Our View of the West: Assignment

Throughout the semester, we’ve been addressing various ideas and subjects related to the theme of the American West.  We’ve explored our personal connections to the American West, we’ve done research on historical topics, and we’ve explored the various forms of the Western in film.  All of this work began with Charles Portis’s novel, True Grit, a text chosen for UAFS Department of English’s one book project this semester because of its focus on the history and setting of Fort Smith. 

This last assignment asks you to consider the issues the “West” faces today.  We’re moving beyond traditional definitions of the American West with this assignment.  You make choose any contemporary issue that you are interested in (except for those on the list below) that you want to craft an argument about.   We’ll talk more in class about appropriate topics for this essay, and the more you can connect your topic to our larger class theme, the easier it will be for you to move beyond opinion alone.

The medium for this essay is a little different than the traditional papers we’ve been writing.  At the beginning of the semester, we discussed that Portis’s novel was originally serialized in three parts in the weekly magazine the Saturday Evening Post.  Publishing stories in parts and in magazines was a style of publication popularized in the nineteenth century, even though it is still used today.  In other words, the text of True Grit became a part of the news cycle.   This assignment asks you to use a twenty-first century method of publication called blogging.  Many of you are familiar with this form and may blog yourselves.  For those of you unfamiliar with the form, a web log or blog, is a website where individuals and groups of individuals publish posts on current topics and other bloggers’ writings.  Sometimes these posts are short, one line links to items of interest.  More commonly, however, posts are lengthy mediations on current events. 

Your papers will be blog style essays.  They should hyperlink to a primary text (news article or other blogger’s work) that sparks the idea for the essay.  They need to express your opinion and knowledge about the topic.  You need to do research and be ruthlessly factual in your argument.  The blogosphere, the term for the interconnected community of writers on the internet, is not kind to plagiarism.  More details about the project can be found on the course Blackboard site.