UNCW English 201-006

At this time, you should have completed the research for you research paper. In other words, your research topic proposal, preliminary bibliography, and annotated bibliography should serve as your planning process for composing and writing your research paper. You should use the sources from your annotated bibliography to write your essay, which needs to be presented as an argument. In other words, your paper needs to make a claim and support that claim taking a “they say/I say” approach.

For instance, if your research question was “do mini-black holes make up dark matter in galactic halos,” then from your research you should be able to say yes or no, and your thesis will state that. On the other hand, if your research question was “how did the heavy cavalry develop in Western Europe during the medieval period,” then your thesis would derive out of your research. (If you researched this topic, you would learn that the development of the heavy cavalry–the armored knight on horse back–was tied to the changing nature of medieval warfare: horses got increasingly bigger and armor got increasingly stronger until firearms made armor obsolete. Therefore, your thesis statement would make such a claim).

So, look at the information you have found and determine if your thesis is an arguable statement. If it is not, you need to develop a new thesis. After you have developed your thesis statement, start thinking about how you can work the information you have into an argument. What background information do you need to present? What claims can you make? What order should you present these claims? Do you need to make any rebuttals? After you have developed a basic outline for yourself, write your paper.

Guidelines and Requirements

This paper needs to be 6 - 8 pages long — this means 6 full pages, not 5 1/2, not including notes or your works cited page. It must follow MLA, format. Your paper must contain a minimum of 6 sources, no more than 2 of which are from the Internet. A print out of all Internet sources must accompany your paper.

What is an Annotated Bibliography?

An annotated bibliography is a list of references that have been summarized and reviewed in light of a particular position or claim a writer plans to make. The bibliography lists reference information of sources that have been researched in a conventionally accepted style (e.g. APA, CBE, MLA, or Chicago). Each reference is followed by a brief summary of the points pertinent to the writer’s position and a review of that information in light of its usefulness (or lack of usefulness) to the writer’s project.

Purpose of the Assignment
Annotated bibliographies are useful research tools. They can help you to collate and evaluate information for larger research projects.

Occasionally, a professor may ask you to write an annotated bibliography instead of a term paper. In this case, he or she may ask for an introduction, the annotated list of sources, and a conclusion. For example, your Early American History professor may ask that you research the achievements of women during the colonial and revolutionary periods. They may ask you to find a number of sources, annotate, and review their information. They may also ask that you write an introduction, which introduces the nature of your investigation and the information you have found and a conclusion, which indicates a brief summary of your findings and an explanation of the significance of those findings, from your point of view. Your professor may then asks that you use this project as a basis for making a class presentation in which you will teach the other members of the class what you have learned. Although you are not specifically asked to write a paper, you have all the skeletal information from which you could go on to write a paper if it were assigned.

To Do

• Using your initial bibliography, begin your research in earnest by reviewing and evaluating potential sources at the same time.
• Choose 8 sources to include in your annotated bibliography. No more than three (3) may be websites and no more than one (1) may be a general magazine article.

Structure

Introduction: In your introduction, you will want to provide your readers background to your topic and issue. The kinds of questions that you will ask yourself before writing this section will include: What background does my audience need? What kinds of issues and evidence made me aware of this topic in the first place? What have I discovered in my initial research? You should write the introduction after you have done all the annotations.

Annotations: Each entry will consist of 4-5 sentences and should:

• summarize the main point,
• evaluate the source,
• explain the source’s usefulness to your project, and
• discuss how it relates to the other items within your bibliography.

At the top of each entry should be the bibliographic information following MLA documentation guidelines.

For web sites: You will want to explain why the web site is more useful than something you can find in the library. I include this requirement not because I am against web sites, but because I want you to realize that since anyone can publish on the web, you need to think critically about what you’re using and why.

Conclusion: The conclusion to your annotated bibliography should provide a brief summary of what you have learned. It should also address the questions you may still have and suggest your direction for further research. You should also state the position or thesis you plan to take in your research paper.

Due: Friday, 30 November

Using the library’s databases and online catalog and the Web, come up with 12-16 potential sources for your research paper (both print and electronic sources). You need not read all these sources, but you should take a look at them and get an idea of what they do and if they might be of use for you. While it’s okay to have some non-scholarly sources (popular magazines, encyclopedias, non-scholarly web sites, newspapers, popular books), you need to have a good mix of scholarly sources as well (peer-reviewed academic articles, books from academic presses, scholarly web sites, etc.).

This bibliography should use MLA formatting and style.

Due: Monday, 19 November

 Based on the free-writing you’ve done in class, write me a letter in which you identify a topic you want to pursue for your research paper (remember, it must fall within the overall theme of media and its effects), identifying not only what it is but explaining why you want to pursue that topic, and 3 or 4 ideas you might explore. At this point you need not have a thesis, but if you do have a research question, do include it.

Things to keep in mind: Your final project will be a researched argumentative essay following the They Say/I Say format. That is, you will be entering into a conversation by making a claim about your topic and incorporating and responding to other source.

This letter should be emailed to me as a .doc or .rtf attachment. Save a copy for yourself!

Due: 10:00 AM, Friday, 16 November

Essay 2 (PDF)

Goals/Objectives
For this second essay, you will choose a section from Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good for You and Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Massage and compare the rhetorical techniques at work in each of the two essays. This is to be a thesis-driven essay which compares and contrasts the rhetorical techniques at work in each of the two passages. Your essay should be 4-5 typed, double-spaced pages.

Remember, a rhetorical analysis is not a summary. A rhetorical analysis assumes your audience is familiar with the main points of the piece and, therefore, analyzes how a text is constructed to fulfill the requirements of its purpose, audience, and context.

The Assignment
In writing this comparative rhetorical analysis, you will first be required to state clearly the main idea of each section; you will then point to the specific ways each author supports that thesis. In providing those specific examples of how each author supports his thesis, you will also classify that support as appealing to logic, authority, or emotion (that is, making use of logos, ethos, or pathos).

Also, pay attention (if possible) to who each author seems to be writing to. The primary questions to answer in a rhetorical analysis are: What methods are being employed in order to appeal to an audience? And why are these particular sorts of appeals being made? So it’s important that this paper not stop at showing what the author does; you must also explain why the author does it.

In explaining (and comparing) how these authors support their main ideas, you might point to such techniques or strategies as:

• The author’s use of appeals (How does the author project an authoritative, credible stance (ethos)? What techniques does the author use to appeal to the audience’s emotions (pathos)? What techniques does the author use to appeal to the audience’s rationality (logic)?)
• The way the passage is arranged (Is there a method to the way the passage is put together, including its relationship to the passages around it?)
• Specific language or word choice (Is there any “loaded language”? What is its effect? Does the author employ vivid metaphors or analogies?)
• The essay’s stylistic features (How might you describe, for example, the author’s voice, how the writer sounds? Does the author speak in plain language or use more elevated prose? Does the writer use short or long sentences? To what effect?)

One thing you shouldn’t do in this paper is to pass any value judgments on the authors you’ll be analyzing. What’s important is that you state clearly what choices these authors make and why they seem to make those choices, not whether you think they make successful choices.

The Process
As you begin your essay, you will want to reread and take notes on each passage. The reading guidelines in the Writing Summaries handout may be of use here as might the Descriptive Outline handout (in fact, you may want to begin by writing a summary of each passage and/or a Descriptive Outline to help you figure out what each passage is doing).

As you begin to analyze each passage, you will want to consider the following questions, although you won’t likely discuss each of them in your essay:

• What is the context of the passage?
  • Why was this text written at the particular time?
  • What else had been said or written previously about the subject?
  • What was the purpose?
  • Can you identify social, economic, and cultural influences of the larger context?
• Who is the audience?
  • What attitudes would the audience have about the subject?
  • What attitudes would the audience have about the author?
  • What did the author assume the audience knew or believed?
• Who is the author?
  • How does the author represent himself or herself in the text?
  • How does the author establish a credible ethos?
  • What else did the author compose?
• What is the medium or genre?
  • What is the medium: print? web site? handwriting? voice recording?
  • What is the genre: speech? essay? letter? poem? advertisement?
• What are the goals of the text?
  • What is the ultimate goal of the text?
  • What are the immediate goals of the text?
  • Is the text part of a larger project?
    • If so, what is the ultimate goal of the project?
    • How does this text support the larger project’s ultimate goal?
• What is the subject?
  • Can you summarize the main idea?
  • How is the main idea supported?
  • How is the text organized?
  • How does the writer/speaker appeal to reason (logos) or to emotion (pathos)?
• How would you describe the style?
  • Is the style formal? Informal? Academic?
  • Does the writer/speaker use humor or satire?
  • What metaphors are used?
  • Can you identify any patterns in the sentences?
  • How is the style related to the purpose?

Individual Conferences
During the week of October 22, I will meet with each of you to discuss your plan for your paper. For the meeting, you will want to have a specific idea about what you are going to include in your paper (the techniques and strategies you are going to discuss) and an idea of how you are going to organize it.

Peer-review Draft
Peer-review drafts will be due at 5:00 PM, Wednesday, October 31, at which point they should be uploaded to Comment. All peer-review drafts should have gone through at least one revision and one editing/proofreading session. The goal in preparing a peer-review draft is to produce the best product that you can. If your peer-review draft is beneath your best efforts, you are likely to get feedback that only tells you what you already know. The purpose of the peer review is for you to get feedback that can help you grow in new directions, and to get that kind of feedback, you need to turn in your best effort

Instructor-review Draft
Based upon your peer-review, revise your essay at least once. Please submit your essay in a folder with the following material:

• The final draft of you essay, clearly marked as such,
• All drafts between the peer review and the final version, clearly marked to indicate what version each is,
• A printout of your peer-review draft, with comments, from Comment,
• All earlier drafts of your essay, clearly marked as to indicate what version each is,
• And any prewriting you may have.

Accompanying your essay should be a brief cover letter that discusses:

1. What changes you made after the peer review and why you made them,
2. Why you believe your final draft successfully fulfills the assignment, and
3. Any of the following issues:
   • What resources you drew upon in the process of writing and revising your essay,
   • What you struggled with during the process,
   • What you think you learned, and
   • What rhetorical and writing issues you focused on in this project.

Peer-review Draft: Due 10:00 PM, Monday, 5 Nov.

Peer-review: Due 8:00 PM, Sunday, 11 Nov.

Instructor-review Draft: Monday, 19 Nov.

A Descriptive Outline can help you analyzing the meaning and function of discourse in a text. It can help you analyze a written text (authored by you or someone else) and provide feedback for others.

To produce a Descriptive Outline, you need to write a says sentence and a does sentence for each paragraph or section, and then for the whole essay. A says sentence summarizes the meaning or message. A does sentence describes the function—what the paragraph or piece is trying to do or accomplish (for example, “This paragraph introduces the topic of the essay by means of a humorous anecdote” or “This paragraph brings up an objection that some readers might feel, and then tries to answer that objection”).

The key to writing does sentences is to keep them different from the says sentences. Keep them from even mentioning the content of the paragraph. Thus, you shouldn’t be able to tell from a does sentence whether the paragraph is talking about cars or ice cream. Here is a does sentence that slides into being a says sentence: “This paragraph gives an example of how women’s liberation has affected men more than it has women.” To make it a real does sentence, remove any mention of the ideas or content and talk only about function. For example, a sentence like “This paragraph gives an example” would do; although better, perhaps, would be, “This paragraph gives an example designed to surprise the reader.”

For Short Project 1, you want to select a passage from Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You and, using the Writing Summaries handout, write a one-page summary of that passage. Your summary should

• identify the passage and its main point early on, and
• integrate a quote, making sure that the quote if properly framed and cited, and that the text quoted is significant to the passage being summarized.

The summary should itself be typed.

What Do I Mean by Passage?

Exactly how you want to define passage is up to you, but it should be a coherent section from the book. It could be a chapter, such as the Introduction (pp. 1-14) or Part II (pp. 139-99); it could be one of the topics from Part I such as Television (pp. 62-115) or Film (pp. 125-131); or it could be a subsection such as the discussion of the “probe, hypothesize, reprobe, rethink cycle” in Video Games (pp. 42-47) or of flashing arrows in Television (pp. 72-84). I would recommend choosing a section you want to work with for your second essay.¹

Due Date: Wednesday, 17 Oct.

1. Essay 2 will ask you to select a section from Johnson’s book and a section from McLuhan’s book and analyze the rhetorical strategies they use in those two passages. [↩]

What is Summary?
A summary attempts to capture the important turns of argument of a source and is a brief restatement of the content of a passage or text, written in you own words. Generally, summaries should be written as objectively as possible, with your goal being the presentation of another writer’s views presented without your own opinions.

The length and purpose of the summary will determine how detailed your summary of the other text should be. While a one to two sentence summary will do little more than identify the text and restate the main point, a two-page summary of a 20-page book chapter will delve into the major points raised within that chapter. Continue Reading »

On the Handouts page are two handouts with passages taken from your first essays. One handout provides good examples of how to mix narrative, song information, and analysis, and the other handout provides sample passages that need to be rewritten. Please don’t take it personally if you find a passage from your essay on that second handout. I chose those passages because they represent problems common to most of the essays.

The i•claim handout is available from the Handouts page.