In this assignment, “translate” the central concerns and claims from an academic paper in the humanities into the public writing genre of the open letter.

The purpose of your letter is to “translate” what you say in the original paper and how you say it to meet the needs of a public audience and to fulfill a public purpose.

The open letter will thus work to demonstrate what the humanities can do in response to a selected public problem and to show your public audience how such knowledge and skill can impact public discourse and action in the “real world.”

Once you’ve completed your “translation” (reconceiving and composing an academic essay as an open letter, you will be asked to write a reflection on this process, exploring how the original argument may have changed through the translation assignment (what parts of the paper were used, what parts were changed or discarded). Your reflection should also consider how your experience of public writing aligns with and/or is different from the more familiar processes of academic writing.