Author: Olivia Wood

Agenda: Week 16 (December 12)

Today we will go over the course objectives and talk through what they mean.

Final draft of the inquiry/research paper are due on Monday (on Blackboard, look under the “Assignment Submission Links” tab)

This is our last day of class before finals. The final exam period is December 21 at 10:30am. Please add your name to this document. We will go in this order for Final Show and Tell.

During Show and Tell, everyone will stand up in front of the class and share a little about what you learned while doing your project. That’s all. 🙂 It’s just graded on participation, not how well you speak or anything.

Agenda: Week 15 (December 5-7)

This is the last full week of class!

Monday (12/5)

texts

writing

Second drafts of the final paper are due today!

If you prefer anonymous peer review: Upload them on Blackboard to the area that says “Final Project (Research Paper) SECOND Draft” under the Peer Review tab.

If you prefer in-person peer review: Email me your paper OR post it here on the Commons under Unit 3 Work

Everyone should ALSO email me “feedback please” if you’d like my written feedback on your essay, OR we can meet during lunch on Monday/Wednesday, OR after class Wednesday, OR we can schedule a time to Zoom.

Wednesday (12/7)

No readings or assignments due today, just keep working on your essays. We will discuss citing sources appropriately.

Rhetorical Devices: Scarcity Appeal and Cognitive Biases

Due 11/30

Find TWO examples of Scarcity Appeal

And TWO examples of some of the cognitive biases (so, maybe you find one example of anchoring effect and one example of confirmation bias)

Provide any necessary context for understanding the examples

Then analyze how these tactics are being used to persuade the audience

Agenda: Week 14 (11/28-11/30)

Monday

texts

  • Scarcity Appeal
  • Cognitive Biases
  • Re-read the beginning and the end of “Should Writer’s Use They Own English?”
  • The Craft of Research Chapter 16: “Introductions and Conclusions”
Craft-of-Research-Chapter-16Download

WRITING

No writing due today! Just keep working on your essays

Wednesday (11/30)

Google doc for today

texts

No readings today

writing

Rhetorical Devices examples + analysis

Agenda: Week 13 (November 21-23)

This week, we’ll just be having Zoom conferences. You can sign up for one here, and the Zoom link will be emailed to you along with the appointment confirmation.

Remember that everyone is expected to have a total of two conferences with me this semester, and these are the final two opportunities. Please sign up for one (or two) if you haven’t had two yet.

If you have met with me twice already this semester, you’re still welcome to sign up for a conference, but please wait a few days to give other folks first pick of the time slots.

Discussion: Practicing Claims

Due 11/14

Today we will practice making claims. Even though this inquiry paper is not an “argumentative” essay intended to persuade, you still need to make claims based on 1) what you learn in your research and 2) the relationships between these ideas.

So, today we’ll practice using something that is hopefully easier and more fun: animated movies.

FIRST, read Chapter 8 of The Craft of Research, PDF is here. This explains some best practices for writing strong and specific claims.

SECOND, complete this Disney/Pixar movie bracket. For each pair, choose whichever movie you think is the best movie (not which one you like more). Work your way through the pairings until you have a winner. If you haven’t seen some of the movies, that’s okay — probably most people haven’t seen all of them. You can either just pick the ones you have seen, or pick which ones seem best based on your knowledge of them. Remember: BEST, not FAVORITE. There are a couple places on the bracket where it says “play-in winner.” This is because the bracket is originally from an internet contest where people voted on what would take these slots. Here, either ignore and advance the other movie, or you can choose one of your own favorites that isn’t on the bracket.

THIRD, once you have your winner, practice writing a strong claim about why this movie is the best of all of the other movies. Remember to use the best practices you learned from reading Chapter 8 of The Craft of Research. Post your claim as a comment on this post.

FOURTH, look at the other comments to read others’ claims. Either offer suggestions for how to strengthen the claims or write counter claims in response to those you disagree with. Why is your movie better than this specific movie?

Agenda: Week 12

Monday

texts

  • Read “Parenthesis” and “Enumeratio” in the book
  • Chapter 8 from The Craft of Research: “Making Claims”
Craft-of-Research-Chapter-8Download

No assignments due this day.

Wednesday

No readings due — it’s peer review day! Make sure you upload your draft on Blackboard (look under the “Peer Review” tab to find the place).

Please also complete the exercises for Parenthesis and Enumeratio in the book and post your answers here.

Agenda: Week 11 (November 7-9)

Monday (November 7)

texts

No writing/activities due

Wednesday (November 9)

texts

Below I am including several example outlines, plus one chapter from The Craft of Research.

Example Outlines

Example Outlines from Person 1

Okay, I’m Person 1, and these are some of my outlines from my sophomore year of college.

Outline 1: Witchcraft Outline
I like this one because of the color-coding. I wrote the main ideas/section headers in black, all of the things I wanted to talk about in that section in blue, and the names of the authors I wanted to cite in red. I also wrote out my thesis in full at the top to always remind me of what I was trying to argue. It helped keep me focused.

Outline 2: Amanda Palmer Project Outline
In this one, I didn’t use color coding, just loose nests of bullets and main ideas. However, you can tell when I copy/pasted a quote from a source, because the font and coloring is different. I did this to remind myself of what quotes/examples I wanted to use as evidence in each section.

Example Outlines from Person 2

These are from a colleague of mine, also from her early years of college. Notice that she uses a much more formalized structure of headings and subheadings (numbers, capital letters, roman numerals, lowercase letters, etc.) than I do. In one case, she wrote her entire introduction as part of the outline.

Islam outline

ps35, paper1 outline

Example Outline from Person 3

This person uses the standard structure of a scientific paper (Intro/Methods/Results/Discussion) but then added sublevels of bullets to her outline based on her specific topic. (This was for an advanced research course where psychology majors had to design and conduct their own studies.)

APA Study Outline

Once she had her outline, she wrote her paragraphs in the same document underneath each subheading. By the end, she had almost an entire paper and just had to paste the paragraphs into another document and add transitions/formatting.

Same outline with paragraphs: Copy of Outline

Next: Here is Chapter 13 of The Craft of Research, focused on “Drafting Your Report”

Craft-of-Research-Chapter-13Download

writing/activities

Please click here to see the activities due for Wednesday.

Rhetorical Devices Week 11

Due 11/9

This is the week for Glittering Generalities, Parallelism/Chiasmus, Climax, Euphemism, and Transfer. It’s a lot!

  1. For Glittering Generalities, our usual– find two examples in the world, then analyze how and why glittering generalities is being employed in the example.
  2. Do ONLY Exercise 1 for “Climax” and Exercise 2 for “Parallelism/Chiasmus.” It might be useful to READ Exercise 1 for “Parallelism/Chiasmus” and see if you can guess the actual famous statements, but it seems very hard if you don’t already know the famous statements.
  3. For Euphemism and Transfer, find one example of each and analyze.

So, you are finding FOUR examples (two of glittering generalities, one euphemism, one transfer) and doing TWO exercises in the book this week.

Leave your answers in comments.