Hello, I'm glad you're here. Today, we're going to be choosing our area of expertise. I very much believe that people write better when they care about what they're writing about. And so throughout this course, I want you to be working with an area of inquiry or expertise that you care about. This will make you more invested in your writing and it will also make it more interesting, presumably for you to read your colleagues writing, because you'll learn about all these different areas of expertise. In this course, you're going to use this area of expertise to do research. So you can choose an area of inquiry or expertise that you know very little about or something that you feel a little more well versed in, whatever you want to learn about or if you want to demonstrate your knowledge of something. But either way, you're going to be doing research on this area of inquiry. So, it should be something that you feel like you'll be able to find materials on. Specifically, the materials over the whole semester that you'll be looking for will be a visual image depicting something related to this area of expertise. Secondly, you'll be finding materials for a case study. This will be an in-depth examination of somebody or some aspect of this area of expertise, so you can learn about it. And finally, you'll be writing an op-ed, which is an opinion piece. Op-ed stands for opposite the editorial page. You'll be writing an op-ed report where you're communicating with a broader public, some important aspects that you think they need to know about this area of inquiry. I want to ask, what do you [COUGH] want to write about for all of these projects? You could choose a hobby, a trade, a skill, an area of knowledge, an historical event, a sport, a geographical region. Anything that you want to learn about or write about will be fine, I'm going to ask you to spend one minute brainstorming, possibilities for your area of expertise. Remember that in this class, we're going to be examining a variety of different kinds of strategies for prewriting activities and brainstorming is a prewriting activity. The idea with all prewriting activities and brainstorming, especially is that you want to just generate as much material as possible without censoring yourself, without rethinking. So maybe if you want to have glass blowing as a possible area of expertise in your head, you might then start to think, well, I don't have access to glass blowing materials and I don't know how I would learn it and I'm not sure if I really want to do that, but don't do all of that. Just write glass blowing and then move on to the next possible area of inquiry. So, I'm taking my phone and I'm going to use my timer and we're going to spend one minute together brainstorming. So go ahead and if you need to please pause, so you can get something to write on and something to write with and I'll set my timer and then we'll work together. Ready, set, go. [SOUND] Our timer's up and so [SOUND] you'll see that I actually only came up with like seven things. I don't know how far you've got, but I think I'm needing to brainstorm a little bit more. So I think I would invite you to, after this video to go ahead and spend maybe three to five more minutes brainstorming more possibilities. My options right now are swimming, dance, glassblowing, interior design, neurology. I'm very interested in neurology. Medieval times, tapestry making, fashion design. I don't really know what I'm going to choose, but I'll probably brainstorm more. I'm looking forward to seeing your writing over this course and learning about all kinds of areas of expertise.
