Objectives:
1) To build on the close-reading skills begun with Analysis assignment.
2) To show comprehension of argumentative essay structure.
3) To use personal experience as a means for intervening in scholarly discourse related,
broadly speaking, to awe.
Assignment: For this assignment, you will create your own experience with awe (or document one that
incidentally happened) and connect that experience to readings from the semester. Doing so will
help you respond to this question:
What was the overall rhetoric of your awe experience, and how did it dialogue with course
texts?
Moves with Content
A successful paper will
1) Be based on a very recent awe experience. The awe experience should not be a distant
memory that you might misremember. You should be able to speak about the experience
with detail and authority.
2) Not be intentionally mediated with drugs or alcohol, for pretty obvious legal reasons.
3) Use the close-reading skills you developed with the Analysis essay to discuss specific
details from the awe experience and their significance. What does the experience say
about you? About the experience itself? About awe generally? Why did this particular
experience, instead of any other experience, create awe for you?
4) Use the analytical-writing skills you have developed throughout the semester to connect
details from your awe experience to other readings.
5) Use at least one reading other than Keltner from our assigned course readings. If
you need to add more sources through research, that’s fine.
Moves with Form
1) Write intro, body, and concluding paragraphs that demonstrate academic conventions.
2) Make sure each body paragraph is an argument you can summarize in 1-3 words.
3) Make sure each body paragraph has a topic sentence that summarizes the paragraph’s
argument and connects that argument to the thesis.
4) Explain how each piece of evidence connects to the topic sentence and to other evidence
within the paragraph.
5) Connect body paragraphs to each other by explaining the logic that connects them. The
argument should not just be a list of paragraphs; the order of paragraphs should matter,
and you should explain the logic of that order, usually at the beginnings and endings of
paragraphs.
6) Make sure to use evidence from different sources in each body paragraph. A body
paragraph featuring evidence from only one source is usually just a summary of
that source, and body paragraphs should be driven by your ideas, not summaries.
For this assignment, a “quote” can be a reference to your awe experience.
7) Offering a paragraph-long re-consideration of your initial argument: a moment of
‘but’ or ‘and yet’ where you consider possible limitations or complications to what
you have argued so far. This should also have evidence to support it.
Specs:
Length: 4 pages
Spacing: Double
Font: Times New Roman
Size: 12
Margins: 1”
Citation Style: MLA
Header
MLA
Page Numbers: Yes
