Anna's+Exemplar

MULTIGENRE RESEARCH PAPER

This is a chance to pursue a passion in your intellectual/emotional/spiritual life, a chance to strive to answer a question involving a topic of consuming interest to you and to communicate your learning through a multigenre research project, where you get at the factual, the emotional, and the imaginative. This is a time to try the untried and to be expansive. Choose a person, idea, topic, trend, era, cultural phenomenon, movement, thing, place. . . and become the quintessential mad researcher, the wigged out, completely immersed learner on the trail of information vital to achieving peace of mind and satisfying your insatiable curiosity.

**// Required Research Sources Of Your Inquiry: //**


 * At least one book (or two, or three. Read fast, become an expert)
 * Articles
 * Primary material: interviews, testimony, observations
 * Internet sources*

*The Internet contains the good, the bad, and the ugly. It is democratic, but there is no screening for quality as there is in journals and books. There are wonderful databases available; there are also shallow, misleading websites. So gauge the quality and the depth of what you find in cyberspace. I definitely don't want you to simply paste material from a website into your paper. I want to see an original mgp from you, one grounded in a research understanding of your topic. I want to see you expand your knowledge about some subject, maybe even your wisdom. I want to see you stretch and refine your writing skills and powers of communication, see you put to use some of that advice about writing with voice in //Crafting Authentic Voice//. I want to read your paper and be informed, but even more, I want to be //moved//.

// Genres or pieces your multigenre project must contain: //
 * Brief informational essay, 250-350 words. Make this vivid, informational, straight-ahead writing. Boil your topic down to essentials. This can appear as a straight mini-essay, or you can drop the exposition a form that fits your mgp.
 * Preface/Introduction/Dear Reader
 * Poetry in contemporary free verse style
 * A visual element/the arts
 * Bibliography
 * Note Page
 * Unifying elements (repetend, repeated images, genres answered, fragmented narrative, a detail mentioned on one crot exploded and illustrated in a longer piece)

Include in your paper all seven bulleted items. But you’ll need to write more genres than these to create a fully realized mgp. Wherever else you go in the writing is up to you. Range as widely as you want in creating this paper. You go for this. One tip: begin your research soon, make it part of your academic life, take notes and gather bibliographic information. Use the Thanksgiving break to search and read. Immerse yourselves in your topic so the writing comes easy.