Final Paper/Project #3 (A must read-- Instructions for your creative response project.)

Final Project #3

Due:

£ Optional Plan 3: If wanted submit Plan for Final Project through Moodle. Due Wed 12/ 4. 

Worth: 300 points

Audience: Literary scholars & YA readers

Each of the 5 options for final projects has a somewhat different requirement for the plan (See the directions at the end of this document). Make sure you read the plan requirements carefully. 

For this assignment, you should choose one of the "creative” options below. If you have an idea for another option, I would be willing to look at it for consideration during the week Plan 3 is due.  (It must be related to the books, have a written proposal, and be approved by me before you begin work on it.)

Option 1: Short Story/ Dialogue

If you choose this option, you will be creating your own short story/dialogue between characters from two different books. One of the characters must be from Shizuko's Daughter or Where the Streets Had a Name,  but the second character may be from any of the books we have read as long as he or she is not from the same book as the first character. I want you to imagine a situation where the characters forced to interact in some intensive way and reveal a great deal about themselves and their experiences, (one idea is to have them receiving some kind of group therapy from a third character, a counselor.) Perhaps both of the characters are dealing with loss or perhaps they both have problems with substance abuse or perhaps they just have dysfunctional families. The counselor could lead the discussion, but you may choose to have your characters either speak or remain silent. If they remain silent, you should indicate the thoughts that are going through their heads.

When the counseling session (or whatever main interaction you choose) is finished, allow your characters to interact privately with each other (without the counselor present). Again, they may say some things aloud and keep some thoughts just in their heads. You should include narrative as well to show the character's body movements since this may give some insight into their emotions. Try to give your scene a focus so that both your characters come to some kind of realization about themselves or their lives. Look at how your characters talk in each book so that you capture their manner of speaking as closely as possible. As you write, be sure to follow the mechanical rules for punctuation and paragraphing. The length of this option should be approximately 1500 words.

Option 2: Fiction Chapter

For this option, you will write a chapter with dialogue and several new scenes in Shizuko's Daughter or Where the Streets Had a Name. This chapter can be in the future (an epilogue), or a chapter that might be placed at the beginning (a prologue), or just in the middle of the book. You have some freedom here. The scenes you choose to create should be ones where no dialogue is presently provided, or they could be for scenes that are implied but not included. Use what you already know about the characters to create language that is believable based on their circumstances; you should strive too to capture the author's voice as well. Your chapter should be able to blend into the other chapters as if it were all part of the same book. Be sure to craft scenes with both action and character development,  and to focus on matching the tone and style of the book itself. The length of this option should be approximately 1500 words.

Option 3: Digital Collage

For this option, you will be creating a visual and written digital collage with a one-word focus. First you should choose a meaningful word that will allow you to talk about cultural conflicts facing the characters in the novels. The word "trapped" is one option, but there are many other possibilities. 

At least one of your entries, preferably two, should come from our final books  Shizuko's Daughter or Where the Streets Had a Name.

Once you have chosen a word, begin creating pieces of your own writing that focus on that word as it relates to the various characters in the novels. You don't need writing samples from all the protagonists we have discussed, but you should focus on at least four of the main characters from four separate books. For example, you could write a  poem about Yuki and why she feels trapped. You could write a news article about Augustus from Fault in our Stars. Choose a different type of writing for each character.  In other words, your collage shouldn't have four journal entries.  

Everything you write should be connected to your key word. Once you have collected these written selections, type them in a variety of fonts or write them in longhand. (Use the font that seems most appropriate for the style of writing.) Then collect a variety of visual images that also reflect the conflicts in the novels as they are related to the key word. One obvious visual image for the word "trapped" would be jail bars for Monster. When you have all the collage samples, you will need to create them digitally. There are some very nice online digital storytelling tools. 

 For example, Glogster (http://www.glogster.com/) allows you to create digital multimedia posters, Weebly (http://www.weebly.com/)  lets you create webpages, ToonDo (http://www.toondoo.com/) creates cartoons, Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) is a sound/voice recorder and editing freeware program; VoiceThread (http://www.voicethread.com) is an online media album for images, documents, video;  create simple videos from pictures, sound, text, and existing video clips try Animoto; Wordle = word clouds, there are timeline creators, etc. etc. 

You might find more digital storytelling inspiration and instruction here: 

http://langwitches.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Digital-Storytelling-Guide-by-Silvia-Rosenthal-Tolisano.pdf

But certainly the most consistently popular choice has been to use Weebly to create the digital collage.

The text portion for this assignment should be at least 1000 words. The visual images must be more than decoration; they must add to the understanding.

Each entry should be well developed and fleshed out. It should also fit the style of the book and represent the chosen characters accurately (by that I mean if you write in their voice it should sound like them and if you write of them it should fit what we know about them or might imagine.)

Optional 4: Poetry Portfolio

Option 5: Literary Analysis Final Paper, 10-20 pages long

For this option you will write a traditional literary analysis paper similar to our shorter analysis papers we have done earlier in the semester except of course this one will be significantly longer. You must pick a theme to examine in each of our books that we have read for this semester.

For example a strong theme/topic to look at would be parent-child relationships and their affect on adolescent development in YA lit. OR perhaps you might want to look at how YA novels often deal with main protagonists who are on the fringe/margins of society, basically outsiders, in some capacity or another.

Like in our analysis papers your chosen theme/topic would need to develop into a debatable argumentative thesis that you prove over the course of the paper. Remember this is a literary analysis paper that is specifically examining some aspect of YA lit. You are looking comprehensively at a large selection of YA literature and making a statement about the presence of some significant element that shapes how this fiction affects us as readers and/or what messages we take away from it.

You do not need to reference any outside scholarly sources though they may be helpful. You will need to incorporate in your paper successful references to all of our YA books.

All formatting rules, common to our Literary Analysis Papers 1 & 2, (other than word length) apply. In short you will need to use MLA citation throughout and include a Works Cited page. See those assignments for specifics about literary analysis paper formatting.  

Speak to me about approval for your paper topic.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Optional----Plans

Give the weight of our final project, I would love for folks to turn in a final project plan; here are the specifics for each project.

• For Option #1 and #2, provide a summary of what you want to accomplish in your scenes as well as a small portion of the actual dialogue or screen play to show that you understand the form.
• For Option #3, provide your focus word and a detailed list of the various pieces (both visual and written) that you hope to include in your collage. You don't have to include the actual poem or letter for Option #3, but you should indicate what the poem or letter or whatever writing genre you have will be about and why you are including it. 
• For Optional #4, provide a summary of what styles of poems you plan to use for each book and any additional details you know.
• For Optional #5, provide a thesis and a paper outline of main points attached to that thesis.

Rubric for all options

Rubric for Grading Project #3 (300 points possible)