Technology& Media& Rhetoric

Statement of purpose
The Basics
At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of what you want to do for your major multimedia project for
the semester, which will see you advocating for a particular technology with respect to a human practice. While it
will develop and evolve over the course of the project, you should at this point be able to at least sketch what
you want to do. Your task in this assignment is write a statement of purpose that addresses the purpose
(obviously), the audience, and the context of your multimedia project.

The Process
Write at least 300 words in response to each of these questions:

1. Purpose: what do want to argue with respect to a particular technology and the active role it is playing is
reconfiguring a particular human practice? What wants does a technology have, and what are the
manifestations and implications of these wants?

2. Audience: To whom are you speaking and why? Answer these specific questions and follow more
specific directions:

a. Generate a list of audience characteristics. Age, gender, ethnicity, level of education, and
access to technology, etc.
b. Imagine your audience at the moment they encounter your argument. Where will they be?
What will they be doing? How might they respond at that moment? Will they respond at
that moment? If so, why? If not, why not?
c. What kind of evidence will this audience accept as persuasive? What sort of proof does this
audience need? Why?

3. Context: What is the situation you're addressing? What's the history? What’s happened before? What's
happening now? Why is this a propitious moment for intervening rhetorically into the situation? Also, are
you dealing with a SLU-centric context? Or something from outside of SLU but in St. Louis? Or
something from your home community? Future professional context? Your previous schools? Your place
of worship? Another public setting?

Write roughly 300 words in response to each of these three questions. The emphasis with this statement of
purpose is on details. The document doesn't need to be overly formal, but it should be very concrete. Be as
specific as possible—get really, really particular.

This proposal acts as a contract or sorts. You won't be held to every particular, but this proposal should be what
you pursue for the rest of the semester. In other words, we'll refer to this throughout the project to see how
you're doing. It will surely evolve and grow, and you might make changes here and there in response to the
constraints and affordances of the tools and platforms you work with. This proposal, however, should be a guide
for how you proceed for the rest of the semester.

Submit this to Google Drive with the file name "lastname_statement_of_purpose"

Nathaniel A. Rivers | English1900 | Technology, Media and Rhetoric | Fall 2019