The final project in this course is to design and sell a pseudoscientific product. The final project will have 3 components: 1) a stand-alone bibliography for the project, 2) a video recording where you sell your product for no less than 4 minutes, and 3) a brief reflection essay (no more than 3 pages) about the decisions you’ve made while putting together and pitching the fraudulent product, making connections to the material that you have been working with this semester and the research you have done.
Bibliography
In this section, you will go out into the Wild Wild World of Web and sample various types of bunkum. I want you to see how people sell weird ideas to people. Eventually, you will copy these methods for your final project. You will generate a bibliography of the various websites/books/podcasts/videos that you encounter. A successful bibliography will:
Have around 20 properly formatted bibliographic entries in either MLA or APA format. See the Purdue OWL for citation styles. (That’s like one a day. Not that bad.)
As you research this stuff, I want you to be looking up what the science says about these practices, how the products are sold to people, who the audiences for the products are, who the speakers are, what type of beliefs and desires to the pitchmen tap into to sell their products, and so on. These ideas will be included in a… Reflective Overview Essay
…that will be no more 3 pages and will be submitted to Classroom. You will discuss the best sources you found and how you adapted their strategies to sell your bunkum product in your…
YouTube-Worthy Video Ad
This is a hard sell. You can record this with whatever software you like: YouTube, FlipGrid, the Tickety-Toks, I don’t care. But you must be able to SUBMIT A LINK to the video in Classroom.