New Media Writing Project

1. The Print Document

Choose a famous speech, a brief published story, or other short prose piece that runs at least two or three printed pages, but not more than ten or twelve. The piece of writing should

• be continuous prose that has a sense of voice and mood, rather than a report,
• not be poetry, a lyric or other kinds of writing that is already compressed, chunked or graphically arranged on the page,
• ideally be public domain (copyright free, such as a nineteenth-century piece), which would enable you to use it on the Web as an example of your work without being sued. You have a right to use published work for education purposes like this assignment.

Once you've chosen the prose piece,

1. make a copy of it to hand in to me on the "essay due" date and
2. obtain an electronic version of the text either by finding it on the Web and copying and pasting or scanning your paper copy into a Word file.

We will talk about the prose piece in conference

2. The Web Site

After you've turned in, and received feedback on the print document, create a Web site using information, language and materials from your document but designing it for the Web. Doing so includes some of the following issues:

• How can the continuous prose piece be chunked into different pages?
• How can the pages be offered to the "visitor" as non-sequential choices that make sense?
• What content can you repurpose, what must you leave out, and what additional material must go out and find?
• Can you maintain the personal voice and mood while still creating something that works as a Web site?
• What organizing principles work for this Web-based version other than the straight-line narrative or one-after-another sequencing of print documents?

Annotations

After completing the Web site, you'll hand in a printout of all its pages with annotations.