This project serves as the final stage of our exploration into rhetoric and argument. You are required to take a position on a current issue/event, (in this case “Why NIL is ruining NCAA sports”) direct your position toward a target audience, and attempt to persuade this audience of the legitimacy of your position. This project asks you to put into practice the major objectives of the course:
Analyzing the ways in which ideas are presented through rhetorical designs;
Recognizing rhetorical designs in an effort to encourage refutation (dialectic);
Using rhetorical designs to engage in argument;
Considering how argument can function as “meaningful disagreement”;
Using argument as “meaningful disagreement” to learn more about our own identities and commitments and to perform acts of community;
Achieving “meaningful disagreement” through the effective assessment and incorporation of research (“ongoing conversation”).
You are required to use no LESS than five and no MORE than six sources (at least two of your sources must come from the HCC databases). Please keep in mind that you will need to locate, examine, and evaluate roughly triple this amount in order to find five to six relevant, on-topic, reliable, and authoritative sources. You will pull the bulk of these sources from databases such as ProQuest Research Library, Academic Search Complete, Academic OneFile, and Project Muse. You will create a works-cited page for this project, following MLA (9th edition) formatting style. As the first line of the prompt asserts, this essay is meant to be an argumentative position paper. It is not intended to function as a report on or review of a topic/issue. On occasion you might have to review/report on an aspect of your topic in an effort to provide sufficient context, but the central goal of the essay should be argumentative—taking a position on an issue, or more particularly an aspect of an issue, and developing a persuasive argument around your position.
