PowerPoint on Introductions

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B11JiXOw1yx0ODI5ZmJiZWMtNzZjMi00MTA0LWI2ZWQtZmNhNDJhMzEyOWUw&hl=en&authkey=CN3ejjU

Activity: Critiquing a Professional Model Text

Up this point we've mostly looked at other students' writing, but from time to time it's helpful to remember that professionals still rely on the same fundamental writing skills that we learn about in this class. For this assignment, each group will read the assigned editorial from the New York Times:

Group 1: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/opinion/26kristof.html?ref=opinion

Group 2: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/opinion/26friedman.html?ref=opinion

Group 3: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/opinion/10krugman.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Group 4: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/opinion/03brooks.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

(Note: Registration may be required, but it only takes a minute.)

Within your groups, discuss your answers to the following questions and record your answers in a Google Doc. Each group need only create one document.

1. What is the article's thesis statement? Where does it appear? Does the thesis statement do the three things that we said all thesis statements should do? Explain your answer fully, noting in detail how the author fulfills each of these requirements. If you think s/he does not fulfill these requirements in the thesis statement, speculate as to why this is the case.

2. What kinds of appeals does the author make to his or her audience? Identify at least two specific appeals. Do you think the audience find these appeals convincing? Why or why not?

3. What kinds of research does the author employ to support his or her claim? Does this research come from popular, professional, or scholarly sources? If the author does not rely on research, how does s/he establish authorial credibility within the article?

4. Does the author employ strong paragraphing skills? Does each paragraph contain a topic sentences that expresses a single idea? Do all sentences in the paragraph explain that idea (and that idea only) fully and completely?

5. How does the author grab the reader's attention in the introduction? Can you categorize the introduction into one of the types we talked about in class?

6. Does the author employ a variety of different sentence types? Does the writing seem dynamic and powerful to you? Support your answer with specific details from the text.

At the end of the period I will ask each group to summarize their answers briefly for the rest of the class.

Grading

https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1iTufSlY8csTrFkvZpRLbJiJhdDjSlj_R4kUS1FDjpM0&hl=en&authkey=CLHswZYN

This sheet will be updated with new assignments, workshops, and skills as they are assigned. Note: homework assignments and draft workshops are due 24 hours after the end of class unless I state otherwise. In order to receive full credit for a draft workshop, you must both submit the required draft on time and complete all of the workshop form questions for one of your groupmates' drafts.

Unit 1 Project: Group Assessment

Read each of your group members' drafts. Once you have read everyone's draft, decide on which stage of the revision process each one of your groupmates should focus his or her attention in the next few days. Write a paragraph in your groupmates' Google Doc supporting your answer with specific reference to the draft (i.e. "paragraphs 3 and 4 seem off-topic, so Student X should focus on ensuring each paragraph's topic sentence relates directly to the thesis statement").

Here's a link to the PowerPoint if you need it:

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B11JiXOw1yx0ZjM5NzJkMTctZDZjOC00NmNlLWE3ZmEtZTFlNTBlN2ZlOWQ3&hl=en&authkey=CNDY6qgM

Homework: Continue working on your Unit 1 Project; you should bring a substantially revised draft to class next Tuesday. Try employing multiple revision sessions in order to deal with several different concerns relating to your draft.

Unit 1 Project Self-Assessment

We just finished learning about three stages of revision: conceptual concerns, organizational concerns, and surface-level concerns. Which of these stages is your primary concern for your Unit 1 Project at this moment? Post a comment here explaining where you will focus your attention during your next round of revisions, noting which specific questions you will focus on and why you believe dealing with these questions will be the most efficient use of your time.

Activity: Critiquing Paragraphing Strategies

Together with your group, examine each paragraph in the model draft for its relationship to the thesis, unity, coherence, and adequate development of the paragraph's main idea.

https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1cX0h_H4W-2YeE93VTdUAlYPT3gC1IhHtayokb49FUu8&hl=en&authkey=CKafxrUF

Create a new Google Doc in which you explain briefly how each paragraph might be improved. You can be as brief as possible, but more complex problems might require a bit more explanation. Each group need only create one document.

Activity: Composing a Working Thesis Statement

If you haven't done so already, composing a working thesis statement for your Unit 1 Project. Don't worry if you don't feel ready; thesis statements always change--sometimes drastically--before the final draft. If you're having trouble getting started, identify the 3 or 4 pieces of most interesting or compelling information you have found during your research and think about what kind of claim that might lead you to make about your topic. You might also ask your groupmates for help.

Remember, your thesis statement should make a claim about your topic, it should give a road map to how your argument will unfold, and it should explain why your argument matters to your audience. You may not have made up your mind about all of these things yet, but do your best to provide this information anyway. If you change your mind you can simply update your thesis statement later.

After everyone in your group has a working thesis, have each person read the thesis statement aloud twice, speaking slowly and clearly. As your groupmates read their statements, jot down your reaction in simple words or phrases. You might use words like "interesting," "complicated," "disorienting," etc. Try to give the author a sense of the audience's immediate reaction to the topic and/or argument. Once everyone has read their thesis statements relay your reactions to their respective authors. Add the reactions about your thesis statement to your Google Doc.

Activity: Adapting to Your Audience

In the Google Document where you've been collecting your research, respond briefly to each of the following questions.

• Who is your audience?
• What does your audience need? What do they want? What do they value?
• What aspects of your topic are most important to them?
• What aspects of your topic are they least likely to care about?
• What kind of organization would best help your audience understand and appreciate your argument?
• What do you have to say (or what are you doing in your research) that might surprise your audience?
• What do you want your audience to think, learn, or assume about you? What impression do you want your writing or your research to convey?

Activity: Brainstorming / Preliminary Research

Within your groups, form yourselves into smaller groups of two or three. Begin by summarizing for your group members what you did in the class's previous activity. Try to be brief (1 or 2 minutes at most), but do your best to get across the gist of the author's argument, the main evidence s/he relies on, and where you think your research might take you from here. Let each person explain his or her work before you move on to the next step.

1. Based on your reading so far, come up with a list of three key words or concepts that are central to your project. Write these three words in the middle of a sheet of paper and circle each one.

2. Working with your partner, for each term create a web around it by identifying as many related topics, concerns, or ideas as you can. Try to do this quickly and constantly… your pen should always be moving.

3. Once you have completed the initial brainstorming session for each member of your group, work on "deepening" your web by performing some preliminary research on the ideas that you brainstormed. For instance, if you are researching how the proposed highway through the Serengeti desert will affect the wildebeest, you might read more about wildebeests and their habitat or you might look for information about existing desert highways and their environmental impacts. As you skim these sources add new terms and concepts to your web to make it comprehensive. If you find a source that it might be helpful to return to later, be sure to bookmark it or make a note of how to find it again.

4. Hopefully by now you have an extremely messy sheet of paper in front of you. Working with your partner(s), compose a list of topics or ideas from your web that you want to research further. Order this list by priority, beginning with the ideas you think are most promising. At this point feel free to discard ideas that you're relatively sure are dead ends.

5. If you finish this task before class time is over, feel free to get started on your homework for Thursday.

Homework:

Find at least three sources (they can be from any kind of publication, including scholarly journals, blogs, or newspapers) in which authors make an argument relating either to your main topic or one of the related ones that you brainstormed in your web. For each of these three sources, identify the author's thesis statement or central claim and quickly compose a retrospective outline of the article. Add this information to the Google Document you created in class on Tuesday.

Link to PowerPoint on Organization

Check it out on Google Docs here: https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B11JiXOw1yx0MjhiY2NlMmUtZWM4Zi00MjE1LTg1NjUtNDc0ZWJmMDU3YmU3&hl=en&authkey=CI2G79EB

Activity: Reading Sources Critically

Begin by composing a retrospective outline of your article from Nature. Follow the procedures we talked about in class last week, beginning by identifying the author's thesis statement or central claim and identifying the central claim or idea in each paragraph. Put your reverse outline on Google Docs, share it with me and your group members, and in the same document complete the following tasks:

1. Describe, in a few words, the article's organizational scheme. Is there an order or a logic to the way the article unfolds? Why do you think the author chose to present the information in the order s/he did? 

2. Identify at least three or four SPECIFIC places in which the author makes an appeal to his or her audience. For each appeal, note whether the author relies on ethos, pathos, or logos, and briefly explain why this appeal would be convincing for Nature's audience. 

3. Note any places in which the author addresses a counter-argument to his or her thesis. Summarize both the counter-argument and how your author responds to it. Does this counter-argument prompt your author to limit his or her claim in any way? If so, how?

4. In order to write authoritatively about the subject you have chosen you will probably have to do more research on the topic. Jot down some notes about where you think this research might take you. Are there any specific references in the article that you should track down? Will you be looking for scholarly sources or popular ones? What kinds of search terms might you use? How will the research you find help to shape your argument and make it convincing? 

5. Finally (and this is a tough one!) ask yourself, "what is missing from the article?" Are their any ideas, opinions, arguments, or references that seem to be missing, left out, avoided, or not addressed? Is there any aspect of the topic that the author just doesn't want to deal with, at least not in depth? Speculate as to why the author made these omissions, and how exploring these areas might be useful to you as you develop your own counter-arguments.

Feeder 1.2 Workshop 2

Begin by composing a retrospective outline of your partner's paper, using the outline we composed of the Huckleberry Finn paper as a model. Once you have completed the outline, examine it for coherence, repetition, orderly logic and transitions, and whether it fulfills the demands of the prompt. Suggest any changes that you believe would improve the paper's sense of organization.

After you're finished, answer the following questions at the bottom of the draft:

1. Briefly describe the current draft's organizing principle. Could the information be organized in another way? Suggest a different organizing principle that would change the draft radically while still making sense, and revise the thesis statement to reflect this new organizing principle.

2. The prompt asks you to make the argument that the information summarized is relevant or interesting to your blog's audience. What kinds of appeals--ethos, pathos, or logos--does the author use to convince his or her audience of this? Are these appeals effective? Suggest a way that the author might employ a different kind of appeal.

3. Describe the draft's introduction, concentrating on the first sentence. How does the author attempt to "hook" the reader? Does s/he begin by telling the reader something she doesn't know? If not, scan the body of the draft and/or the original article for an interesting fact that the author could place at the beginning of the essay.

Activity: Identifying Appeals

Read the following article from slate.com:

http://www.slate.com/id/2267094/pagenum/all/#p2

This article contains appeals of all three types: ethos, pathos, and logos. Work in your groups to identity at least one of each type of appeal in the article. Which of these appeals is most persuasive to you? Why do you think that is the case? In which order does the author present these appeals? Why do you think he chose that order?

Posting to Your Blog

Work together with your group members to post your Feeder 1.1 assignment to your blog. If you need help posting pictures, links, or any other hypertext ask me or one of your group members for their help.

Once everyone has posted their assignment, check the blog to make sure that the formatting (font style, size, spacing, image placement, etc.) is consistent from post to post. If there are discrepancies in formatting, discuss them with your groupmates. From now on all of the posts on your group's blog should follow the same clean, consistent, and readable visual style.

Feeder 1.2 Workshop 1

1. Look up the article on which the draft is based. Based on our discussion from Thursday, is this a scholarly article in the natural sciences? Explain your answer.

2. On Thursday we also talked about how thesis statements aimed at different audiences must address the "so what?" question differently. How does the original article answer the "so what?" question? (In other words, why does the research matter to scientists?) How does the draft answer the "so what?" question? (In other words, why does the research matter to your blog's audience?) If you have trouble with these questions you may want to consult the original article and/or discuss your thoughts with the draft's author.

3. Does the essay seem organized to you? Does the author present the information in a manner that is clear, logical, and easy to read? Do you feel more knowledgable after reading the draft, or do you feel slightly confused? Explain your answer in as much detail as possible and suggest at least one change the author could make to improve the readability of his or her essay.

Determining Your Blog's Citation Conventions

Using the blogs we just examined as well as the formal APA, MLA, and Chicago styles (refer to the relevant sections on the Library's Citation Tutorial (http://www.lib.unc.edu/instruct/citations/) for details), work with your group members to draft a rationale for how and why you will cite your sources on your blog. Compose a short, 2-3 paragraph essay that explains:

1. Why your group thinks that citing sources is important.

2. How citations will be implemented on your blog. This should take the form of a rough style guide like this one for MLA format: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/06/. You need only explain the format for the types of references you anticipate using most on your blog.

3. A short rationale for how and why you chose the citation style you agreed upon.

Post this essay to your blog by class time on Thursday, September 16.

Citation Conventions

Go to the library's tutorial on citations and complete the section "Why We Cite:"

http://www.lib.unc.edu/instruct/citations/introduction/index.html


Good citations accomplish the following goals:

• They allow you to show how your argument is built upon the ideas of others.
• They allow you to indicate which ideas are taken from others, and from whom those ideas were taken; in other words, to give credit where it's due.
• They allow the interested reader to follow your argument and confirm its logic by investigating the ideas on which the argument is built, or to further explore those ideas on their own.

The problem is that there are no established standards for how to cite references in blog posts, though there are generally accepted guidelines. Return to the science blogs we looked at a few weeks ago and note how each of these cites the material they reference in their posts:

http://scienceblogs.com/thoughtfulanimal/

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog

After you've looked at each blog, discuss your answers to the following questions with your group:

1. Many of the posts that appear on these blogs, like your Feeder 1.2 assignment, are summaries of single articles that appeared in another journal. How do the authors of these blogs cite the articles on which their posts are based? Is there a standard format? If so, what is it?

2. How do the authors credit other material they reference (i.e. images, background reading, etc.)? Do these follow a standard format? What is it?

3. According to the standards outlined in the UNC Library's tutorial, are the citation conventions employed by each of those blogs ethical? Why or why not?

4. How do you think you should cite sources on your blog? Which aspects of the above blogs do you want to emulate? What mistakes do you want to avoid?

Feeder 1.1 Workshop 2

Before you exchange drafts, at the bottom of your document write a quick summary of the revisions to your draft since Tuesday. Explain, in a few sentences, the goals of your revisions and whether you think you achieved them. Then exchange papers and answer the following questions about your partner's draft:

1. We just finished talking about several different types of effective and ineffective introductions. What type of introduction does the current draft have? Is it one of the effective or ineffective introductions? Explain how you determined which category the introduction fits into.

2. How does the author answer the "so what?" question? In other words, why does the author's argument matter to his or her readers? At what point in the draft does the author establish this answer to the "so what?" question? Could it come earlier? Explain your answer.

3. Examine the summary of the author's revisions posted at the bottom of the draft. Do you think the author was successful in achieving his or her goals with these revisions? Do you think s/he could go further? Explain your answer with as much detail as possible.

4. We've noted several times that the thesis statement should serve as a roadmap for the rest of the essay. Does the current thesis statement provide a vivid roadmap? Does the body of the essay follow this roadmap closely without deviating or digressing? Explain your answer in detail.

5. Rewrite the first paragraph of the draft, using one of the other types of effective introductions we talked about in class. Note: you may have to consult the author's sources in order to find an anecdote, dilemma, etc. relating to the essay's topic.

Once your groupmate has answered these questions about your paper, read his or her feedback and answer the following question at the bottom of the document: do you think your introduction is effective? Is the introduction your partner wrote more or less effective than your original introduction? Why?

Lesson: Identifying Scholarly Sources

Practice: Read the Feeder 1.2 assignment. Next, log in to Academic Search Premier and try to find an article you might want to write your Feeder 1.2 assignment about. Once everyone in your group has found an article, exchange with one another. Determine whether your groupmate's article is a scholarly, professional, or popular source. Discuss your answer with the person who found the article.

Feeder 1.1 Workshop 1

Identify your partner's thesis statement. Copy and paste it into the bottom of the Google Doc and then answer the following questions about the thesis statement. Please be as clear and as detailed as possible:

• Does the thesis statement answer the question posed by the assignment?
• Has the author taken a position others might challenge or oppose?
• Is the statement specific enough?
• Does the statement pass the “so what?” test? Are you telling your audience something they don’t already know?
• Does the thesis pass the “how and why” test?

Once your partner finishes reviewing your thesis statement, work together to revise both of your thesis statements. Once you have finished revising both of your thesis statements, answer the following question about your own draft. Type your answer at the bottom of the document.

We have noted several times that the thesis statement provides a roadmap for the rest of your essay. Thus, revising your thesis statement often entails revising the rest of your essay as well. Think about the model Feeder 1.1 essay we looked at; how would the body of that author's essay change in light of the revisions we made to his thesis statement? As you revised your own thesis statement, did your roadmap change? If so, explain in 3 or 4 sentences how you will need to revise your essay in order to make it consistent with your new thesis statement.

Feeder 1.1 Model Draft Workshop

https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1P_8taEIo-SLtF9Nqdw1AzC4hT-0oPzOJgmsj30ihRXM&hl=en


Sample workshop form questions. Discuss your answers in your groups:

1. Summarize, as briefly as possible, how the two articles summarized in the draft fit together. How are they in conversation? Is this connection clear in the draft, or could it be clearer?

2. Glance at the original articles on which the draft is based. Does s/he summarize these authors' arguments adequately? Does the draft highlight each article's central claim? After reading the draft, were you surprised by anything in the two articles? Why?

3. Does the draft seem to approve of one of the articles, or does it take one of the articles more seriously than the other? Is this preference justified? Does the author make this justification clear in the draft?

4. How has the author attempted to grab the reader's attention? Do you think this strategy is effective? Think back to your reaction when you read the first few sentences of the draft… did you groan or were you pulled in? Explain your answer in as much detail as possible.

After you discuss these questions, compose a list of THREE things that the author should do to improve his or her draft. Post these as a comment on this post.

Intro Posts Workshop

Read all of your group members' drafts. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Do all of the posts follow the same format? Are they of comparable lengths? Do they employ a similar authorial voice? 

2. Are all of the posts consistent with the blog identity you talked about on Tuesday? Why or why not? 

3. Did you notice any grammatical, spelling, or formatting errors in your or any of your groupmates' drafts?

Spend a few minutes thinking about your answers to these questions, then quick fix up any problems you noticed with your draft. If yours is fine, perhaps you can help one of your groupmates fix theirs?