Statement of Discovery

Discovery Rebrand Pitch - Poster 10
Originally uploaded by the last mixtape

Here's an example of a Statement of Discovery:

When I began this project, I wanted to explore the 30 years of friendship I’ve had with my childhood girlfriends. My main focus, I thought, was going to center on two recent instances that pulled the six of us closer together and so I began my research by searching for genre sources based on those two incidents: my one girlfriend's pregnancy and my other friend's recent diagnosis.

I chose my first set of genre sources from my personal documents, pulling from electronic sources such as online conversations, emails, Facebook threads, and articles and also a hardcopy source, in the form of a thank you note. Beginning with a visual source, a picture of my friends and I taken at a baby shower a few weeks ago, I set out to discover the basis of this long lasting friendship by first analyzing the details of that still image. From there, I moved on to comparing two textual sources related to the photo in an attempt to further the meaning behind the image and connect it to my topic at large.

At that point, I realized that I had spent pages talking about my friends but I had only gone into detail about a few of them, so I decided to shift my focus for a moment and describe each of the girls and how we met. I felt this was imperative since a significant amount of attention had been focused on the longevity of our friendship; I want to afford my reader an opportunity to meet each girl as I did, all those years ago.

At that point, I sourced additional genres because I knew I wanted to segue from the role my friend's pregnancy played in reuniting our friendship circle to the role our other friend's diagnosis had in strengthening it. I turned to a well known literary friendship, that of deceased poet Lucy Grealy and current contemporary fiction novelist, Ann Patchett.

Their story served as a meaningful transition between the two parts of the story I was trying to tell and in the end, I discovered that it was the second story that was the most powerful part of the project, which is why I spent 13 pages writing the story that she told to me.

I believe that story says everything about friendship that needs to be said; the discovery and the telling of that story is that makes this project meaningful. This project afforded me an opportunity to take time to explore something that is often taken for granted - the value of our personal relationships and in the end, I've realized just how fortunate I am to have such a lovely circle of friends.

Multigenre Help

help me...
Originally uploaded by blue out

OK - this is your last bit of help:

Don't forget:

- Title Page with the name of your project, centered, with your name centered beneath

- Table of Contents (don't forget to number your pages)

- Statement of Purpose

- SIX separate modes of expression on your SIX genre sources; don't forget to include a minimum of TWO secondary extensions in the form of footnotes

- Statement of Discovery

- Works Consulted for all TEN sources

Here's a sample of my Works Consulted:

Works Consulted

Black, Erica A. Thank-You Note to Ali Weiss. June 2009. Ali Weiss Papers. Hoboken, NJ.

Black, Erica, Jennifer Donohoe, Caryn Miller, Heather Agler Roth, Ali

Weiss, Amy Welliver. "Re: Yippee and Yahoo." Facebook. 5 June 2009. Web. 8 June 2009. .

Donohoe, Jennifer. “hey…”. Message to Ali Weiss. 9 June 2009. E-mail.

Grealy, Lucy. “Autobiography of a Face.” New York. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994.

Grealy, Sue Ellen. “Hijacked by Grief.” The Guardian. 7 August 2004. Web. 6 June 2009.

Patchett, Ann. Truth and Beauty: A Friendship. New York: Harper Collins, 2004.

Sparks, Muriel. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999.

Six Friends at Christmastime. December 27th, 2008. Photograph. Courtesy of Ali Weiss

Six Friends in Lewisburg, PA. May 24th, 2009. Photograph. Courtesy of Ali Weiss.

Wodehouse, Suzanne. “Re: Keeping it real since 1973”. Facebook. 26 May 2009. Web. 8 June 2009. .

If you have further questions, email me at readwriteweiss@gmail.com and I'll get back to you at some point over the weekend.

And yes, it is due on MONDAY the 15th, NO EXCEPTIONS!

IN DA CLUB

IN DA CLUB
Originally uploaded by thug lif3

In honor of the end of the school year, if you mention that you read this blog posting over the weekend by saying the phrase "gee, Ms. Weiss, I'm sure glad we're out of the media center and back In Da Club", I'll show your class my infamous dance video.