Letter to the Editor
                                               Geoffrey Bateman

For this assignment, you will demonstrate that you can write a well-crafted, rhetorically situated, and audience-aware letter to the editor of a regional or national newspaper like the Denver Post or the New York Times. There are two options to fulfill this assignment.

Option #1: Find a recent (ideally within the last four or five days) editorial or a piece by a columnist that elicits a strong response from you. You might fervently disagree or agree with it, but regardless, I want you to identify a piece of writing that interests you and that addresses an issue you feel passionately about. First, I want you to write a letter to the editor that responds to the editorial or column and meets the specific guidelines that the newspaper lays out for such letters. (For example, the Denver Post will only accept letters that are less than 200 words.) You should prepare this letter with an eye for submitting it to the editor and writing it so well that it gets published. (Once you workshop the letter and get feedback, you will submit it.) Second, for the purposes of our class, I would like you to expand this letter to a 500-600 word letter that more fully addresses the issue you are responding to. You should maintain the same focus on the newspapers audience, but develop your ideas further. Please submit both of these pieces, as well as the original editorial or column, to your writing group (via the group discussion board or file exchange) and to me (via digital dropbox).

Option #2: For this option, I would like you to draft three different letters to the editor in response to a recent editorial, column, or other letter to the editor. Depending on the newspaper you write for, these letters should each be 200-250 words long. You should follow the guidelines listed above in terms of identifying issues to respond to. Write each of these letters with the intent of submitting them, but you will only have to select one letter to submit after you workshop all three. For our workshop please submit each letter and the pieces they respond to to your writing group (via your group discussion board or file exchange) and to me (via digital dropbox).

Please note: For either option, please compile all these pieces into one MS Word document. You may need to cut and paste the original article(s) and reformat them, but make sure theyre all in one document to make sharing and accessing these files easier.

Also, please make sure you submit your drafts to your writing group so that everyone has enough time to download them to their computer before class begins on Wednesday. If 9:00 am is not early enough, then arrange a better time for your group.

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