A white paper is a report that offers a solution to a problem. It is often used in business/technology to propose a new product/innovation or in government to propose a certain policy/course of action. They are read by the people in the company or government or other institution who are higher up and make decisions about what products/policies to go with; consumers and the general public are usually not the intended audience for white papers. People who write white papers are usually workers within the institution who have an idea (that they have a lot of evidence for) which they want enacted but don’t have the power to enact it themselves, so they pitch their idea to the higher ups through a white paper. The rhetorical purpose it to inform the readers of the benefits of their product or policy and to persuade the readers to go with their idea. A white paper is written academically, with a lot of data usually. They are usually 6 to 10 pages and are formatted similar to academic articles, they also often have visual representations of data (such as graphs or charts). I’m not totally sure of the formatting of a white paper, but this is what I found through looking at guides on how to write them and examples.
The discipline I have chosen for Project 2 is film. Depending on whether they’re learning to make films or analyze them, students will write different things. Students studying filmmaking may write screenplays, while those studying film analysis may write film criticism or analyze the literary and/or the visual aspects of a film. Professionals in the field of film may write screenplays for movies or academic journal articles analyzing or criticizing films. Some important conventions of screenplays that distinguish that genre of writing are the dialogue, as well as the stage directions, camera direction, and action descriptions. Also, there are descriptions of the character’s emotions and how the lines should be delivered. Good writing in a screenplay is determined through its ability to convey the writer’s vision of the film to the actors and other people in the production team. Also, within the finished film, the screenplay and the movie are good if they capture the audience and make them feel the intended emotions. Academic criticism for films is similar to academic articles for literature, except there is often the added component of analyzing the visuals/direction, rather than just the text/dialogue. In my research, I’ve found examples of screenplays and academic articles of film criticism, which is how I’ve discerned the conventions of the genre.
Molly's Rhetoric Blog 