Writing Assignment: write Persuasive Message with Visual

ASSIGNMENT 2: PERSUASIVE MESSAGE WITH VISUAL

Due Date: Sunday, November 22, 11:55 p.m. Length: Up to 1200 words for the entire assignment (essay and memorandum) Primary Audience for Assignment 2: Student Nurses and Volunteers at LHSC; Sarah Noble Assignment Format: essay (MLA format) with visual and memo of transmittal (.doc or .docx format only) Value: 25% of final grade

Background and Assignment Using the information and exhibits from the “Just Clean Your Hands” case study, write an essay (MLA format) of up to 1000 words that persuades student nurses and volunteers to increase their rate of hand-washing compliance. Your assignment must also include a brief memo of transmittal to Sarah Noble, telling her what you are sending her. Presumably, she will shape your essay into a pamphlet that she will include in welcome packages for new workers.

You will be graded not only on style, grammar, clarity, organization, accuracy, and concision but also on the persuasiveness of your argument. Consequently, you should consider these questions:

Which points from the case will be most convincing and most relevant to your intended audience? How will you catch your audience’s attention? How will you structure your body paragraphs for logic, coherence, and readability? What tone should you adopt? How will you appeal to ethos, pathos, and logos? Which of the three appeals should you emphasize?

You must also create a visual to accompany your essay:

Using information from the case study, create a chart or graph that dynamically and memorably illustrates one of your main points. You must effectively integrate this graph into the body of your essay.

Resources Locker/Findlay Chapter 4 and 9 and Unit 6 lecture notes Units 7 and 8 (readings and lecture notes) Assignment Case: “Just Clean Your Hands”

IMPORTANT NOTE: if you use ANY material from the case (or other sources), you MUST cite it properly. All direct quotations MUST be in quotation marks, followed by a citation; paraphrased passages must include a clear reference to the source.

ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR ASSIGNMENT 2 (PERSUASIVE MESSAGE)

Format As always, please double-space your assignment, indenting the first sentence of each new paragraph (so that you do not need to leave extra space between paragraphs). Include both the transmittal message and essay in the same file. Please open with the memorandum of transmittal, and start the essay on a new page, following MLA guidelines for its format (see the sample essay in Appendix B of The Canadian Writer's Handbook: Second Essentials Edition).

Genre As with the first graded assignment, the memorandum of transmittal requires only three sentences: identify the attached document for Sarah Noble, explain the main ideas, and offer to make any necessary revisions.

This assignment blends two discrete genres—the persuasive message and the formal essay—so your essay must accommodate the structure appropriate to this type of message, the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action) structure.

Structure/Content Introduction/Paragraph of Attention Although it will be concise, your introduction will be a little longer than that of the negative message (which contained two sentences). The purpose of this introduction is to gain the reader’s attention and to identify the subject without specifically stating your purpose (i.e., the request for action). Because you anticipate resistance to your request, you must do the preliminary work to persuade them to act. To gain the reader’s attention, Locker and Findlay suggest that you use a pathos appeal. This appeal requires only a couple of sentences, and it should use psychological description (Locker and Findlay: “word pictures”), presenting a scenario in which readers can envision themselves doing—preferably enjoying—something related to your subject. This short passage should appeal to sense experience. After your pathos appeal, you should conclude your introduction by identifying the subject. Keep in mind, however, that you should not make your request in your introduction: your direct request will appear in the conclusion, where you will tell readers how you want them to act. Before you make that request, you must discuss the benefits of acting.

Body Paragraphs/Paragraphs of Interest and Desire Each body paragraph should open with a topic sentence reflecting your purpose. In a persuasive genre, the topic sentence should make a claim about a specific subject, a claim related to your thesis. Your body paragraphs should develop your claim (the claim that appears in the topic sentence) in relation to compelling evidence, which should come primarily from the case but can also come from scholarly sources dealing with hand hygiene. Notes on the visual (one of your forms of evidence) appear below.

Each body paragraph should conclude with a sentence that sums up your discussion without merely repeating your topic sentence. Each concluding sentence could plausibly begin with the phrase “as a result.” Do not, however, use this phrase mechanically to open each concluding sentence (when drafting your essay, you can use it as a prompt to guide your thinking about the purpose of the concluding sentence).

Interest and Desire: The distinction between the middle sections of the AIDA pattern is not always clear: how do you distinguish maintaining your readers’ interest from inflaming their desire to act? You can distinguish these two sections in a fairly straightforward manner if you remember that you should discuss the benefits of acting: the first body section (the section of interest) should discuss immediate benefits, and the second section (the section of desire) should discuss longer-term benefits. At both stages, you should also try to anticipate and address objections for not acting.

Conclusion/Paragraph of Action As in the previous assignments, the conclusion to this essay should be personal, positive, and forward-looking. Unlike the previous assignments, this conclusion will tell your readers how to act, making the request and offering specific details that guide the readers through the process of acting according to your request.

Visual For this assignment, you must integrate a visual into the body of your essay. The visual involves three primary considerations: choosing the appropriate visual, labelling it thoroughly, and integrating it correctly.

• Choose the visual that best serves your purpose (e.g., to display proportions of a whole, use a pie chart; to track changes over time, use a line chart). • Label each part of the visual: open with a title (“Fig. 1” plus a brief caption), identify the units and quantities on the x and y axes, cite the source of both the data and visual (if you have created the visual, the source is “Primary”), and (if necessary) include a legend identifying colours and symbols. • Integrate your visual into a body paragraph, treating it as you would any quotation or paraphrase. Do not leave your visual stranded between two body paragraphs. Correct integration of a visual involves three steps: (i) Introduce the visual with a sentence identifying its by its number (e.g., “Figure 1 indicates …”; do not include the entire title of the visual), and give a brief explanation of its contents. (ii) Place the visual after the introductory sentence. (iii) Comment on the significance of the visual. Although the visual simplifies a large body of (usually numerical) information, you should still comment on its significance to your argument. Completing this third step will prevent you from leaving the visual between two body paragraphs.