- Genre: Contextual Analysis
- Audience: educated, curious readers; some are on your side, some are skeptical
- Learning Outcomes: Rhetorical Knowledge; Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing; Knowledge of Conventions; Processes
- Length: 1500-1750 words
- Sources: minimum of eight credible sources, at least four of which come from peer-reviewed scholarly publications; one of which must be a book
- Background: St. Martin’s e-Handbook: choosing topics (12); conducting research (13); integrating sources (15)
By this point in the term, and after an individual conference with me, you should have identified an issue or a question that interests you for further inquiry from reading the New York Times: a trend, an idea, an argument or advocacy position, or an ongoing news story.
Your challenges for this project are to first spend some time in inquiry mode, asking questions — to whom does this issue matter? Why? What is interesting about it? What is important about it? What is at stake? — to contextualize your issue and to then, finally, to take a persuasive position on it.
Our Process:
- Fri. 1/27: Online library workshop
- Mon. 1/30: Preliminary Inquiry Question
- Mon. 2/6: Project Proposal with three rhetorical precis
- Mon. 2/13: Project First Draft (workshop & peer review)
- Mon. 2/20: Project Second Draft (workshop & peer review)
- Wed. 2/22: Source Remix
- Wed. 2/29: Project Final Draft