PURPOSE: You can review the assignment instructions on pages 249 – 253, however, the specifics of the assignment are outlined below.
Your response for this assignment MUST BE AN ESSAY FORMAT AS THE EXAMPLE INDICATES.
Many challenges that writers routinely encounter while drafting their academic or formal texts are well known and occur every time a writer composes; we could call them “standing” challenges because they never go away. How should you introduce your text? What are good strategies for writing a conclusion? How do you introduce sources? How do you decide whether and when to use I in your text?
In this project, you’ll identify one such standing challenge (choosing from a list ON PAGE 250 or offering your own suggestion to your instructor) and a kind of writing that you’d like to look at to see how other writers have solved that challenge. You’ll create a corpus (like Thonney does in her piece) of ten examples of such writing, and explain the ways that the EACH text solves the writing challenge that you’re analyzing (without using 1st or 2nd person). The sources you use must be authoritative from a Triton Database, CompPile or other source listed in the Module 3 lecture material.
This project will look similar to Thonney’s study of conventions of academic discourse, using headers.
RESEARCH: CHOOSE A CHALLENGE AND BUILD A CORPUS
Begin this project by deciding on what standing challenge you’d like to investigate THAT FOLLOW TRADITIONAL ACADEMIC WRITING STANDARDS. It might be most useful to you to choose a standing challenge that you find most difficult to address in your own academic writing. You will choose from the list below, or, because it’s not an exhaustive list, you can propose a standing challenge of your own to propose to your instructor. The challenge you choose should, like the ones listed below, have to do with difficult decisions writers routinely face, while drafting pieces of academic writing , about what the text should say or how it should say it. Below we list some standing challenges that pertain to many genres of academic writing.
STANDING CHALLENGES IN ACADEMIC WRITING (refer to the chart on page 250)
Once you know what standing challenge you’d like to study, you need to decide which texts you’ll examine for how they negotiate this challenge. Because, as numerous readings throughout this book demonstrate, writing varies by the purpose and readership whose needs it responds to, you should make sure all the texts in your corpus are of the same “type” in some way: ALL RESEARCH ARTICLES FROM THE DATABASE. Initially, you’ll need to find more than ten articles so you can narrow down your list to the ones that are most appropriate for your analysis.
Finalize your selections with ten article sources to discuss in your essay.
ANALYZE YOUR CORPUS
Once you’ve collected your texts, read each one thoroughly. Highlight the places in each where your writer deals with the standing challenge you’re studying.
You are to exam how researchers that study college composition write about the challenge you’ve selected. You are going to consider the following:
how do they introduce the challenge
how do they provide proof that the challenge is real
how do they indicate their exigence
how do they introduce sources they have used to support their claim, etc.
Note that, depending on the challenge you’re studying, you may need to define or stipulate what counts as an instance of the writer addressing the challenge. For example, “introducing a source” is not the same as citing a source; researchers may cite scores of sources that they never actually introduce, by simply bundling citations into parentheses without ever speaking about the source directly. You would need to decide what for you is going to count as a writer “introducing” a source.
Depending on the challenge you’re studying, you might wish to create a spreadsheet and copy instances of writers addressing that challenge into the spreadsheet. (For example, instances of a source being introduced.) Or, if your challenge is something that a writer might do very often, like using I, or using very short sentences, you might want to create a spreadsheet that lists each text and the number of times in a text a given strategy is used. (You might further break texts down by parts — intro, body sections, conclusion — and track a given usage by parts.) It would be wise to talk about your plan for analyzing the texts in your corpus with your instructor, with a writing center tutor, with other members of your class, or with friends or family both before and while you analyze texts. Those you talk to can help check your logic and often will be able to make suggestions, or help you see possibilities that you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.
When you’ve gotten a sense of where and how writers are addressing the challenge you’re studying, you’ll be able to begin making comparisons of their strategies for meeting the challenge. This comparison work will help you identify patterns (“writers usually do X”) and ranges (“approaches to this problem vary from strategy A to strategy D, but no one ever does strategy H”).
Bring what you learn from your sources to bear on your analysis by seeing if what you read or what authors tell you helps you identify other patterns than you already had, or helps explain other strategies you find being used in your corpus.
PLANNING, DRAFTING, AND REVISING
When you have a sense of what strategies writers in your corpus are using to address the challenge you’re studying, and any patterns you’re identifying or insights you’re gaining about how to address that challenge yourself based on what other writers are doing, you should be ready to start planning and drafting your report. To plan your piece, you’ll be working to explain USING HEADERS TO SEPARATE THE CONTENT:
What challenge you studied, what makes it a challenge, and what your personal interest or investment in that subject is (exigence).
What principles/criteria you used to decide which texts would be in your corpus.
Ways of describing the strategies, approaches, or solutions you saw authors using to address the challenge
What you feel like you’ve learned from the study
What parts your report will need in order to explain these things, and what material you would plan to include in each part
A good plan, storyboard, list, or outline will help you draft, and you may also be discovering ideas as you draft. Know that this approach can be very effective for generating ideas as you write, but can add some time to the revising process because you’ll probably need to move ideas around quite a bit from where they come to you, to where the reader will be able to make the most sense of them. This is harder to do in prose (full sentences) than in lists, which is why using lists makes planning easier than using prose-paragraphs does.
A good plan, storyboard, list, or outline will help you draft, and you may also be discovering ideas as you draft. Know that this approach can be very effective for generating ideas as you write, but can add some time to the revising process because you’ll probably need to move ideas around quite a bit from where they come to you, to where the reader will be able to make the most sense of them. This is harder to do in prose (full sentences) than in lists, which is why using lists makes planning easier than using prose-paragraphs does.
What you’re aiming to draft, to be clear, is a report on the range of approaches you found to how writers negotiate the challenge you’re studying, any patterns that emerged, and what you learned from the project.
As you should always do with formal or complex writing, expect to continue developing your piece, based on reader feedback, after you’ve completed a first draft. Build time into your drafting process to finish a first version, have other readers give you notes on how they experience the piece at that point, and work further on the piece to tune it based on what readers reported was working well or creating problems for them in the first version. Try not to think of the revising aspect of the drafting process as “extra” work or time, but rather, simply an expected part of the time it takes to get the piece built to begin with.
EXTRA CREDIT OPPORTUNITY: When you near the end of your drafting, consider adding a “coda” or addendum to your piece that discusses whether, and how, you were able to apply your learning on the standing challenge you studied to your writing of this piece. If you focused on introductions, did you learn anything that helped you design the introduction to this report? (If you indicate you changed something in your writing, it must be evident in this draft vs essay 1 and 2).
WHAT MAKES IT GOOD
REVIEW THE RUBRIC
The purposes of this project are to build your knowledge about strategies texts typically wind up using to solve a given standing problem, and to share that knowledge with other writers. You will have done the project well if your final report:
Clearly explains what the “standing” challenge is that the report investigates
Studies a corpus of similar texts for how they solve or negotiate this challenge
Describes the strategies you see the texts in your corpus using, and identifies any patterns that emerge
Explains what conclusions you draw from your research, and how you would apply those conclusion to your own future writing.
Strategies for Success:
Be sure to review the rubric for specific assignment expectations.
Don’t use 1st and 2nd person.
Don’t announce your intent. The thesis should be a claim you intend to prove using the examples you provide and should not be a question, use the 5-paragraph format method, etc.
Essay must be 1200 – 1400 words and at least 10 paragraphs. NOT INCLUDING CITED MATERIAL.
Your format must be in traditional MLA essay structure.
You will need to cite all your resources from the readings/videos if you reference the material.
