Project One: Place
Project Due: 6/28
In-Class Writing/Place Worksheet Due:6/18
Peer Review: 6/25
The goal of this project is to investigate and analyze a space on campus you’ve selected and scouted out. Your goal is to explain the place and why people interact with it (and with each other in it) in the way that they do. This might be a place you’ve never given much thought to before, or a place you go to every day. Make sure it’s a place that you can spend some time in relatively inconspicuously investigating and observing. (Common rooms, eating areas, library or study spaces, outdoor areas, etc.)
For this assignment, “space” is being defined as the location and context of real, physical objects that have been deliberately and permanently placed there. For example, the union, a dorm, and the library have been deliberately planned to create an environment and convey a message.
You’ll begin this project by completing the Place Worksheet over the first weekend of the semester.
On Tuesday, you’ll spend some time in class developing an idea and an argument about that place.
When thinking about your space you’ll want to consider questions like these:
•What sort of argument is the design of the space attempting to make? What is the space trying to convey?
•How do people interact with this place, and how is that interaction different from how they interact with other places? Why is it different? What causes this difference?
•How does this place influence people to behave in a certain manner?
•If this place were arranged differently, how would it affect the movement and interaction of people within it?
Keep asking questions like these as they come to you. You will most likely need to make several visits to your space to expand on or revise your answers.
Don’t forget to investigate the history of the space: check Purdue’s website, look for plaques, cornerstones, or memorials, ask at the information desk in the Union. Then consider how this history affects your vision of the place and how people interact with the location.
Next, ask yourself what this all means. Take your specific examples and observations, answers to the analysis questions, any interviews or information you may have gathered, and write an essay that analyzes the space rhetorically.
For the purposes of this assignment, a rhetorical analysis asks you to discuss its context (surroundings, atmosphere, a description of the space and how it functions), audience (or viewers, or people milling around, or even the people who are intended to view it but who might not be there), author (or architect/institutional creator), subject (its main idea or what it portrays, its “main point” or argument), and style (formal, informal, comfortable, useful, etc.). The point of a rhetorical analysis is to understand how all these things work together to support its purpose.
Try to synthesize all of your findings into a new observation about its history, intended purpose and actual use. That new observation should lead you to a coherent statement of its importance which can serve as a guiding (“thesis”) statement to your analysis. By putting together all of the work you’ve done, you should have a paper that covers several of the following: In other words, what is the place supposed to do? Does it actually do that? What kind of image is the space trying to portray? Is it successful? Do people use the space as intended? Is this a good or a bad thing?
On Friday, 6/25, we’ll be Peer Reviewing this essay in class. You’ll need to bring a heavily developed draft (at least 1000 words) to class and be prepared to read and comment on a classmate’s draft. Failure to show up with your draft, or meaningfully participate in Peer Review will result in the loss of participation points and will mean you’re missing one of the components (a Peer Reviewed essay) of this project.
The analysis should be 1500 to 2000 words long and properly formatted in MLA style. For details, please refer to the Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab) and its MLA Formatting and Style Guide.
The Basics:
Typed, double-spaced, proper headings, page numbers, a real title, 12 point Times New Roman or Courier font, 1-inch margins, indented paragraphs, MLA citation of any sources used, and a works cited page, where necessary.
Feel free to include appropriately positioned pictures of your place if they help illustrate points of your argument.
For help with this, feel free to email me, discuss it in conferences, or come by my office hours.
As is the standard for all assignments in this course, you’ll need to turn your final draft of this essay in a folder containing all other components of this project (the ‘Accompanying Material’), in this case:
•the Place Worksheet
•Pictures of your place or space
•In-Class Writing from Friday, 6/18
•Peer Reviewed draft
•200-300 word reflection on this assignment.
Please email me a .doc or .rtf electronic version of your final paper as well.
