draft

Congratulations! You're about to start putting your TED talk together, which means we'll have a lot to talk about in our video conference.  So, the first step: Read   the project prompt   again, and read it carefully. Attention to your rhetorical situation is critical to your success in this project.  Done? Good. Now let's talk about the process of scripting your talk. I'm going to talk about the whole talk and all its parts, though you're only responsible for drafting just the first two parts by Monday.  I trust that by now you’ve watched a few  TED Talks  (Links to an external site.) . And you’ve probably noticed that, whatever the topic and method of presentation, most all TED Talks share a few key elements.  • Big, original, insightful ideas  • Relevant personal stories and/or stories about the experiences of others  • Solid scholarly research  The central, most important element here is, of course, the big, original, insightful idea. Indeed, “ideas worth spreading” is TED’s motto; the stories and the research the speakers include all serve to support that big idea. So, thinking big picture, your goal is to develop and present an idea big enough, original enough, and insightful enough enough that your audience will want to spread it to all their friends.  To insure that your talk features all of the key elements of a TED Talk, let's break it down into four parts:

1. an introduction  in which you explain your research question

2. a summary of what the writers you discovered through your library and internet research have had to say about this question

3. a description of what you've discovered through your auto- and cyber-ethnographies and your interview (don't worry: we haven't started these yet)

4. an analysis that ties it all together and gives your detailed and compelling response to your research question

How do I write these parts? And how do they fit together?

It’s important to remember that you’re not writing a garden-variety research paper — or even a “paper” at all, in the typical sense. You’re scripting a talk. The idea is that you could put your talk on a thumb drive, walk onto the stage at a TED conference, plug the thumb drive into a teleprompter, and deliver a talk as compelling as that of any of other TED speaker. So rather than thinking of the four elements I describe above as static, inert containers into which to dump the appropriate information, let’s think about them as script elements for a riveting and dynamic lecture, delivered onstage by a dynamic speaker (i.e., you), to a live audience of scholars and interested laypersons. How do you write the script for that situation?  It’s helpful to think of each part of the script as a response to a question. (For Monday, I ask only that you draft the first two parts.)   1.          What is your research question, and why is it important to your audience? In this segment, you’ll explain what your research question is and make your audience care about it. Use your proposal to help you write this part.              Your audience hasn’t accompanied you on the research you’ve done, so they’ll need your help to understand your research question and why it should matter to them. You should therefore aim to be crystal clear and to contextualize the question. And be sure to interest both the scholarly segment and  the lay segment of your audience.

2.         What has the conversation about your topic been about so far? Here you’ll share what other folks have been saying on your topic, definitions of important terms, relevant bits of context, etc., to help your audience understand what the experts think. You'll use your annotated bibliography to write this.             When you write this segment, you should aim to be crystal clear: quote from the research, but do so judiciously, and explain what you're quoting. This isn’t a place to dump quotes. The idea is to help your audience understand the arguments that your sources have made and to see the connections between these arguments and your question.

3.         What did you see and hear in the field? Here you’ll pick the most pertinent material you gathered via your auto-ethnography, cyber-ethnography, and interview, and weave it all together into a coherent narrative.            The idea is to give your audience a concrete picture of the questions and arguments you discussed in the previous sections and  to set yourself up to deliver your  big idea in the next section. So select the most interesting scenes you witnessed, the most interesting ideas you heard expressed, and combine them to tell the story of what you found through your original research.  4.        What’s your big idea? This is the grand finale: Here you’ll tie everything all together and deliver the most important part of the talk: your  response to your research question, and why your big idea is important to everyone in your audience — the scholars and the laypersons alike.            To make your big idea persuasive, it needs to bring to a climax the whole rest of the talk: So connect it to what you say in the intro; connect it to the ideas you gathered from other writers in your bibliography; connect it to the story your told about what you heard and saw as an ethnographer and interviewer in the field; . In short, your big idea should tie the whole script together.

How much space should I devote to each part of my talk?

Your goal is to create a 25–30-minute talk, which (in Times New Roman 12) is roughly 12–15 double-spaced pages, or 3,000-3,750 words. Since the most important part of the talk is your big idea (i.e., the last part), you should give it the most space, and you should build up to it, giving more space — hence more emphasis — to each part of the talk as it proceeds:

· Intro: 1–2 double-spaced pages (250–500 words)

· Summary: 2–3 double-spaced pages (500–750 words)

· Description: 4–5 double-spaced pages (1,000–1,250 words)

· Analysis: 5–6 double-spaced pages (1,250–1,500 words)

There's no ideal number of paragraphs per part — though they'll all need more than one, for sure. So instead of thinking about an ideal number, make sure that each point you intend to make gets a fully developed paragraph of its own.

What’s our drafting schedule?

· By noon on Monday, submit a draft of your intro and summary sections by noon on Monday. Name it as follows: First name, last name - TED Script - Draft 1- WRIT 1133.

· By noon on Wednesday, submit a draft of the entire script: all four parts. Name it as follows: First name, last name - TED Script - Draft 2- WRIT 1133.

· By 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, July 18, turn in your final, revised version of the script. Name it as follows: First name, last name - TED Script - FINAL - WRIT 1133.