be similar to the following:

  1. What potential does VR have (medicine, architecture, etc.)?
  2. What limitations does VR face and how can we address them?
  3. Who are the major players in VR and what are their projects?
  4. How does VR work?
As science writing is most often done collaboratively, this group project will give you an idea of the real world experience. Writing with others takes some new strategies for coordinating drafts and changes, but people typically enjoy the experience of exchanging ideas and working with others. Please look at your Allyn and Bacon textbook for some guidance on writing collaboration techniques (pages 86-87) and using computers effectively for collaboration (pages 797-798). We will also go over issues of collaborative writing in class.

To prepare for this assignment, we will have a class on creating web pages on September 8. Before that class, you will need to obtain web authoring privileges for your isis id. We will go over this in class.

To complete this assignment successfully, you need to provide well organized web pages that answer your question clearly and fully. Your audience will be members of a general scientific community with an interest in virtual reality. Since your audience is NOT expert in the field, you should write to general, science-savvy readers. Your webpages should use both the style (for example, few--if any--quotations) and vocabulary of the scientific discourse community. They should note any conflicts in your proposed definition(s), and they should clearly distinguish between fact and hypothesis. You will need to support your work with at least 12 sources, and they all must be recent.

With web pages, organization becomes very important. Once you find the answer to your question, you will need to figure out how best to divide that answer into pages for presentation on the web. You will also need to consider what links are the most effective for presenting your information (that is, you don't want to include every link, just those that support what you are doing). Also, since you will be adding the pages to the UNC web, you need to design your format in a way that integrates some of the basic features of the UNC site (for example, UNC pages have buttons on the bottom for searching and directories). We will also discuss this in class.

Your pages should be accurately documented using the CBE style (be careful with any numerical data that you incorporate). Your drafts will be posted in your group's presentation web space.

As you revise, think about all the lessons of "The Science of Scientific Writing" (e.g., the topic position, the stress position, precise and active verbs, etc.) and check your writing to ensure that you have taken your readers' expectations into account. Also, take advantage of the Writing Center on-line! Turnaround times have been excellent.

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