English 101

Paper #2: Experience and Other Evidence

Length: 4 full pages, double-spaced

Rough Draft Due:

Final Draft Due:

Introduction to the Assignment

For this paper, you will build on your first paper, Experience is an Argument, and further develop your inquiry by engaging what others have said about the topic. In this paper, you’ll construct an argument about an issue you can relate to in some specific way by including both your own experience and evidence from research. These two kinds of evidence should mutually inform each other; that is, you should be able to analyze and reflect on your experience through the lens of the research you do, and you should read the research with a critical eye, informed by your own experience. The idea here is that the research should not just be tacked on to a narrative of your experience, but you should use the research to critically consider your experience and develop your argument.

Experience

For your first paper, you began with your own experiences. Now, you’ll move that to a next step. Reflecting on the theme of civic engagement that we have been discussing in class, consider how some element of your experience relates to a broader situation, issue, or controversy. We read many examples of such connections between personal experience and public issues in readings that we have done in the course so far. Many of the authors we read related their experiences as a kind of lesson, using their experiences as rhetorical tools to persuade their readers. [may want to add here some specific examples from the readings you chose.]


. . . And Other Experience (a.k.a, research)

When academics write and investigate, they bring research to bear on their thinking and writing, informing their experiences with observation, reading, discussion, and conversation. Thus we have the name of this paper, Experience and Other Evidence: in addition to talking about your own experience of an issue, you will also research the issue, ideally building toward a broad research paper. You will apply your own ideas as evidence in making a claim and you’ll expand those ideas with research on the topic. You must have a bibliography of at least five sources, and you must specifically engage at least two of these in the body of the paper.

The research requirement here is meant to expand your thinking on an issue. Think of your research as a conversation with others on the topic, a conversation that allows you to expand your understanding and critical perspective. No doubt you often make sense of your experiences by talking about them with others and reflecting on them ourselves; if you think of research in the same way, your research and therefore your writing will be richer, more meaningful, and part of your critical development rather than an onerous task. The research conversation will help you to learn something you don’t know about a topic of interest to you. Consider the term research. There’s an implication there that you are not searching for the first time, but looking again or anew into a topic.

Weaving together Experience and Other Evidence

How will you use these two kinds of evidence in your paper? That’s for you to decide. You might start with the personal experience and then move on to research, or you might start in a broader way and use your own experience as specific supporting evidence. In drafting the paper, you may even decide to write two papers, one all about your experience and another entirely based on research, and then revise them by weaving them together. How you decide to do this will be based on the context of your writing, that is, on who you decide constitutes your audience, what constitutes your purpose and how you will develop your exigence.

The point of this paper, though, is not just to talk about two kinds of evidence but to synthesize those two kinds of evidence, using each to inform the other. That’s the way research works: each new piece of evidence builds on the evidence that you already have, expanding your understanding and perspective of a given issue.

One rhetorical tactic you may want to use in preparing the paper, while both reflecting on the points you want to make and considering your research, is stasis theory. It might serve as a guide to help you categorize and articulate your ideas. Is the question that you are focusing on one of fact, cause, value, or action? What kinds of claims are the authors of your research making, or what kinds of questions are they asking?

What to turn in:

1. A prose description of the rhetorical situation of your paper, including an audience analysis, a description of what your context is, etc.

2. The Final draft of the paper

3. A bibliography of at least five sources, in MLA format

4. The rough draft of the paper read by a classmate, with the peer editing remarks they wrote AND a reflection from you on their comments

5. Style work as assigned

6. Library exercises as assigned

7. Final draft of paper #1 with grade and comments


Notes for instructors:

Adjust the assignment sheet as to fit your specific requirements:

n add due dates

n add a schedule of assignments and readings at the end (what will happen in class each day, what readings are due for each day, etc.)

n add specific examples from your readings (from the rhetorical analysis presentation)

n consider what you’ll assign for style work

The Goals of Paper #2:

n introduction to stasis theory (a reintroduction if you talked about it for the first paper) and understanding how issues can be categorized

n deeper understanding of construction of ethos

n introduction to research and what makes a good academic topic

n continuing development of their understanding of the theme of the course

The Experience and Other Evidence paper melds personal and academic writing to help students make the transition between the two genres and to introduce them to research and what counts as an academic issue by asking them to consider their personal experience (with experience defined very broadly) and how it might be at issue for the broader society, and thus a researchable issue. This paper will, for many of your students, be the first of their research papers; others will realize that some topics are too unmanageable or inappropriate to research, which is an important lesson.

The key to these being a great introduction to research is to work with students to understand the difference between synthesizing ideas and just adding quotations, statistics, “facts.” One way to be sure these papers achieve synthesis is to read drafts with students, either in individual conferences (which can be overwhelming in terms of time) or in small writing groups, where students have read each other’s drafts and you read but don’t heavily comment on drafts. Your presence in the writing circle (which we might consider to be a stage before peer editing) will help to move students to a higher level of understanding the paper, but so will students seeing each other’s work and the potential in the assignment.

By way of example, consider the radio series “Youth Voices,” which invites high school students in Washington, DC to produce radio stories that reflect this relationship between their individual experiences and larger social concerns that academics often research. The students talked about something from their everyday existence – being recent immigrants, struggling with weight issues, deciding where to go to college were some of the topics for Summer 2005– and then interviewed people considered expert in the various fields to find out how their individual situations were reflected in society and how contemporary research could help them understand their situations (see http://wamu.org/youthvoices/ if you’re interested in learning more about their stories).

What to do in teaching this assignment :

n Have your library session (which should have already been scheduled before the beginning of the semester). The session can come at any point in the assignment, but then take into consideration how much introduction to research you gave when you evaluate their use of research (there are advantages, and disadvantages, to doing it at all points in the assignment). With this consideration in mind, decide what requirements, if any, you have for what kinds of sources students should be finding for this paper. Different teachers have different preferences. For instance, some teachers require that all five sources in this paper’s bibliography be academic sources (that is, from scholarly journals). This is fine, but to be able to meet this requirement, students will need lessons on how to find academic sources, how to differentiate academic from non-academic sources, how to comprehend academic sources, and so on. Library day, by itself, is not enough to teach them all of this (it only scratches the surface of these issues), so be sure that there is enough room in your syllabus to talk about all of it before students get too far into researching and writing the paper. If you don’t have time to cover all of the nuances of academic vs. nonacademic sources while teaching this paper, consider making a different distinction: argumentative vs. nonargumentative sources. The two sources (minimum) that students are supposed to engage with in this paper obviously need to be sources that are making arguments, so that students can respond to them in a meaningful way. You can then go into more detail about academic versus nonacademic sources as the semester proceeds.

n On another library-related topic, consider what library exercises you can use in teaching this assignment. As they start to think about this paper, students will already have a topic from Paper #1, so the “Brainstorming Keywords” exercise, in particular, can be great for jumpstarting their research on their topic. You might consider making this exercise due on Library Day, so that students come in to the session with some keywords to try. Even if you collect these exercises as homework at some point, it’s a good idea to collect them again with the final draft of the paper, because they can sometimes give important clues about why certain papers and research projects are not working (or are working, as the case may be).

n Select readings from Engagements with Rhetoric. You may just build on readings from the rhetorical analysis unit, or assign new articles; if the former, ask students to review what they have read, looking now for how the personal and the academic are melded, or some other consideration you articulate. This can be a good opportunity to revisit the topic of civic engagement, and talk about how responsible and effective use of sources relates to writing as a civically engaged scholar. One reading from EWR that is useful for this purpose is John Leo’s “The Unmaking of Civic Culture” (47-48). Although it’s not an academic source per se, and it’s not exactly an argument of inquiry, it is a brief essay that combines both personal experience and citation of a couple of outside sources. It is, therefore, a good piece to use for starting a conversation with your students about what research from outside sources can add to evidence from personal experience. And the subject matter of Leo’s essay ties in directly to civic engagement, making it all the more useful.

n (Re)visit stasis theory

n Revisit the Burkean concept of rhetoric as identification

n Revisit a discussion of ethos and persona

n Assign readings from They Say, I Say. Students will begin working with sources on this paper (if they haven’t already done so on the rhetorical analysis assignment), so chapters 2 and 3 of TSIS, which focus on proper summarizing and quoting, are useful chapters to cover. In addition to these basic skills, though, this paper is the place to introduce students to the idea of responding to sources and effectively engaging with them. Chapters 4 and 5 of TSIS give students a range of strategies for doing this. Keeping in mind that this paper (like the first paper) is supposed to be an argument of inquiry, pay particular attention to what Graff and Birkenstein say in chapter 4 about agreeing and disagreeing simultaneously (p. 59-62). This nuanced form of response may be quite helpful to many students who are struggling to get beyond simplistic viewpoints on their topic. The authors point out that admitting uncertainty or mixed feelings “can be especially useful if you are responding to new or particularly challenging work and are as yet unsure of how you stand. It also lends itself well to the sort of speculative investigation in which you weigh a position’s pros and cons rather than come out decisively either for or against” (61). The “speculative investigation” that Graff and Birkenstein describe in this passage fits nicely with the goals of an argument of inquiry. Finally, note that Susan Bordo’s essay “The Empire of Images in Our World of Bodies” (pages 149-161 of TSIS) can be a useful example of an essay that synthesizes personal experience with evidence from sources. Bordo’s essay originally appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, so it’s written for a scholarly audience; because the Chronicle is a scholarly newspaper rather than a journal, Bordo’s essay does not use formal citation conventions, but it does do a good job of modeling some of the strategies of response that Graff and Birkenstein discuss. It’s also possible to see Bordo’s essay as a sort of argument of inquiry, although students will need help seeing the nuance and complexity of her discussion of an intensely personal and emotional issue.