To raise your spirits, let’s begin with a clip:

Now, let’s whip up the framework for a Major Paper 1 on a new sound-script for Roger & Me.

First, aside from making a new sound-script, what do we have to do?

• Make a complex claim about why your sound-script matters and how it intersects with an important social issue relevant to your film or TV show.
• Be supported by intertextualized evidence from the following materials:

• Your new sound-script,
• Your film or TV show (visuals or sounds),
• At least one peer-reviewed journal article or academic text outside of the course material, and
• (OPTIONAL) A selection from the 121 course material.

• Demonstrate an awareness of your sound-script’s rhetorical strategies and conventions.
• Use writing strategies that are proper to academic writing to argue why your sound-script matters.
• Include an appropriate title.

Ok, now we also need to make sure we cover the course outcomes. Today, we’ll focus especially on the first three and begin with some important pre-writing questions.

• Who is our audience? What do they expect? (MLA, for one)
• What evidence do we have to work with? (I’m thinking of at least five here.)
• What tools from class do we have to work with? (I’m thinking of at least five here, too.)
• What’s our primary artifact of analysis? And what is the gist of it? What is it arguing? How is it engaging Roger & Me?

Now that we have a toolbox, the prompt, and the course outcomes in hand, let’s frame the paper.

• Introduction: What might it include?
• Body: What might it include?
• Conclusion? What might it include?

Here’s an example paragraph that I wrote about Roger & Me for 121, should you wish to use it as an example. Note the use of three-step analysis.

In his 1989 documentary film, Roger and Me, Michael Moore assumes the role of narrator, a position through which he verbally arranges the visual material, describes and contextualizes it, and ultimately makes an argument about it. That argument is essentially that General Motors (GM), and particularly GM’s chief executive officer (CEO), Roger Smith, ruined the economy and culture of Flint, Michigan when they closed their factories and consequently laid off over thirty thousand GM employees. Importantly, Moore grew up in Flint. As such, Roger and Me might be understood as Moore’s way of speaking for the people of Flint–representing them through the film, articulating their histories and best interests on their behalf, and circulating those representations, histories, and interests to an audience beyond the city’s physical limits. For example, consider a trailer for the film, in which Moore declares: “To raise [the people of Flint’s] spirits, I made this movie.” The visuals corresponding with Moore’s voice-over narration consist of a large crowd of (ostensibly angry) people, who are presumably from Flint. This crowd collectively exclaims, “Fire Roger Smith! Fire Roger Smith!” And so, in subsequent scenes, the audience witnesses Michael Moore engaging in a hopeless search for the elusive CEO of GM. Of note, the audience also hears Moore sarcastically narrating his own experiences, helping the audience move from visual to visual and transitioning them between the documentary’s informational gaps. In short, the audience is to understand Michael Moore not only as the documentary’s narrator, who synthesizes audio and video with the film’s plot and Flint’s history, but also as a type of superhero or champion, who seeks justice for the people of Flint at all costs. However, if we consider arguments such as Linda Martín Alcoff’s “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” then Moore’s voice-overs and narrative approach, especially his appropriation of others, may be ethically problematic. Additionally, when considering the generic conventions of Roger and Me as a documentary, Moore’s various rhetorical moves, though persuasive, might very well lead an audience to inaccurate or extremely biased conclusions about Flint’s people, culture, and economy. The next question is, then: How might an alternative mode of narration resolve the apparent dissonance between Moore, as narrator, and the city of Flint, as Moore’s “subjects”?