Round up of assignments for Monday, Oct. 3

Hi everyone,

Okay, following up after our non-class on Monday. Hope everyone is having a good first full week of autumn!

I wanted to confirm the reading assignments for this week prior to class on Monday, Oct. 3.

And I'll also add in a writing assignment that I'd like you to compete prior to our next class.

Because I'm getting it to you late, I'll give you until Sunday, Oct. 2 to get the writing assignment to me. Hope that seems fair to all

So, to repeat the reading assignments:

• In "Dynamics of Media Writing," please read chapters 7 and 8. We'll talk about this material in class next time. Chapter 7 focuses on legal issues and is particularly rich with important info.

• In "The Inside Scoop," please read through the end of Chapter 9. Pay attention to their dispute with the Pillsbury Corp. We'll use that as the basis for several writing assignments.

Speaking of which...here's the writing assignment:

• Chapter 6 of the "Dynamics" book is about writing for the Web. We'll talk more about this in our class on Monday, Oct. 3.

But for now, I'd like you to try to write some Web copy for Ben & Jerry's. Your job is to help them out in their dispute with the Pillsbury Corp. as described in Chapter 9.

In the "Inside Scoop" book, go to Page 110. The second-to-last full paragraph describes how Ben Cohen and Chico Lager felt about doing battle with a giant corporation:

"Even before we determined that what they were doing was illegal, we knew it was immoral. If we could get the word out, we felt confident that other people would react the same way we had—with disbelief, followed quickly with a sense of outrage."

So your assignment is to help them get the word out by writing up the situation from their point of view. And you'll write this specifically for the company's Web site.

(Yes, I know they didn't have a Web site in the early 1980s. This is just an exercise to work on writing copy for the online world.)

So please write up copy for a single Web page that explains the Pillsbury Corp. dispute from the perspective of Ben & Jerry's.

Can you lay it out to cause a reader to see it the way Ben and Chico do in the above quote from the book?

Please read through all of Chapter 6 in the "Dynamics" book and try to follow the guidelines of effective writing for the Web.

To help you, here's a short list of requirements for this assignment, and for Web writing in general:

1. Come up with a great headline that invites visitors to read further and learn more.

2. Break up the copy into screen-sized paragraphs, also called chunks. Generally, that means just one or two sentences per paragraph.

3. Keep it short and to the point—no more than seven or eight "chunks" or paragraphs in total. But include as much detail as you need to make the case.

4. Explain this dispute for a general audience. Use simple vocabulary.

5. And overall, do what you can to provoke the reaction that Ben and Chico want: "...disbelief, followed quickly with a sense of outrage."

What information can you include to create these feelings in your audience? What can you say?

Format: Please submit this assignment as a .doc file attached to an e-mail. Please get it to me no later than Sunday, Oct. 2 at 9 p.m.

Questions? Please don't hesitate to ping me. I'm looking forward to seeing what you do!

Blogs: I'll address these in a separate post tomorrow. For now, I just wanted to get the above assignment out to you.

Thanks and more tomorrow!

Jeff R.