Assignment
Our major essay for the course is a chance to come up with your own topic, inspired by our course theme and the texts we’ve encountered so far. At this point, something has likely caught your interest and perhaps sparked an idea. This essay is a chance to develop and pursue that idea (or “hunch”) through your own creative focus.
Along the way, this assignment will help you gain practice in forming a working thesis (or thesis question) which focuses your essay, developing/evolving that thesis for the essay, developing complex claims, providing evidence, offering insightful analysis, conducting academic research, integrating a mix of sources to use for your own thinking/analysis, and citing those sources in MLA format (9th edition).
Finding a Topic Focus
The focus of your final essay project should examine a particular subject or theme regarding visual rhetoric. Along the way, you are required to make use of two of the major class readings: Lakoff, Sontag, De Zengotita, Thompson. A particular claim or concept from one of these authors is likely the place to start. That interesting idea/concept/claim is something that you can trace and consider further in a project of your own. Likewise, return to the Short Essay Responses we’ve written. Particular analysis you’ve started in one of those responses could be extended into a larger project.
Whatever you decide to pursue, the project should be original and seek to develop new knowledge and new insights for readers. You main aim for the paper is conduct analysis to develop an insightful argument (or theory/thesis) for readers, making use of source material along the way to borrow and extend their ideas (and, with your research, provide additional context or concepts to develop your discussion).
Building Conversation with Sources
As you develop your essay, you are required to make use of a mix of sources to help you evolve your thesis (or pursue an answer to your thesis question). At least two sources should be from our class texts. The other sources will be of your own choosing, gathered through independent research. You are required to build conversation with at least five credible sources for the essay.
Your work with sources offers you an opportunity to apply, borrow, test, and extend ideas and insights brought up by that author/speaker for your own writing project. Essentially, you want to use sources along the way to help you set up what you want to say and build your analysis.
In his book, Rewriting, Joseph Harris uses the term “forwarding” to describe this kind of work with another text. Reading his chapter on “forwarding” will help you consider how you might use sources to introduce ideas and concepts for you to think with. These moves are described by Harris as “borrowing” and “extending.” In these cases, you don’t sacrifice your thinking for what another author said. Instead, you make use of an idea, term, or concept from that author to help you think through your subject and, along the way, “put your own spin on the terms or concepts that you take from other texts” (Harris 39). By doing this, you can bring in a source to do more than just be an “expert” or an “answer.” A more interesting approach is to use sources to help spark your analysis and your thinking through of the subject you are writing about. This also offers you an opportunity to add to the intellectual conversation started by the texts – which is, essentially, the main goal of this writing project.
Assignment Details
Getting a Thesis
Set up your essay to be an exploration of an initial guiding claim or thinking question that is complex and contains tension (a need for discussion – something that resists easy or predictable answers). This will be your working thesis which you develop and evolve for the essay. Along the way, you want to offer readers evidence and analysis to help think through and develop your guiding claim or question.
Draft 1 is all about trying to find and shape your working thesis. Your essay should discuss some aspect of visual rhetoric, inspired by our coursework so far, and aim to offer readers ideas and theories which add to (extend) the intellectual conversation started by the sources you’re working with.
In essence, you want your writing project to be based in critical thinking, building knowledge, and, most importantly, of genuine interest to you; this means going beyond what you already know or have answers to. The goal is not to persuade your audience about an issue; rather, you should develop a discussion that exploresan original/complex idea or question (consider the difference). Your topic should be something that calls for genuine discussion, through the form of an essay, with multiple perspectives in mind. Your writing should be a discovery for you and your readers, not a dictation of finished thinking or presentation of your opinion only. Writing from a place of genuine inquiry will help you see a need for gathering outside sources and sustain your development of a thesis for readers to take away.
Developing Analysis
A big part of writing a strong academic essay is exploring your central idea (or thinking question) through thoughtful analysis and reflection rather than pro/con or opinion-based writing.
Analysis can
explore a significant tension or trend not commonly noticed,
view an idea or concept from multiple perspectives,
consider implications or answer “so what?”,
examine underlying assumptions in a text or idea,
apply a text or theory as a lens, or
make intellectual moves which help the writer understand his or her topic better.
Consider how analysis works as a step-by-step process: breaking your subject into parts, looking for patterns, making the implicit explicit, forming questions and tentative claims, asking “so what?,” etc.
Finding Evidence and Using Sources (Analytically)
Part of this assignment is for you to gather your own sources to be in conversation with. The sources that you bring into the essay should act as a lens for you to test, develop, complicate, and evolve your initial claim or question you are setting up early on. Use of sources should analytical so you do more than just bring in the source to provide facts or “proof” for points you already know to be true.
Our Week 4 Module will discuss tips for gathering credible sources for your essay. Any medium is fair game, as long as you can justify its credibility as evidence in your paper (this includes film, music, newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, TV shows, online clips and interviews, etc). Keep in mind that online resources are often not very credible nor scholarly valuable – use the open web with caution. Wikipedia, for instance, is not considered a scholarly source.
Along with sources that are more theoretic or “academic,” you’ll want source material that functions as evidence which you can analyze as well. For instance, if you were exploring the interface design of Instagram considering the claims of Lakoff and Sontag, actual Instagram posts would be representative examples you could cite and analyze in depth.
Regarding the research you need to conduct, don’t forget the great resources you have here on campus. A short conversation with a research librarian will save you a lot of time as you plan your draft.
Genre, Audience, and Purpose
Stylistically, you are in the mode of the expository essay, but it does not have to carry a strict academic tone; there is plenty of room in this assignment for a personal voice, if you wish. In other words, it’s definitely okay to use “I” in your paper. “I” in this case is a synthesis of your observations and the social, cultural, historical, personal contexts you are writing from. Personal experience is also okay to use as evidence for your claims, however, it cannot be your only evidence.
Overall, remember that it is important to fully describe, explain, and theorize for an intended audience of interested academic readers. Imagine your audience expecting and wanting ideas, insights, and complexities that are original and satisfying to read. Keeping this in mind will help you stay in the realm of building a larger idea or theory for readers as the essay develops (a clear take-away idea/theory which answers “so what?” for readers by the end of the essay).
Incorporating a Visual Element
Given the overall focus, your essay project should incorporate some visual element to go along with your discussion. Working in the visual mode, in addition to print, will allow you to illustrate your ideas and deepen your analysis of evidence.
This visual element could be as simple as incorporating images into your essay. You could also do a fieldwork photography project. Or, you could develop other visual elements, of your choice, to augment the reading process. How you tackle this aspect of the essay is up to you, but you should include some visual mode to your essay.
Checklist
Draft 1 should reveal an attempt at all of the following requirements:
Your draft should be a minimum of 6 full double-spaced pages with 1’’ side margins, 1” header and footer margins, Times New Roman, 12 pt font.
This draft should include a strong working thesis to help focus your essay; this is a main complex claim or thinking question you set up early on and develop/refine/complicate as the paper unfolds. Your claims should represent complexity in thinking through your ideas and need to be supported by detailed reasons and evidence.
Bring in at least five sources into your essay that you are “in conversation with.” At least two sources must from our class readings (Lakoff, Sontag, De Zengotita, Thompson). Any other texts included in the paper can be of your own choosing. Keep in mind that you want your sources to be credible, or you have to make them credible through your own analysis. Try not to get carried away with sources – you don’t want them to take control of the essay (no more than 8).
As you incorporate your sources, accurately summarize the ideas, theories, terms, or concepts you are using from that source to offer context (making sure your summary is understandable to a reader who is not familiar with the source you’re introducing).
Add to and help develop the ideas from the sources you bring in to help you introduce your own thinkingabout the topic you are writing about. Your sources should be a springboard for your own claims, questions, and analysis. In other words, you must “do something” with your sources. Be sure to clarify the meaning of the material you have quoted, paraphrased, or summarized and explain its significance in light of your evolving thesis.
Support your claims with reasoning and evidence – making sure to link the evidence to the claim(s). You’ll want to include a few of the various kinds of evidence available to analytical writers.
Try to acknowledge “the other side,” or multiple perspectives, so readers can see you addressing possible conflicting evidence or counter arguments (tension) which complicates your thesis (and helps it evolve).
As you move toward the conclusion, address the “so what?” question for your thesis.
Clearly and explicitly explain your chain of reasoning – the thought-connections you are making throughout your draft between claims, evidence, & sources. The more clearly you explain connections to your readers, the more your readers will be able to follow your thinking.
Cite all sources in MLA format (in text), in addition to a Works Cited page. Use Purdue OWL.Links to an external site.
Proofread and edit your draft before turning it in. Be sure that you have avoided all forms of plagiarism, including the use of AI generated writing.
