The Task 1: Topic Proposal assignment is the starting point for a semester-long research project in a writing and rhetoric class. The goal is to choose and clearly describe a topic related to writing, rhetoric, language, or literacy—something you're genuinely curious about and willing to study in depth. You’ll need to explain your topic in a way that makes sense to scholars familiar with writing studies, but who might not know the specific issue you’re focusing on. The assignment also asks you to justify why your topic fits within the scope of the class and what you hope to learn from researching it.

Task 2: Research Review & Proposal builds on the foundation laid in Task 1 by moving from identifying a research topic to engaging with existing scholarship and planning your own research study. It’s split into two key parts. In Part 1, you're asked to critically review a scholarly article connected to your topic. This pushes you to practice academic analysis—summarizing, evaluating, and responding to another writer’s work while considering audience, structure, and effectiveness. In Part 2, you're challenged to take ownership of your research by developing specific research questions and outlining how you would investigate them through primary research methods like interviews, observations, or textual analysis. Even though you won’t carry out the research, proposing it helps you understand how academic inquiry is planned and conducted. Overall, this task is meant to deepen your knowledge of writing studies, strengthen your analytical skills, and get you thinking like a scholar—asking smart questions, engaging with sources, and designing a study with purpose.

Task 3 asks you to take the research review you wrote in Task 2 and rework it into a completely new, multimodal format—something like a video, infographic, slideshow, or website. The goal is to translate your original analysis into a form that works better for a different audience or purpose, while still keeping the core ideas and arguments. This project emphasizes not just content, but how you communicate that content through visual and/or auditory elements, layout, and tone. In addition to the actual project, you’ll also write an Author’s Statement where you explain why you chose your new format, how you preserved the key parts of your original work, and what the process taught you about writing in different media. Task 3 is about flexibility—how well you can adapt your ideas, your writing, and your communication style to suit new platforms, audiences, and rhetorical situations.