Week 3: Readings, Quiz, Project 1

Good morning everyone! I just sent out an e-mail regarding this week's assignments to your Black Board account. This week, your reading covers Chapters 2 &3 with a quiz over the material on Wednesday. Project 1 is also due, as is your third blog post, so you have a busy week ahead of you. I am posting the Project 1 information below, though you can also find it on Black Board and in your most recent e-mail from me. If you have any questions about the assignment, please let me know and I can offer additional guidance. I have been going through your blogs and you all should receive comments from me about your second post either today or tomorrow. Great work so far. There is a lot of stuff happening this week, so please make a note of the due dates for everything, which you will find in the e-mail I just sent to you via Black Board. If you have any questions, you can comment on my blog, e-mail me, Skype or instant message me via Skype--your options are many. Anyway, have a great week!

Courtney

Course Project One: Analysis of Writing in Your Major

For your first formal project in this course I would like you to apply some of the concepts you have been developing through the course readings and lectures to an analysis of writing that typically gets done in your major and/or field. My goal is to have you recognize and begin to describe in some detail the rhetorical expectations and conventions that shape how people write, research and think within your academic community, while at the same time gaining a better understanding of how you could be a more successful communicator within this field. There will be several steps to this work.

Step One

First, you will need to select a paper that you’ve written for another class at USM that you feel could use some improvement–preferably from a required class in your major or offered in your department. The paper you select should be problematic in some way, meaning that if you had the ability to write it again, you already suspect you’d make some changes to it. If after thinking about it a great deal you cannot decide on a specific paper that will work for this project, you can always use a paper assignment or project that you know will be assigned in another class this semester or in the near future. (For example, almost every Senior Capstone course at USM requires some piece of writing – so you might inquire into what these projects typically consist of.) The only requirement here is that you select an assignment or project that is typical within your major/department.

Once you have located a paper or assignment within your field, I would like you to spend some time reflecting on and analyzing the rhetorical situation that prompted the writing of this paper. That is, using some of the same questions that guided your thinking in your last blog posting, I’d like you to think carefully about the factors that influenced how you went about writing this original paper, and/or, some of issues and concerns that inform the assignment. Some questions in particular you might consider include:

• What was the context or situation that prompted your writing? What kind of class was this paper written for, what exactly did the assignment ask you to do, and what additional sources, materials or resources were you asked to employ in producing the paper?
• Was the topic of the paper or project assigned to you, or were you able to select your own? Did you know something about the topic already, or were you expected to learn something through the process of writing? Is there a larger debate, discussion, or controversy already going on in your field that this piece of writing was meant to engage/address? If so, what and how?
• Who was the audience for this paper? Only your teacher? Any one in your field? Other students? Professionals? What did you know about your reader’s background, credibility, knowledge of the topic, beliefs, social allegiances, etc., before writing this paper? What kind of relationship did you try to establish with your reader(s)? How? What assumptions about your reader(s) did you make in writing the paper? What have you discovered about your reader(s) now that you’ve written the paper?
• What was your call to write? Why did you address the issue and/or topic that you did? Was there any sense of urgency involved in this? How did you identify the significance of the issues involved, either for yourself or for your readers? If the topic was assigned to you, in what ways did you attempt to make the issue your own?
• Beyond simply completing the assignment, what was your purpose in writing this paper? What were you trying to accomplish? In what ways were you trying to affect your readers, and to what end? How did you go about doing this? Why?
• What genre or form did your writing take? How did you go about structuring/organizing your paper? Why? Was there any particular style of language or level of formality that you tried to use? Why? What tone did you strive to achieve? Did you use any specialized terms or slang in your writing?
• What other factors, if any, do you think shaped the writing of this paper? What goals do you think your teacher had in assigning this particular writing task?

Step Two

Now that you have some sense of the rhetorical elements and assumptions that originally informed the writing of your paper, it’s time to evaluate the overall effectiveness of some of your choices with respect to the expectations, beliefs, values and practices of the wider field.

Which is to say, using your paper, your teacher’s reactions to it, the original assignment, and your own understanding of the beliefs, values and goals of your field/discipline, how would you rate your own understanding of what is expected of you as a writer when you write papers like this? What do you now know about writing this type of document that you may not have considered before? Taking a step back, what does a paper like this suggest to you about the topics, issues, beliefs and assumptions that people in this community tend to value and/or be interested in? Is this type of document/assignment common in your major/field? What sorts of audiences are typical, and what kinds of assumptions do writers need to make about their readers in producing papers in your discipline? What other motivations does one need in order to be successful in writing a paper or assignment like this?

Finally, based on this particular assignment, what would you say are some of the beliefs, assumptions and/or goals that both students and professors in your major/field seem to share when they read and write? That is, looking back on the types of readings and writing that people in your major seem to do most often, what do you think this suggests about the values and practices of your academic community more generally? If you had summarize in a sentence or two what the purpose of your academic major or field is—based on this one assignment alone—what would it be?

Step Three

Now that you’ve thought carefully about both the rhetorical situation that prompted you to write, and considered some of the larger values and beliefs in your field that shape writing more generally, it is time to formulate a revision strategy. That is, given everything you’ve written and thought about in steps one and two, if you were suddenly given two weeks to revise this original paper and resubmit it for a new grade, what specifically would you do to it and why? What specific principles that we’ve been discussing in English 333 this semester do you feel would be useful to you in trying to revise this paper? What advice would you give other students facing a similar writing situation as the one in the original assignment? What things would you try to avoid doing next time if you faced a similar situation again? What kinds of things would you try to do next time? Be specific!

Once you’ve carefully thought about and written about each of these issues, I would like you to organize your observations into a 3-5 page report (750-1250 words) that offers specific examples and details that effectively illustrate the points you wish to make. You may structure this report in any way that makes sense to you, keeping in mind that most readers will want to see a clear beginning (introduction), middle (elaboration), and ending (conclusion). Feel free to use headings/subheadings if you think it will help organize your discussion, and if possible, please include a copy of the original paper that prompted your analysis and/or a description of the assignment.