Writing Online

Deliverables (What you turn in on Thursday, November 18)

1. Audio in Mp3 format (1-3 minute length): posted on personal website
2. Reflective Statement: hard copy

What follows are the guidelines and due dates for the sound project. At the bottom of this page is a list of resources that you may consult for information and inspiration.

Evaluation Criteria
I do not expect the sound projects to attain the quality level of a professionally produced piece of audio. Composing in audio format is a new experience for most of you, so a high level of difficulty is normal and should be expected.
Remember, you have been writing essays and research papers for roughly 10 years or more and are still not a professional at those written genres, so as a class we can’t expect to develop 10 years of audio experience in less than one semester. As students the goal in any class is to practice developing skills and to gain knowledge that will allow you to perform better next time. Perfection is not the goal. This is why the reflective statement is a critical piece of this assignment. I am interested in what you learned by completing the project and in what your intended outcome was even if your actual audio did not realize your intentions due to technical difficulties and beginner status with the medium (audio) and genre (a short, persuasive piece similar to a public service announcement). Thus, I expect your audio to be complete but not seamless in its execution; that is, I expect it to be at least a full 1-3 minutes with a recognizable beginning, middle, and end and I expect you to be able to articulate your intentions, choices, and composing process in the reflective statement.

Project Design Plan (Due Thursday, November 4 )

Your design plan should begin with an analysis of purpose, audience, and context:

• Purpose: Why do you want to communicate to an audience about the issue, topic, or subject you have chosen? Do you want to inform on an issue or provide factual information or instructions or advice? Do you want to offer informed opinions or persuade your audience to adopt your viewpoint or take action on an issue? Are you offering social criticism, for example critiquing American eating habits or television programing? Is your purpose to entertain and if so, why do you think this form of entertainment will be interesting to your audience?
• Audience: Who is your ideal audience? What is the audience’s demographics (age, gender, race, etc.)? What are their interests, hobbies, political and/or social leanings as you imagine them?
• Context: What background knowledge are you assuming your audience will bring to your project? How do you imagine the situation in which they will listen to your project: will they be drinking their morning coffee in a comfortable chair, sneaking a break at work? Will they be relaxed, worried, listening leisurely, or while multi-tasking?

Also consider the following:

• Medium: Why will your idea work well as a sound only project? That is, why do you want to communicate with your audience in this way? Why not use another medium?
• Arrangement: How will you organize your project? Remember that audio is a time-based medium that people will experience from start to finish in the exact order that you set up at the pacing you set (yes, they can rewind, but you will want listeners to experience the audio without the need to go back and forth). The order and pacing of material will be extremely important.
• Strategies: How will you establish your authority or believability as an author? Will you compose in a formal, academic style or is it more appropriate to be conversational or funny? Will you provide evidence that you’ve been thinking about and/or researching your topic extensively such as quotes, interviews, audio from outside sources? Do you want your project to appeal to your readers’ sense of logic and objective reasoning or to appeal to emotion or to both?

Audio Details
You will use the same topic as you did for your poster. The other requirements are that your public service announcement (PSA) use more than one form of sound as categorized in McKee’s article “Sound Matters” (i.e., the project cannot be all music, all sound effects, etc.), that it be 1-3 minutes in length, that it persuade your audience to take some form of action on the issue, and that it fulfill the rhetorical objectives you outline in your design plan. You will have more space to include information in the PSA than you did in the poster, so you might consider interviewing someone that can provide an outside voice (literally and figuratively) to your piece.

In class we will discuss techniques and best practices for interviewing and editing audio. Here are some basic guidelines:

• Schedule your interview early on in the project. This way you will have time to schedule and conduct a follow-up interview if necessary or scrap the interview altogether and start over if something goes wrong.
• Write interview questions ahead of time. It is good practice to have a set of interview questions to guide your conversation even if you end up straying from those scripted questions. In fact, you should be prepared to ask extemporaneous follow-up or tangential questions based on the responses of your interviewee. A question can be as open as “Tell me what a typical day at work is like?” or as detailed as “How old were you when you when you got your first paying job and where did you work?”
• Even though your finished audio will only be 1-3 minutes, your interview should be significantly longer: 10 to 20 minutes depending on the purpose the interview will serve in your piece.
• As a point of ethics, you may want to give your planned questions to your interviewee ahead of time and give him or her the right to veto questions. This can put an interviewee at ease and give them a sense of ownership over the interview process. You should also explain, ahead of time, that the finished audio will be posted on your personal website—that is, it will be public. For particularly sensitive topics, you may want to use a pseudonym for your interviewee and take other precautions to conceal his/her identity. These are issues you should discuss with your interviewee well before the actual interview.
• Don’t worry about making aural mistakes during the interview. Umms, ahhs, pauses, and other “mistakes” can be eliminated during the editing process if you so desire. Try to conduct your interview as a conversation and not a cross-examination.
• Always do an audio test before beginning your interview to make sure the recorder is working and that the sound levels are appropriate. With the Zoom H2 recorders you can check out, it is best to wipe and reformat the memory card before you begin.
• Always keep your original interview audio preserved and backed up in several locations (i.e., on your computer’s hard drive, on your flash/thumb drive, on a CD) so that if you have any technical problems you can always return to your original interview and start over.
• When using Audacity, always begin a work session by opening your project and doing a “Save As.” rename the project with an increasing number in the file name each time you open the project to work on it. (e.g., carrie_audio2.aup, carrie_audio3.aup, carrie_audio4.aup). Occasionally Audacity files become corrupted, and if you create a new version each time you work at worst you will lose an hour or two of work rather than weeks of work. For more tips on using Audacity, see the post “Audacity Activity.”
• When using music and sound effects, always ask yourself “How does this contribute the purpose of this audio piece?” It is easy to fall into the trap of using your favorite song or a particular sound effect because it is cool or personally meaningful to you, without considering how it contributes to your rhetorical agenda.

Resources

Audacity
Audacity is a free, open-source program for editing and recording sounds; this is the program you learned to use in class. Go to the “Downloads” page and be sure to choose the correct version for your operating system (choose the “stable” version and NOT the “beta” version). Also download the “LAME MP3 Encoder”; a link to this is listed under “Optional Downloads” on the download page. You need the LAME MP3 encoder to create MP3 files. You can also download a portable version of Audacity to carry with you on you flash/thumb drive. The portable version is available on the network drive in our classroom and in Eddy 300.

PSA Examples

• http://www.radiospace.com/psahome.htm
• http://www.arborday.org/media/audio.cfm
• http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/psa/psa_kids_hygiene.htm
• http://www.michmab.com/pubmp3/index.php
• http://www.entertonement.com/collections/mspptxprcy–PSA
  • http://www.entertonement.com/clips/vnmhxhvhtl–You-wanna-go-College-Access-Ad
  • http://www.entertonement.com/clips/jjnmnxyjll–Tiny-Apartment-Ad-1

Five Minute Fears
Here are some short, scary audio stories—just in time for Halloween. These use fun sound effects and vocals.

This American Life
TAL is a public radio program that broadcasts shows incorporating various genres including interviews, short stories (fiction & non-fiction), and news magazine style journalism. You can listen to past episodes on the website and subscribe to the podcast or listen live on 91.5 FM KUNC, the local public radio station to hear current episodes. If you visit the website’s “About Our Radio Show” page you can learn more about the program’s history and purpose. Here’s a taste:

One of our problems from the start has been that when we try to describe This American Life in a sentence or two, it just sounds awful. For instance: each week we choose a theme and put together different kinds of stories on that theme. That doesn’t sound like something we’d want to listen to on the radio, and it’s our show. So usually we just say what we’re not. We’re not a news show or a talk show or a call-in show. We’re not really formatted like other radio shows at all. Instead, we do these stories that are like movies for radio. There are people in dramatic situations. Things happen to them. There are funny moments and emotional moments and—hopefully—moments where the people in the story say interesting, surprising things about it all. It has to be surprising. It has to be fun.

Radio Lab
Radio Lab is an hour long audio program, usually on a topic related to the social sciences, that uses interesting and complex sound techniques.

StoryCorps
StoryCorps is national project that records families and friends interviewing each other. The website describes the project this way:

StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit project whose mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening. By recording the stories of our lives with the people we care about, we experience our history, hopes, and humanity. Since 2003, tens of thousands of everyday people have interviewed family and friends through StoryCorps. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to take home and share, and is archived for generations to come at the Library of Congress. Millions listen to our award-winning broadcasts on public radio and the Internet. StoryCorps is the largest oral history project of its kind, creating a growing portrait of who we really are as Americans.

Additional audio clips played during class discussion
From StoryCorps:
Lauren Vincelli interviews her parents
Mary Caplan talks about her brother’s death

From Poems that Go:
While Chopping Red Peppers

From This American Life:
Episode 110: Mapping (sound section starts at about 12:40)

From On the Media:
Pulling Back the Curtain