For 396 Students - The Second Writing Assignment Is a Multimedia Project

When you are ready, click the image on the left to a blog post I wrote last summer that has the video and an explanation for what I'm trying to have you accomplish with the video. The second assignment is to make one of these. Choose a suitable theme and then produce your own creation, from soup to nuts. You must also produce all the supporting documents, as indicated in that post.

Here I want to give a different justification for this assignment. Among the more important skills to learn for your future career is how to write an effective memo. A related skill, also quite important, is how to write a good executive summary of a longer document. In other words, knowing how to communicate important ideas with a very limited amount of text is requisite for career advancement.

I could have given you an assignment to write an effective memo, but it would be hard to come up with a setting where that sort of assignment would really grab you. Absent the compulsion to really nail it, you would find the exercise far less instructive. I'm hoping you can immerse yourself in this media creation project and thereby get something of substance out from the time you put into doing this work.

And then you'll have something to show your parents and friends from having taken the course. ;-)