ENG 301: Writing for the Professions

Dr. Keith Miller

FIRST ASSIGNMENT: SLAVE BURIAL GROUND

Your first assignment is to write a proposal based on Boiarsky and Soven's materials about the African Slave Burial Ground accidently uncovered in Manhattan by a construction crew that was building a courthouse. Your proposal will be evaluated by proper federal authorities.

You graduated from ASU with a sterling academic record and either soon or eventually advanced to some position appropriate to making your proposal. You propose what this position is. You can be president of a university, chair of an anthropology department at a university, Mayor of New York City, a member of the City Council of New York City, a museum official, president of the NAACP, or whatever position you like, as long as it is relevant to making a reasonable and convincing proposal. If you like, you can invent your organization as well as your position in it.

In your proposal you need to address the following issues as intelligently as possible:

1. How your proposal was developed. What process was followed.
Who was involved. Why you developed your proposal through this process.
2. What to do with the slave burial site in Manhattan.
3. What to do with the courthouse in the process of being built.
4. What to do with remains that have yet to be excavated.
5. What to do with the already excavated remains and artifacts.
6. What to do with the excavated remains and artifacts over the long run.
7. Where the money from your plan will come from.
8. What your budget is and how you are allocating it.

You must justify your proposed solution, explaining why it is the best possible solution. You need to do so in order to have your proposal accepted over other, competing proposals, such as the one from Howard University.

Consider Figures 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4, which raise various questions and objections to details in the Howard University proposal. The critics who wrote these questions are responding mainly to portions of the proposal that are not in your book. But many of their objections seem sound. When you write your proposal, you need to counter possible objections to your ideas.