The Prospectus (25% or 250 points)
Adapted from Jenn Courtney and Ron Block's "Prospectus assignment" from Seminar 1 (prior to fall 2016)
A “prospectus” presents an overview of your creative vision/mission, a tentative title for the project, an overview of the project, audiences you are addressing, your rationale, and what your plans are for further research and writing in order to complete this project.
|
In order to fulfill the requirements for the prospectus, you will likely need to produce a 7-15 page document, double-spaced, 1" margins. |
As the culminating assignment for Core II, you will draft a prospectus that articulates your goals and provides an intellectual/creative framework for your Master’s Project. The prospectus should be developed enough to convey that
|
Background
In 2015, the MA in Writing program changed the capstone requirement from a “thesis” to a “Master’s project” to allow students greater flexibility in terms of topic and genre, and to better align with the requirements of Rowan Global.
There are three, broadly defined, types of projects: creative, scholarly, and new media or hybrid.
|
A Master’s project, by definition, has its own academic purpose and audience; because it is a required part of an academic degree, it has members of the academic community as built-in audience members. Your project should, however, also aim to reach a wider audience—readers of literary short stories, young adult readers, members of an academic discipline such as rhetoric and writing studies, and so on.
In the prospectus, you should describe the audience you are actually targeting or that is best served by your project. You might envision the audience that would likely purchase your collection of stories, or the readers who would be most interested in your study’s findings. Think on multiple levels here: on the one hand, you are completing the project as an academic capstone and must satisfy your institutional readers while, on the other hand, you are thinking in terms of publication. Do your best to address the expectations of both audiences: the audience that you are addressing and the audience you are ultimately targeting. |
Discover ways to be as specific about the audience as you can be, mentioning their interests (subject headings), or the authors they might read, or the trends (or discussions) they might be following, or aspects of lifestyle, or even—if only as an exercise—the image of the “ideal reader.” Your intended audience might be the middle school goth kid deeply concerned with finding a way to belong to an envied social group, but your immediate audience might be an agent or a teacher. The Prospectus should run about seven to fifteen pages, double spaced. Use an appropriate format for citation when referring to any outside works.
|
Creative Project Prospectus
Vision/Mission Statement
Articulate your vision/mission statement in such a way that your project is a direct expression of it. Working Title Provide a tentative title of the project and any accompanying explanation, if necessary. Overview Describe the project, beginning with the premise that the project explores. Present the genre and key themes or elements of craft you hope to explore. If there is a storyline, or merely an exploratory storyline, share this, emphasizing key conflicts (the network or networks of controlling values that structure the conflicts), as well as narrative design, the structure, or “big picture” considerations, such as genre, literary tradition, or treatment. You might consider that this section would have what a cover letter to an agent might have. Audience analysis There may be few or several elements to the audience you need to analyze, including but not limited to the actual audiences, the authorial audience, and the narrative or ideal narrative audiences (see Rabinowitz). The actual audience will include the those actually existing people whose values and concerns would be fulfilled in some way by interacting with your project. As such you will need to present the dominant values that guide and even control the way the actual audience sees the world, and how they might deal with your project. There might be multiple layers to this audience and you may need to Include demographics or reader profiles to capture the various constituencies of the actual audience. You could identify specific authors whose readers might enjoy your writing; for example, readers of Elizabeth Royte or Scott McCloud or Aimee Bender might find your work compelling (but also include why you say so: what are such readers reading for in those authors' works? Sometimes the readership of creative work is very defined, especially in children’s writing. Sometimes you have to be very creative in order to define it. The authorial audience would be the ideal ultimate audience that would completely get the project, understand its context and purpose--what you are trying to accomplish--and even see aspects of the project that you yourself might not even see or imagine. For instance: agents and developmental editors for creative works on the one hand, and scholars and researchers in a particular field of study on the other. Ultimately, authors you might consider masters of the genre or field of study you are writing within might belong to the authorial audience. And so distinguishing the authorial audience will help to bring you into dialogue with other works and authors, a community, or a literary tradition. In a very real sense, a part of your audience might include the dead, or audiences impossible for readers to ever become. The narrative (and/or ideal narrative) audience points to the role your actual and authorial audience should play when engaged in your project. Who does the actual reader need to become to "get" the project? Rationale This section should answer the “so what?” question for readers. It answers the question: "what is at stake for you as a writer?" And "Why is this project important?" Why this project? Why this genre? What do you want to accomplish? To push yourself in a new genre to expand your writerly repertoire? Explore a question in order to open up a new domain of inquiry? Tell a story that you believe needs to be told? A discussion of your prior creative work to contextualize your project goals would be helpful. This section should be explicitly reflective. As with the scholarly prospectus, you might “explain how [your work] enters into ongoing conversations,” only these “conversation” would be composed of the books you have read, the literary tradition of which you are a part, or perhaps the “challenges” posed by critics or theorists. How your project ties into current events or an ongoing national conversation may be extremely relevant. Plan Share the plan you have between now and when you will be completing your Masters project, including your independent research and writing plans, as well as classes you will be taking in the interim. |
Read the prospectus instructions for all the major categories for ideas regarding Overview, Audience, and Rationale. You might get ideas from the multiple perspectives. |
Scholarly Project Prospectus
Vision/Mission Statement
Articulate your vision/mission statement in such a way that your project is a direct expression of it. Working Title Provide tentative title and any accompanying explanation, if necessary. Overview This section should propose to readers the value of your specific topic and arguments, why you are intellectually interested, and what difference you hope your project will make in a specific field of study, and/or to a targeted discourse community. This section should address the central research questions you are interested in posing, exploring, arguing, and solving in the project and explain how it enters into ongoing conversations about the topic. It should be focused and clear; think like the reader who would most be interested in the project and try to anticipate their questions so that your project description is thorough and appealing. If you plan to do any field research—interviews, surveys, etc—you will need to talk with me about the Institutional Review Board (IRB) procedures for working with human subjects. We will handle that on a case-by-case basis. Audience The issue of audience within a scholarly writing is analogous to the role of various audiences within creative writing projects. That is, there is an actual audience that needs to be analyzed, as well as the authorial audience, and even the narrative audience, but rarely will there be the need to deal with an ideal narrative audience, unless your effort is to reveal how a given "scholarly" discussion is erroneous (the Flat Earth Society). Toward the end of analysis of the actual audience, strive to clarify the particular field or sub-field you are addressing, perhaps even pinpointing a specific controversy that a certain group of scholars and researchers are debating: those specific individuals are part of your actual audience. This is what Jim Porter calls a "discourse community" in his article "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community." Consequently, you will need to direct your project to specific journals or presses (that is, those scholars and researchers who identify themselves as belonging to a particular field of study and so then read and contribute to that journal or press), and doing so will help you sharpen your study overall. Having a clear target actual audience in mind can also assist you in handling introductory material, managing how much background to provide, and so on. Keep in mind that as an aspect of audience, you are entering into a dialogue with other writers and works and traditions with histories of thinking and methods of inquiry. Rationale This section should answer the “so what?” question for readers. It answers the question: "what is at stake for you as a writer?" Why this project? Why this genre? What are you offering here that’s new? Explain what you would like to accomplish with this project: contribute to an ongoing discussion? Revive a stalled discussion? Challenge your readers in some way? Provide readers with a particular insight? This section should be explicitly reflective. Organization Though organization plans are tentative at this stage, do your best to explain how your project will be organized. When thinking about organization, try to anticipate areas that might be “thin,” and what you might do to develop them further. You can arrange this section thematically or by chapter. Plan Share the plan you have between now and when you will be completing your Masters project, including your independent research and writing plans, as well as classes you will be taking in the interim. |
New Media Projects
Vision/Mission Statement
Articulate your vision/mission statement in such a way that your project is a direct expression of it. Working Title Provide a tentative title and any accompanying explanation, if necessary. Overview This section should explain to readers your specific topic or goal and why you are intellectually interested in it: what premise and/or research question(s) are you exploring with this project? If it is not immediately clear why this project is appropriate for a writing degree, explain. Anticipate terms, techniques or methodologies that readers unfamiliar with new methods of composing may need to have defined. You should plan to explain specifically how your project continues and/or adds to ongoing conversations within new media studies. If you plan to do any field research—interviews or surveys, for example—talk with me about the Institutional Review Board (IRB) procedures for working with human subjects. We will handle that on a case-by-case basis. Audience The discussions of audience presented above for creative writing and scholarly projects also are applicable here. Narrow down your readership/users down as much as possible while anticipating additional ones. Identify, for example, similar sites and/or initiatives. Having a clear target in mind can also dictate how you handle site design, content delivery, and so on. Be aware of the space in which the project might appear . Rationale This section should answer the “so what?” question for readers. It answers the question: "what is at stake for you as a writer?" Why this project? Why this genre? What are you offering here that’s new? Explain what you would like to accomplish with this project: contribute to an ongoing discussion? Revive a stalled discussion? Challenge your readers in some way? Provide readers with a particular insight? This section should be explicitly reflective. Organization As much as possible, describe the final form(s) and/ or artifacts you anticipate creating. Specifics can be determined in collaboration with your readers. Plan Share the plan you have between now and when you will be completing your Masters project, including your independent research and writing plans, as well as classes you will be taking in the interim. |