Clare 110: Composition and Critical ThinkingFall 2016

Policy Statement – 2 Schedule – 5 Assignments – 7

Clare 110: Composition and Critical Thinking IFall 2016

Professor: Matt KingEmail: mrking@sbu.eduPhone: 716.375.2457Office Hours: Monday and Tuesday 2:30-4:00 and by appointmentOffice Location: Plassmann D6Class Website: http://mattrking.com/courses/c110

Clare College Core Objectives Students demonstrate rhetorical knowledge by adapting their writing for specific

audiences and purposes. Students can analyze, synthesize, and evaluate texts from different academic disciplines

and discourses. Students employ a writing process grounded in the production of text across multiple

drafts and strategies for research, invention, revision, editing, peer review, and reflection.

Students apply academic writing conventions related to argument, structure, and style.

Course DescriptionA composition course emphasizing the development of a writing process, rhetorical knowledge, and knowledge of conventions of academic discourse. Course assignments foreground critical reading, writing, and argumentation skills as well as the analysis of academic and cultural texts. This course is a prerequisite for CLAR 111. (3 credits)

Course Goals Develop a writing process grounded in the production of text across multiple drafts and

strategies for research, invention, drafting, revision, editing, peer review, and reflection; Gain proficiency in literacy practices – observing, conceptualizing, analyzing, and

applying – and understand how they shift in different writing and disciplinary contexts; Understand and execute moves in academic discourse that frame writing as a

conversation with other writers; Address concerns of audience, purpose, and modality in your writing, both in terms of

the conventions and standards of academic discourse and in terms of framing writing as a force for social change and social action;

Adequately document sources and develop an understanding of the significance of different types of sources and the function of documentation;

Produce writing that meets accepted standards of style, syntax, and mechanics for university writing.

Class Texts- Joseph Harris, Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts- Other readings made available online as needed

GradingPaper 1 – Coming to Terms = 15%Paper 2 – Forwarding = 15%Paper 3 – Countering = 15%Paper 4 – Revising = 15%Reflection Papers (4) = 20%Short Assignments = 10%Participation = 10%

TOTAL 100%

Papers are graded based on the quality of the final product as well as your writing and revision process work. Reflection Papers will be completed with each major paper, allowing you to reflect on your writing process and its effectiveness. Short Assignments will receive a completion grade. Participation is based on your preparedness for class and participation in class activities.

Late Work. Excessive or unexcused late work will not be acceptable, and I reserve the right to penalize late work in such circumstances (generally, such penalties will be a letter grade for every day an assignment is late). If circumstances prevent you from being able to submit an assignment on time, you should discuss the situation with me ahead of time.

Attendance. You should arrive to class on time with all assigned readings and papers for the day completed. You are allowed six absences throughout the semester without a grade penalty (although missing class can affect your participation grade and your ability to succeed in the class generally). If you have 7-8 absences, you cannot receive higher than a C for your semester average. If you have 9-10 absences, you cannot receive higher than a D for your semester average. If you have 11 or more absences, you will receive an F for the semester. For every 3 instances of tardiness, you will incur 1 absence. If you only have 0-1 absences, you will receive a 1/3 letter grade bonus on your semester average.

For athletes, students who provide documentation for absences related to athletic competitions will be excused for all such absences. Student athletes can also miss two more class periods throughout the semester without a grade penalty. If you have three or more unexcused (non-athletic) absences throughout the semester, then all of your absences will be counted toward the attendance policy.

+/- Grades. Plus and minus grades will be used in awarding final grades for this course. The letter-to-percentage conversion is given below.

Paper Grades Semester AverageA+ = 98.5 A = 95 A- = 91.5 93-100 = A 90-93 = A- B+ = 88.5 B = 85 B- = 81.5 87-90 = B+ 83-87 = B 80-83 = B- C+ = 78.5 C = 75 C- = 71.5 77-80 = C+ 73-77 = C 70-73 = C-D+ = 68.5 D = 65 D- = 61.5 67-70 = D+ 63-67 = D 60-63 = D-F = 55 Less than 60 = FPlassmann Writing Center

Revising and responding to feedback will be an invaluable and necessary part of your development as a writer this semester. Toward this end, you are strongly encouraged to visit me during office hours or by appointment, and you are also strongly encouraged to visit the Writing Center in the basement of Plassmann Hall (6A). There is a sign-up sheet outside the Center; while walk-in appointments may be available, it will help to sign up for an appointment ahead of time. Bring your work with you to your appointment. You will receive a 1/3 letter grade bonus on each paper that you workshop at the Writing Center.

Academic Integrity Academic dishonesty is inconsistent with the moral character expected of students in a University committed to the spiritual and intellectual growth of the whole person. It also subverts the academic process by distorting all measurements. A list of unacceptable practices and procedures to be followed in prosecuting cases of alleged academic dishonesty may be found in the Student Handbook and here.

Students with Disabilities Students with disabilities who believe they may need accommodations in this class are encouraged to contact the Disability Support Services Office (Doyle 26, 716-375-2066) as soon as possible to better ensure that such accommodations are implemented in a timely fashion. Documentation from this office is required before accommodations can be made. Please see the official SBU Student with Disabilities policy here.

EmailEmail will serve as an official means of communication for this class, and you should check the email account you have registered with the university regularly. Feel free to email me with your questions and concerns.

Title IXTitle IX makes it clear that violence and harassment based on sex and gender are Civil Rights offenses subject to the same kinds of accountability and the same kinds of support applied to offenses against other protected categories such as race, national origin, etc. If you or someone you know has been harassed or assaulted, you can find the appropriate resources at the Health and Wellness Center or at the Campus Safety Office. For on-campus reporting, see the Title IX Coordinator (Sharon Burke, Director of Human Resources) and Residence Life Staff (RAs, RDs, and other professional staff). The University's policy and procedures regarding gender-based and sexual misconduct can be found online.

In the event of an emergency, call Campus Safety at 716-375-2525 or contact Nichole Gonzalez, Residential Living and Conduct, 716-375-2572, ngonzale@sbu.edu. Be aware that most university employees are mandated reporters.

Clare 110 | Course Schedule

Date Major Due Dates; Homework (due day listed); In classM 8/29 Introduction to CourseW 8/31 Read Barrett and Myers (Moodle)F 9/2 Meditation Observation dueM 9/5 Read RW Introduction, Ch. 1; Watch Beyoncé, Coming To Terms ActivityW 9/7 Read Lessig, “Creators” and Lang, “Cultural Appropriation”; Watch JohnsonF 9/9 Read McRobbie, Lynch (Moodle); Watch Rogers and PharrellM 9/12 Coming to Terms with Creativity paper due; Citations exerciseW 9/14 Read Reid, work on Paper 1; Paper 1 rubricF 9/16 Paper 1 due for peer reviews in classM 9/19 ConferencesW 9/21 ConferencesF 9/23 Read Burger; Discuss Paper 1 samplesM 9/26 Paper 1 revisions due with ReflectionW 9/28 Read Unit 2 Overview and RW Ch. 2, bring Paper 2 artifact to classF 9/30 Read Bustillos and EcoM 10/3 Coming to Terms with Culture paper due; Writing obstacles activityW 10/5 Read Petersen

F 10/7Research due, read NPR on diversity; Discuss plagiarism resources (here, here, and here)

W 10/12 Work on Paper 2; Look at paper samplesF 10/14 Paper 2 due for peer reviews in classM 10/17 ConferencesW 10/19 ConferencesF 10/21 Writing workshopM 10/24 Paper 2 revisions due with Reflection; Discuss McElweeW 10/26 Read Unit Three Overview and RW Ch. 3F 10/28 Read King, bring Paper 3 artifact to classM 10/31 Coming to Terms with Politics dueW 11/2 Read Gladwell and BogostF 11/4 Read Klein and complete abstract assignment; Abstract handoutM 11/7 Research due; Discuss countering activitiesW 11/9 Work on Paper 3F 11/11 Paper 3 due for peer reviews in classM 11/14 ConferencesW 11/16 Conferences

F 11/18 Writing workshop with APA worksheetM 11/21 Paper 3 revisions due with ReflectionM 11/28 Read RW Ch. 4; Discuss reflexivity and metatextW 11/30 Read RW Ch. 5F 12/2 Paper 4 due for peer reviews in classM 12/5 Wrap up semester; Paper 4 editing handoutW 12/7 No class meetingF 12/9 No class meetingW 12/14 Paper 4 revisions due

Unit One Overview

This class focuses on writing practices. In other words, we are approaching writing as something other than just knowledge or a collection of skills. Effective writing is grounded in practices: activities, behaviors, and ways of thinking that are conducive to engaging with the ideas and writing of others and generating your own. In this sense, writing is action.Effective writing is also grounded in practice. This may seem obvious, but it’s worth noting: you have to write to become a better writer. As with anything that requires practice, you will likely experience failures and missteps while working to improve your writing. This is true for writers at every level of experience and expertise. So, as you work on your writing this semester, you have to be willing to fail – take risks, test out new ideas, try to express something you may not have the words for at first. You have to be willing to practice.

Writing ProcessAs we move through the semester, we will focus on three sets of writing practices. The first focuses on developing a writing process. This emphasis on process suggests that writing is not a one-time activity where you take the fully formed ideas in your head and transmit them to the page once and for all. Instead, writing develops over time, across different stages and drafts. Often we have to discover and better understand our ideas through the writing process itself. This does not mean we have a set process that works for everyone or in all situations. Even something like research or drafting – both of which can be important parts of a writing process – work in different ways in different situations and disciplines.The first unit of the semester gives us an opportunity to start practicing different aspects of a writing practice, particularly those related to finding and generating ideas (what rhetoricians call “invention”), drafting papers out of these ideas, revising and editing papers, giving feedback to peer writers, and reflecting on our work.

Literacy PracticesOur second set of practices focuses on literacy more generally. Literacy has historically meant the ability to read and write, but many scholars have pushed this understanding in new directions (as with “digital literacy”) or have questioned whether “good” reading and writing means one set thing. A recent educational movement focusing on “multiliteracies” emphasizes the importance of being able to engage with many different types of texts in many different ways. Toward this end, scholars have identified four literacy practices that help us think beyond just reading and writing and that are relevant in any learning situation: experiencing/observing, conceptualizing, analyzing, and applying.

Our first unit begins with an emphasis on experience and observation. “Creativity” will serve as our main concept for the unit, and we will encounter different understandings of creativity through our readings and viewings. We will also use these texts to practice rhetorical analysis. Rhetoric helps us think about persuasion, and rhetorical analysis helps us understand how arguments are constructed and why they are persuasive.

Academic MovesOur third set of writing practices will help us better participate in academic conversations. Academic writing often relies on specific moves, specific ways of engaging with other writers and developing your own ideas. Harris’s Rewriting will be particularly relevant here: in his first chapter, Harris takes up “coming to terms” as one such move or practice, and it will be our main focus in the first unit. By framing academic writing as a conversation, we emphasize the importance of responding to other writers and their ideas as a way of developing our own ideas. Coming to terms with a text helps us better understand the author’s thinking and purpose, and this in turn allows us to be more precise and thorough in our own thinking.

The challenges of developing a writing process, literacy practices, and academic moves all overlap and reinforce one another. For example, observing, conceptualizing, analyzing, and applying help with the invention stage of the writing process, as they offer opportunities to develop and explore ideas. Similarly, coming to terms with someone else’s writing involves making observations about it, analyzing it, and drawing on relevant concepts to better understand how it works. Our work in this unit will give us a foundation in these practices that we will develop throughout the semester.

Meditation Observation

As we start thinking about writing and how it works, we want to be mindful of a few key terms and practices. For this assignment, we’ll focus on two of these: observation and orientation. Observation involves a particular sort of attention to our experience and what we notice about it. In any situation, we can make any number of observations, and different types of observations will be helpful in different situations and for different purposes. So, we want to be mindful of what we observe and what we can do with these observations.

Orientation helps us think about how we position ourselves in relation to what we observe and encounter. The way I interact with new people will differ depending on whether I take up a friendly orientation or a judgmental one. The way I respond to a piece of writing will differ depending on whether I’m trying to analyze it or use it as inspiration for my own ideas and creativity. The orientations we adopt toward the world around us shape our actions and responses. Some of these orientations are deeply ingrained; we inherit many of them from our culture, families, religions, etc. Other orientations we learn over time or use in limited situations. We want to be mindful of our own orientations toward the world and how we can take on different orientations for different purposes.

This assignment takes up our concerns with observation and orientation. First, you’ll need to complete two “observation sessions,” each about 10-15 minutes. In the first session, practice meditating. Find a quiet place to be alone with your eyes closed. The challenge is to quiet your mind. This does not mean emptying your mind so you’re not thinking at all, but rather that you don’t fixate on any thoughts. It’s okay if thoughts come to mind, but don’t dwell on them. Instead, let them go. Observe what’s happening in the moment: focus on your breathing, what you hear, what you feel. For the second session, find a place to sit or walk and observe your immediate environment – what you observe around you and what you experience in response – without letting your thoughts wander to other concerns.

After you complete the mediation/observation, start writing. Write about 300-400 words for each session (600-800 words overall). Your writing should focus on observation and orientation, addressing some combination of the following prompts and questions:

What did you observe and experience? Be as specific as possible. How would you describe your orientation toward what you observed and

experienced? Were you peaceful? Bored? Inspired? Stressed or worried? Was this activity fun? Awkward? Silly? Informative? How did your own attitude toward the situation or what you were observing shape what you saw, experienced, or felt? What might you have observed with a different orientation toward the situation?

Do these observations or experiences mean anything to you in particular? Did you notice, observe, or experience anything that you haven’t before?

When you finished meditating/observing, did you have anything in particular on your mind? If so, you might try following your thoughts. Where does this thought take you? Why did it come up in this situation?

If you’re not inspired to write about anything from the meditation/ observation experience itself, try freewriting about anything immediately after the observation session. Whatever comes to mind, write about it non-stop for ten minutes.

You should submit this assignment by attaching it as a .doc or .rtf file in an email to me, and you should also bring a hard or electronic copy with you to class on the day it is due.

Coming to Terms with Creativity

This short paper (500-700 words) asks you to focus on one of our “creativity” texts from Lessig, Lang, Johnson, McRobbie, and Lynch. Choose the text you are most interested in considering further in Paper 1. Your paper on this text should take up the questions and prompts that Harris offers in “Coming to Terms”:

Defining the writer’s project in your own terms

Aims: What is the author trying to achieve? What position do they want to argue? What issues or problems do they explore?

Methods: How does the author relate examples to ideas? How do they connect one claim to the next, build a sense of continuity and flow?

Materials: Where does the writer go for examples and evidence? What texts are cited and discussed? What experiences or events are described? (19)

Noting keywords or passages in the text

What aspects of this text stand out for you as a reader? (20) Find opportunities to incorporate these specific words, phrases, and sentences into

your paper by quoting them and explaining their significance. See Harris’s strategies for different types of quotations (29-31).

Assessing the uses and limits of the author’s approach

“[A]ny perspective on an issue (and there are often more than two) will have moments of both insight and blindness. A frame offers a view but also brackets something out. A point of view highlights certain aspects and obscures others” (24-25).

With these thoughts in mind, what aspects of the author’s thinking are most useful, helpful, persuasive, and insightful? What are the limitations of this perspective? What does this perspective overlook or leave out?

This is not a requirement, but you are welcome to turn to a brief example to further illustrate how the author’s perspective is helpful or limited.

Your paper should follow MLA guidelines for spacing, font, the first-page heading, and the header with last name and page number. Instead of a title, include a full MLA citation for the text you are addressing beneath the heading and before the paper proper begins.

Paper 1

Our first major paper (1200-1500 words) builds on the “Coming to Terms with Creativity” short assignment and asks you to put multiple texts into conversation with each other. You can work with any combination of Lessig, Lang, Johnson, McRobbie, and Lynch (Rogers and Pharrell, too), and you are also welcome to use other texts from outside of class. Include at least three texts overall and at least two of our class texts.

Your goal in this paper is to make an argument about the texts you discuss, focusing in particular on their uses and limitations. Your argument should do the following:

Identify which aspects of these texts’ thinking on creativity you find most useful, persuasive, and insightful, and explain what makes this understanding helpful;

Identify which aspects of these texts’ thinking you find limited, and explain what the approach overlooks or fails to address.

In order to support and substantiate your argument, it will help to perform Harris’s other moves for “coming to terms” and some new ones as you put the texts into conversation:

Define the authors’ projects, noting their aims, methods, and materials; Quote keywords and passages from the texts, explaining their significance; Note where the authors’ thinking intersects and diverges, where they agree and

disagree, where their thinking overlaps or goes in different directions.

These challenges give you an opportunity to incorporate your own thinking on creativity, particularly if you agree with something but want to expand on it or if you find that some idea or perspective is lacking from the conversation. You are welcome to incorporate examples to further illustrate how these perspectives on creativity are useful or limited.

As you develop your thinking, keep in mind Harris’s note about opposition: “In writing as an intellectual, then, you need to push beyond the sorts of bipolar oppositions (pro or con, good or evil, guilty or innocent) that frame most of the arguments found on editorial pages and TV talk shows. Intellectual writers usually work not with simple antitheses (either x or not-x) but with positive opposing terms—that is, with words and values that don’t contradict each other yet still exist in some real and ongoing tension” (25). In this sense, you should not argue for or against one particular understanding of creativity. You are trying to complicate and enrich our thinking about creativity, not simplify it.

Your paper should follow MLA guidelines for spacing, font, first-page heading, title, header with last name and page number, and citations, both in-text and on a works cited page.

Paper Reflections

When you submit the final draft for any of our four main papers, you should also include a reflection paper (500-700 words) that addresses the work you did in the main paper. This is a separate assignment that receives a grade of its own (5 = A, 4 = B, 3 = C, 2 = D, 1 = F). Your reflection should address the following prompts and questions.

Define your project in the paper. What are you trying to accomplish, above and beyond satisfying the requirements and addressing the assignment prompt? How does your paper participate in and contribute to a conversation on creativity?

What specific choices did you make to work toward this project? Why did you choose the texts and examples that you did? What choices did you make regarding organization, style, and language? In what ways were your choices shaped and constrained by the texts we used, the assignment prompt, the genre of the assignment (an academic essay), or any other factors beyond your control? How might your paper have been different if you had more flexibility in these areas?

What are the strengths and limits of your project? How might your work be useful to other writers? To what extent were your choices effective? How could your work be developed further?

How would you describe the context of your writing process? What was your writing environment like? What technologies did you use? How long did you spend on writing at a given time? How many writing sessions did you have for the papers? What changes and interventions can you make in your writing process to continue improving?

Unit Two Overview

This unit builds on our thinking about creativity by turning to creative works in the culture around us. We will continue to draw on readings that give us helpful concepts and perspectives about culture, but we will be more interested in using them to analyze a cultural text than putting them into conversation with one another. New concepts for this unit include gender (in terms of “masculinity” and “the cool girl”), maturity and adulthood, morality, empathy, and diversity. We can continue to draw on our creativity readings from the first unit as well. As we work toward this cultural analysis, we will continue to develop our proficiency with our three main sets of writing practices.

Writing ProcessIn the first unit, we developed strategies for different aspects of the writing process: invention (generating ideas and content), drafting, organization, peer review, revising, and reflection. In this unit, we will expand on these strategies and include more of an emphasis on research. Specifically, our thinking on invention will expand from summarizing texts and putting them into conversation with one another to analyzing a primary text through the lens of secondary texts. Also, the challenge of organization will shift from addressing three main texts to addressing one main text from multiple perspectives.

Literacy PracticesWe started the first unit by making observations about our own experience and the world around us. We then shifted our attention to making observations about texts and their purposes. We considered how the concept of creativity could be understood through the lens of different concepts, such as borrowing, incubating, meditating, and cultural appropriation. We analyzed texts to assess their uses and limits and to note their similarities and differences. We applied our thinking to articulate new understandings of creativity based on our analysis.

For this unit, we will continue to think about the literacy practices of observing, conceptualizing, analyzing, and applying. Our observations will focus on cultural texts, and our analysis will shift from rhetorical analysis, which helped us address the arguments and effectiveness of our readings in the first unit, to cultural analysis, which helps us better understand how cultural texts embody and negotiate different meanings and concepts.

Academic MovesOur third set of writing practices helps us better participate in academic conversations. Harris’s “coming to terms” helped foreground the importance of understanding and responding to other authors as we develop our own ideas. In this unit, Harris’s notion of “forwarding” will help us build upon this foundation in the thinking of others. This move involves taking a helpful aspect of an author’s thinking and developing it further, opening new possibilities for how the idea could be applied or expanded upon.

Coming to Terms with Culture

For this short assignment (500-700 words), you should start to work toward analyzing the cultural artifact that you will address further in Paper 2. For both the short assignment and the paper, we want to draw on Harris’s notions of “coming to terms” and “forwarding” so that we can better understand how the cultural artifact works and how we can draw on class readings to analyze it. This analysis should draw on concepts and ideas from our class readings. You can continue to draw on our Unit 1 texts on creativity, but you can also incorporate thoughts from Bustillos, Eco, and Petersen on concepts such as masculinity, the “cool girl,” maturity and adulthood, morality, empathy, and diversity.

One challenge will be choosing a cultural artifact or text to analyze. Our understanding of “text” here is broad. Any thing or person that helps us think about creativity and these other concepts could work. You could focus on a text from popular culture such as a song, music video, television show, movie, or advertisement. You could look at examples from fashion, sports, food, entertainment, politics, or business. You can focus on a particular person that embodies a sense of creativity (or masculinity, or diversity, etc.). Just about anything will work as long as you can point to specific examples and make specific observations of the text you are analyzing.

Your work should address the following prompts and questions:

Before you work toward analyzing the text, you should first “come to terms” with it. How would you define the text’s project? What is the purpose of the text? How does it shape our ideas about what it is about? What sort of perspective does it offer? What keywords, passages, examples, or details can you identify from the text to support your thinking about its purpose and perspective? What details from the text are particularly important in terms of our understanding of it?

Offer your own thoughts on how this text embodies a sense of creativity. How does the text offer new ideas or shape our thinking in a new way? How does the text build on its influences? How is it different from other texts that are similar to it?

Put the text into conversation with one of our class readings. Can you use Lessig, Lang, Johnson, Lynch, or McRobbie to help us think about how this text is creative? Can you draw on Bustillos, Eco, or Petersen to help us consider how the text shapes our thinking about concepts such as gender, maturity, morality, empathy, or diversity? How does your text help us extend on what these authors have said, offering a different understanding of the concepts they take up?

Paper 2 Research

In addition to drawing on our class readings, Paper 2 also asks you to incorporate sources from your own research. Different types of sources could be helpful for our purposes. For example, if I were analyzing a song by Taylor Swift, I could look at sources that discuss the specific song, Swift herself, other artists like Swift, pop or country music, or music in general. I could look at sources that take up concepts relevant to Swift and the conversations around her music – concepts such as relationships, celebrity, feminism, or #squadgoals. All of these types of sources could be applied to Swift in some way, even if they don’t discuss her work directly. We can draw on different genres of writing as well: academic scholarship, journalism, critical writing in magazines or on blogs, etc.

As you conduct your research, you should look at a range of different databases. You are welcome to draw on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, but it will also help to look at more specific databases as well. For academic sources, check out JSTOR, Project Muse, and Academic Search Complete on the library’s website (Google Scholar will also be helpful here). For newspaper articles, use LexisNexis or the sites of specific newspapers, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, or The Guardian. Relevant magazines and sites for cultural criticism include The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, A.V. Club, Valid, Vox, and Medium.

Through your research, you should identify at least three sources that help you think about the cultural artifact you are analyzing in “Coming to Terms with Creativity” and Paper 2. You should submit your research in the form of an annotated bibliography, giving us full MLA citations for the sources and then annotations that explain what the sources are about and how they contribute to your thinking about your cultural artifact.

Paper 2

This paper (1500-2500 words, about 4-7 double spaced pages) builds on the “Coming to Terms with Culture” short assignment. Again, our main goal is work toward analyzing a specific cultural artifact, text, or person with reference to concepts from our class readings (creativity, masculinity, gender, maturity and adulthood, morality, empathy, and diversity). In our analysis, we want to draw on Harris’s notions of “coming to terms” and “forwarding” so that we can better understand how the text works, put it into conversation with our class readings, and then build on and extend the thinking of those readings.

Your analysis will need to substantially incorporate at least three outside sources, including at least one of our class readings and at least one source that you locate through your own research. You should use these sources to extend your thinking on the text you are analyzing, putting the text into conversation with these outside sources. For Harris, “a writer forwards a text by taking words, images, or ideas from it and putting them to use in new contexts. In forwarding a text, you test the strengths of its insights and the range and flexibility of its phrasings. You rewrite it through reusing some of its key concepts and phrasings” (37-38). That’s what you’ll be doing with these outside sources as you apply them to your cultural artifact.

Toward this end, your writing should address the following prompts and questions:

Ultimately, you will need to offer your own argument, insight, or perspective about the text you are analyzing and how it forwards concepts from your sources. You should be able to articulate how your analysis of the text adds to our understanding of these concepts and the sources that discuss them.

To support your argument, you will need to analyze specific details from the text. For example, if you are analyzing a song, you should discuss specific lyrics, aspects of the music, aspects of the video, etc. If you are analyzing someone in the fashion industry, you should discuss specific aspects of their clothes in terms of color, material, design, etc. You’ll need to make connections between these detailed observations and the larger insights and perspectives you want to offer so that we see how they relate: how do these details allow us to talk about the concepts from the sources? How does the text shape our thinking about these concepts?

This is not a requirement, but one way to develop your analysis is to compare one text or creator to another. For example, if I were analyzing Taylor Swift, I could compare one of her country songs to one of her pop songs, or one of her pop songs to a song by Nicki Minaj or Miley Cyrus, or one of her songs to song from a different genre, such as punk music. A comparison could help you be more precise in articulating how your text helps us think about our concepts in a different way.

Your paper should follow MLA guidelines for spacing, font, first-page heading, title, header with last name and page number, and citations, both in-text and on a works cited page.

Unit Three Overview

This unit takes our thinking in a new direction, turning from the analysis of cultural texts to participation in public and political conversations. Rather than focusing on concepts, we will focus on positions that people take in response to public issues. We will take up our class readings not as sources to draw on in our papers but rather as models of the writing move that Joseph Harris (2006) describes as “countering.” Our work in this unit will allow you to focus on a political issue, such as race relations in the United States, poverty, climate change, or the economy. You will ultimately be making your own argument in response to this issue, but following Harris’s thoughts on countering, you will do so by building off of and responding to another text. For our writing assignments this unit, we will also be switching from MLA to APA, and this will have implications not only for how we format citations but also how we engage with our research and structure our arguments.

Writing ProcessOur switch from MLA to APA will affect our writing process in this unit, particularly in terms of research. In cultural studies and the humanities (where MLA is more prevalent), scholars frequently draw on sources in order to refine their analysis of a cultural artifact. Making an argument through cultural analysis is often less a matter of saying that someone else is wrong than showing how we can analyze a text in a new way. In the social sciences (where APA is more prevalent), scholars frequently draw on sources not to respond to them directly or to draw on them for analysis but rather to map out a larger conversation so that they can situate their own research and argument within it. For our purposes in this unit, you will need to adjust your research goals accordingly, and this will also affect how you organize your paper and develop your argument.

Literacy PracticesBuilding on our literacy practices from the first two units, our observations will focus on political texts and the positions that they take in response to public issues. Conceptually, we will turn from focusing on broader concepts for analysis (creativity, gender, adulthood, empathy, etc.) to thinking about how we frame these public issues. In terms of analysis, we will turn from the meaning and significance of a text to analyzing its argument and effectiveness in addressing an issue. We will apply what we learn from this analysis by advancing our own positions in response to the issue.

Academic MovesIn this unit, Harris’s notion of “countering” will help us take up a particular position or argument and push back against it in some way, offering alternative perspectives or approaches to an issue. For Harris, forwarding can be described as in terms of saying “Yes, and…” to an author’s thinking, while countering works more as a “Yes, but…” (p. 56). In this case, you will take up one main text that offers an argument in response to a public issue, and your challenge will be to counter it in some way.

Coming to Terms with Politics

For this short assignment (500-700 words), you should start to work toward analyzing and responding to the main text that you will address further in Paper 3. This text should make an argument or take a position in response to a public or political issue. For both the short assignment and the paper, we want to draw on Harris’s (2006) notions of “coming to terms” and “countering” so that we can better understand the position represented in the text and how we can push back against it or offer an alternate way of addressing the issue.

One challenge will be choosing a text to analyze and counter. This text might be a speech, an article, a film or documentary, an interview, or something else along these lines – anything that makes an argument or takes a position in response to a public issue. If you do not already have a text in mind, it could help to start looking for a text by focusing either on a public issue or a particular person. If you know that you want to focus on, for example, race relations, poverty, climate change, or some other public issue, you can use this issue as a framework or search term to find texts that address it. If you know that you want to focus on a particular person – perhaps a politician like Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, a journalist, an activist, or someone else contributing to public conversations – you can look through texts that this person has authored.

Once you have a text to address, your writing should address the following prompts:

Before you work toward countering the text, you should first “come to terms” with it. How would you define the author’s project? What is the purpose of the text? What is the main issue that it addresses, and what argument or position does it take in response to the issue? What are the main claims, examples, evidence, and/or counterarguments the author offers to support the argument?

In what ways is the text effective in making its argument? Regardless of the extent to which you agree with the text, why might some people agree with this text’s thinking? What sort of beliefs, values, or assumptions does it appeal to?

What do you see as the limitations of the text’s position? What does it fail to address or consider? These questions give you an opportunity to take up Harris’s notions of “arguing the other side,” “uncovering values,” and “dissenting.” In this sense, can you attach “a positive value to something [the text] denigrates or a negative value to what [the text] applauds” (p. 60)? Can you uncover any hidden values in the text that limit its understanding of the issue? Can you show how this text contributes to a consensus about the issue “so you can then define your position against” this consensus (p. 64)?

Paper 3 Research

Our third paper asks you to incorporate sources in a few ways. Going back to the “Coming to Terms with Politics” short assignment, you should have one main text that you are responding to and countering in some way. As you advance your own thinking about the issue, you are welcome to draw on outside sources that help you support your thinking.

Another way of incorporating sources for this paper relates to our shift from MLA to APA. For APA, it is customary to include a literature review at the beginning of the paper. Our understanding of “literature” here is not literary works like novels and poems but rather scholarly literature, articles that people have written in order to address a particular question or issue. So, a literature review serves as an opportunity to map out the conversation that has already taken place around this question or issue. When an author writes a literature review, they do not necessarily discuss these sources at length. Instead, they try to offer a more general understanding of how the conversation has developed overall. For your research here, you can be looking for sources that take up the issue even if you are not planning on discussing them at length or using them to advance your own argument. Anything that gives us a better understanding of the conversation will help.

As you conduct your research, you should look at a range of different databases. You are welcome to draw on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing, but it will also help to look at more specific databases as well. For academic sources, check out JSTOR, Project Muse, and Academic Search Complete on the library’s website (Google Scholar will also be helpful here). For newspaper articles, use LexisNexis or the sites of specific newspapers, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, or The Guardian. Relevant magazines and sites for cultural criticism include The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, A.V. Club, Valid, Vox, and Medium.

Through your research, you should identify at least six sources that address the issue you are taking up in Paper 3. At least two of these sources should be academic articles. You should submit your research in the form of an annotated bibliography, giving us full APA citations for the sources and then annotations that capture the source’s position or argument in response to the main issue.

Paper 3

This paper (1500-2500 words, about 4-7 double spaced pages) builds on the “Coming to Terms with Politics” short assignment. Our main goal is to advance our own positions in response to an issue but to do so by countering another text in some way. With this in mind, it will help to remember Harris’s (2006) thoughts on countering:

Countering looks at other views and texts not as wrong but as partial—in the sense of being both interested and incomplete. In countering you bring a different set of interests to bear upon a subject, look to notice what others have not. Your aim is not to refute what has been said before, to bring the discussion to an end, but to respond to prior views in ways that move the conversation in new directions. (p. 56)

Your writing should address the following prompts and questions:

The introduction of your paper should include a literature review that offers an overview of the main positions taken in the conversation around the issue that you address. Your literature review should include references to at least four sources.

Ultimately, you should advance your own argument in response to the issue, and your argument should emerge out of the work that you do to counter another text. Toward that end, some part of your paper should address a text that makes an argument in response to the issue. You should “come to terms” with the text, giving us a sense for the author’s project and how they develop and support their argument. You should also “counter” this text by drawing on Harris’s notions of “arguing the other side,” “uncovering values,” and/or “dissenting.”

As you counter the main text and build your own argument about the issue, be mindful of opportunities to support your thinking by making specific claims and offering specific evidence and examples. This would be a good opportunity to draw on outside sources that help you support your thinking.

Your paper should follow APA guidelines for the title page, abstract, main body, running head, spacing, font, reference page, and in-text citations.

Paper 4

This paper asks you to further revise Paper 1, Paper 2, or Paper 3 while adding a few twists along the way. Regardless of which paper you choose to revise, the entirety of the original assignment still applies (except for the maximum length limit; you might find yourself going over the limit as you incorporate new material). As with our previous papers, Paper 4 will ask you to submit the paper itself and a reflection on the paper. However, our approach to these different aspects and their contribution to the paper grade will change. The requirements and grading are explained further below.

Reflection

To prepare for the revisions, complete a reflection (400-600 words) addressing Harris’s questions on page 99 (he discusses them at greater length on pages 108-121):

What’s your project? What do you want to accomplish in this essay? (Coming to Terms)

What works? How can you build on the strengths of your draft? (Forwarding) What else might be said? How might you acknowledge other views and possibilities?

(Countering) What’s next? What are the implications of what you have to say? (Taking an

Approach)

Paper 4

The document you submit for this paper should track the revision work you do. Starting with the previous draft of the assignment (the one that was graded as either Paper 1, Paper 2, or Paper 3), you should track all of the changes you make to the paper using the “track changes” feature in word processing programs or by hand (see Harris’s discussion of “Tracking Revisions” on pages 103-108). In addition to the revisions that emerge out of your work on the reflection, your work should also address the following prompts.

You should proofread and edit your paper to ensure your citations are entirely correct and your paper addresses all the following grammatical concerns:

o Comma Splices and Fused Sentences o Apostrophes o Semi-colons and Colons o Quotation marks (including titles)

Following Harris’s thinking on “taking an approach” from Ch. 4, you should develop a sense of “reflexivity” in your paper through your revisions. For Harris, the notion of reflexivity directs our attention to “those moments in a text when a writer reflects on the choices that she or he has made in taking a certain approach or in making use of a particular term” (85). He also draws on the concept of “metatext—text about text, writing about writing, moments when a writer calls attention to the terms he is

using or the moves he is making” (90). Through your revisions, you should incorporate at least three such moments of reflexivity or metatext in your paper. You should highlight these sentences or put them in bold so that they can be easily identified.

Harris also discusses acknowledgements in Ch. 4, a place for authors “not only to name the people they wish to thank but to specify what they want to thank them for” (95). At the end of your paper, you should include an “Acknowledgements” page that offers thanks to the various people who helped you and influenced your work.

Paper 4 Grade

Your Paper 4 grade will be determined by the reflection as well as your level of success on these three new challenges: editing and proofreading, reflexivity, and acknowledgements. This grade will not be affected by the grade you received on the original paper (Paper 1, Paper 2, or Paper 3), nor will it be affected by the quality or extent of your revisions beyond our concerns with editing, reflexivity, and acknowledgements.

Your Paper 4 Reflection grade, however, will be affected by the quality of your revisions. As with our previous reflections, this aspect of the assignment will receive a grade of its own (5 = A, 4 = B, 3 = C, 2 = D, 1 = F). Your grade here will be determined by the overall quality of the paper itself and the quality of the revisions.

Reflection Grade Examples

If you received a “C” on Paper 2 and revise it for Paper 4 and your revisions substantially improve the paper, you could receive a 4 (“B”) or 5 (“A”) for your reflection grade.

If you received an “A” on Paper 3 and revise it for Paper 4 and make some revisions that improve the paper, you could receive a 5 (“A”) for your reflection grade.

If you received a “C” on the original paper and your revisions do not substantially improve the paper, you could receive a 3 (“C”) for the reflection grade.

If you do not make revisions to the paper beyond the requirements noted above, your reflection grade could go down from the original paper grade. For example, a paper was originally a B could receive a 3 (“C”) for the reflection grade if no revisions are made.