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Final Project: Throughout the semester we will be working with numerous short stories and will be discussing them and approaching them from various standpoints. This project will serve as a capstone to the course--effectively asking you to use the skills and abilities that you have practiced in the course to construct a larger, more formal project. For the final project, you will be preparing a website for a specific short story of your choosing. The story cannot be one that we read in class, must be an "American" short story, and must be approved by me in advance, but other than that, there are no restrictions on what you can choose. The steps and necessary components of this final project are outlined below and the due dates for various portions of your project are explained on the class schedule. As always, if you have any questions or need any additional information, feel free to let me know in class or e-mail me by
clicking here. If you have questions about the citations or citiation formats, please contract me or look at the MLA stylebook available here.
Website: For this project, you will be constructing a website that features the five major components below. The first step that you will need to take in completing this assignment is to find a short story that interests you. Try looking through the Oxford anthology at the stories that we did not read in class. You also might want to search for another story by an author that you enjoyed reading, or try just browsing the some of the short story collections on the Internet or in the library. Once you have found a story, meet with me so that we can discuss your selection. Then, using whatever tools you prefer (including several that we will discuss in class), construct a website around your short story that features the following components:
- Short Story Summary: Since you can not assume that the visitors to your website will have read the short story that your site deals with, you will need to provide a short summary of your short story. This should be roughly a page of typed, double-spaced text and should just give a quick plot overview of your story.
- Critical Analysis of the Short Story: This is the most important part of your website. Building on the discussions that we have in class, try to come up with a way to look at your short story that contributes to the understanding of the story itself. This section of your website will be the longest--roughly seven to ten typed, double-spaced pages. Since critical analysis is a process that we will be discussing in class extensively, I will pass out a more detailed description of this section of your website as we get closer to the proposal due date.
- Author Biography: Using both Internet and traditional research, construct a short biography of the author of your short story. Include information about the author's other publications and links to those publications if they are available online. This page, like the summary, should be roughly a page in length.
- Annotated Bibliography: For this section of your website, you will need to use the MLA Bibliography and Academic Search, as well as various Internet search engines to find other critiques of your short story. Then, construct a page that both lists those critiques in MLA format and annotates each one--providing a short summary of the article. Your page should have at least ten items (some of which you may use in your critical analysis).
- Image Collection: Throughout the semester, I have tried to pair each writing with both supplemental resources available on the Internet. For most readings, I've tried to include at least one link to a picture or a group of pictures that helps make the story come alive or relates to the story in some way. For this section of your site, I would like you to do the same thing--finding and including at least five images and explaining why those images are important.
- Links: For this section of your website, try to find at least five webpages on the Internet that relate to either your short story or to the author. Provide those links as well as a short (two sentence) annotation for each one. If possible, please include a link to the story itself.
Note
- Website Design and Layout: As mentioned in the syllabus, while this course is a hybrid course, it is not a web design or programming course. Therefore, you will be graded on the content of your site, not how well it is designed. Also, we will talk about how to put up a website in class, but you can use any program that you want, from FrontPage to DreamWeaver, to Microsoft Word. Remember, content is everything here.
Copyright ©2003, Richard C. Hay
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