Writer______
English 99: Writing Assignment One
Reading for Essay One:
Cascio, Jamais. “Get Smart.” Atlantic Monthly July/August 2009: 94-100.ProQuest. Web.3 Jan. 2017.
We’ve been having a look at how paraphrase—and especially that compressed kind of paraphrase called a summary—can serve as a means of checking and clarifying our understanding of texts, and you’ve gained a bit of actual summary writing practice. Likewise, we’ve now had some practice with active, critical reading—with ways to interact with and engage a text at levels beyond the superficial. For your first essay assignment you’ll be applying that experience with summary writing to a longer, more complicated argument and then applying active, critical reading moves as well. Begin by doing an active, careful reading of Cascio’s article, which is available from our library via ProQuest or Academic Search Complete. Be sure to annotate as you read, and you’d be wise to make sure your annotations include both summary and response comments. Also, since this is essentially a summary/response essay, having a look at “Summary/Response Essay Overview” in the Documents section of our Course Website would be a useful way to get your bearings, and after your first careful reading of Cascio’s article, you should find the “Graphic Organizer for Non-Fiction” in the Documents section (under the Reading Strategies heading) useful to help you organize your summary ideas as well.
Your basic task for this assignment is twofold. The majority of your essay will involvesummary; your job will be to describe Cascio’s argument clearly and thoroughly to readers who aren’t familiar with the article. You’ll want to carefully articulate both the fundamental point of Cascio’s essay (Cascio’s thesis) and the structure of supporting claims, details, and examples that underpins that fundamental point. Remember, in this portion of your essay, your principal job is simply to present the configuration of Cascio’s ideas as clearly, as accurately, and as interestingly as you possibly can. Given that this article clocks in at around 4000 words, you’ll doubtless need a good six or sevenhundred words (between two and four body paragraphs, say) to adequately summarize the material. However, when you’re done with the summary, you still have one more important task to accomplish: after you’ve finished the summary portion of your essay, be sure to include at least one good sized body paragraph—separate from your concluding paragraph—that offers a thoughtful, richly developed response to the argument you’ve summarized. Here, of course, you might take any of several directions: examine connections between the article’s ideas and your own life experience, offer explanations of why you agree or disagree with important ideas from the article, provide a critique of the way the article argues its case, articulate unstated implications of the article’s argument. . . . The options are various, but the basic point is to demonstrate that you’ve given some careful, independent thought to the article’s ideas, to join in the academic “conversation” Cascio’s essay is part of.
One important thing to remember as you draft and revise is that you should assume your audience forthis essay isn’t me, but rather, somebody a lot like me (i.e. a member of the academic community) who hasn’t read Cascio’s article (in real life, this is the sort of reader you’d likely be writing a summary for). As you move through your writing process, be sure to check in with me at each step listed below and be sure to turn this assignment sheet in with your would-be final draft. Also, be sure to include at least one peer conference—with another member of our class—in your writing process and to turn in a Peer Conference Record Sheet—completed in full—along with the final draft. And remember that Thursday, 9 Feb. is the absolutely deadline for working through your collaborative writing process and submitting a would-be final draft of this assignment; also, though, remember that you’d be wise to get this work completed well before this date.
Plan and Annotations:
Draft/Drafts:
Assessment: + OK Further revision, please