Academic Summary

Assignment: Write a summary of Donald Murray’s “The Maker’s Eye.” Your summary will be about 300 words long.

Purpose: The ability to write an effective summary is one of the most important writing skills a college student (or any writer) can possess. Much of academic writing requires you to enter a conversation among experts, but before you jump in, you must first listen as a means of carefully, accurately, and ethically understanding the positions of those you’re intending to address. That’s where the critical skill of summarizing comes in. Here, you learn to read and represent the words of others, and this is why we begin the semester with the summary assignment.

Audience: Imagine your audience for this summary to be other students at UMD who are entering into the conversation about this article. You might think of your summary as being posted on a course website.

Writing the Summary: This summary will demonstrate that you have closely read Murray’s essay. Remember, you are summarizing, not analyzing, arguing, or responding. You are explaining objectively and concisely what Murray’s essay is about and the main ideas that drive his piece.

To achieve your purpose with your audience, use the following strategies in your summary:

  • Introduce Murray’s essay in the beginning of your summary so your readers know the exact text you are summarizing. Include the author’s name, the date of publication, and the publication title within the first few sentences.
  • Focus on the writer’s major arguments, central ideas, and main claims. Show that you understand the “big picture”—the writer’s purpose and how he supports it.
  • Focus on the “big picture.” Though integrating some important examples or quotations will be effective, you do not want to get mired in the specific details of the essay. You want to generalize about the types of evidence or methods of arguing Murray employs to support his argument. Include only the key phrases and terms that are central to Murray’s essay and an explanation of what those mean and how they are employed.
  • Use “author tags” so that your reader understands that you are reporting the author’s ideas rather than suggesting they are your ideas.
  • Use an objective tone and a mix of paraphrased and quoted source material.
  • Save comments on the author’s form, style, or structure for the end of the summary.

First Draft Due:

Final Draft Due:

Annotated Bibliography

Assignment: For the annotated bibliography assignment, you’ll cite and annotate five peer-reviewed scholarly sources you see as significant to the investigation of the issue you have chosen for the semester (approx.150 words per annotation).

Purpose: Throughout the semester, you explore an issue of your choice. From now until the end of the term, you will ask questions about this issue (Inquiry), analyze arguments within the issue (Rhetorical Analysis), identify lines of argument and conversations (Digital Forum), and offer your own argument about the issue (Position). To take on all of these tasks, you’ll need to conduct research on a topic of your choosing. The Annotated Bibliography assignment enables you to do this work. For this assignment, you’ll be introduced to research strategies and the UMD library system, and this introduction should help you to choose wisely the sources that will speak to, enrich, extend, and complicate your understanding of the issue under consideration and that will be the prime subject matter for your Annotated Bibliography and your writing throughout the semester.

Audience: I am your audience for your annotated bibliography. Using an academic tone, explain to me the source, how it is relevant to your topic and inquiry, and why this source is credible.

Writing the Annotated Bibliography: Your annotated bibliography should follow the example below. In each annotation you should (1) cite the text of your choice in perfect MLA format; (2) summarize the text; (3) evaluate the credibility, fairness, and/or bias of the source, and (4) discuss how the text will help you gain a deeper sense of the issue and how you might use the source in the Inquiry essay.

hooks, bell. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge: South End P,

2000. Print.

hooks’s text works to define what feminism is to an uninformed and possibly resistant audience. Her goal is to dispel negative perceptions of feminists as “men haters” and instead to offer a new, more positive explanation of this political position. Feminism, for hooks, is a “movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression,” and she notes that anyone can be a feminist if he or she works towards this end (viii). Her chapters—“Our Bodies, Ourselves,” “Feminist Class Struggle,” and “Global Feminism” (just to name a few)—reinforce her overall aims, as hooks attempts at every turn to explain feminist issues to readers in a generous and welcoming tone. I find her book to be an informed and levelheaded assessment of feminism, and her definition of feminism coincides with that of other authors I’ve consulted (see Bordo). For my Inquiry paper, I help my audience see the various ways stakeholders are re-defining feminism, and hooks’s definitions of what feminism is will be particularly important for my purposes.

Final Draft Due:

Inquiry Assignment

Assignment: Write a 4-5 page inquiry essay about your chosen topic.

Purpose: Over the course of the semester, you will complete a series of assignments that asks you to identify an issue of interest to you and pursue it by asking questions, conducting research, analyzing arguments, and taking a position of your own. The Inquiry assignment initiates this process of thinking and rethinking.

The Inquiry assignment asks you to identify the issue you’d like to pursue for the semester and begin your exploration. The goal of the assignment is to present this issue to your readers and pinpoint a guiding and critical question that invested citizens and experts are asking about the and the responses they are formulating. Key to this project is the idea that you are not just inquiring for your own sake. Rather, you are using this assignment to encourage an audience of your choice to invest themselves in this issue. That is, you need to make it clear that this issue has exigence: understanding the issue is thus important and asking questions about it is a worthwhile endeavor.

Audience: You may choose to write to readers who have never encountered the issue you’re engaging, or you may write to readers who have preconceived ideas about the issue under discussion. Whatever audience you choose, you want to think about how your inquiry addresses their understandings and concerns.

Writing the Inquiry: I encourage you to initiate your work in this essay by reflecting on your personal experiences and interests and identifying the issues that are most important to you. You will complement this personal investment, though, with scholarly research—research that will enable and support your work throughout the course assignment sequence. For this assignment, you will identify at least five academic sources that spur your thinking on your topic and add perspective to your experience. The Annotated Bibliography assignment will help you to identify relevant sources and practice summarizing, evaluating, and connect them to the overarching objective of the Inquiry essay (see the Annotated Bibliography assignment description). Examining these resources should also help you to identify important questions to ask about your issue—questions that should stand at the center of your Inquiry assignment. When you submit your final draft of the Inquiry essay, you will include a bibliography of the five sources cited in MLA style, and you must specifically integrate and engage at least two of these sources of these in the body of the paper.

Building on the research you conduct for the Annotated Bibliography, you will craft your Inquiry essay with these goals in mind: (1) identify and explain to your audience the issue itself and argue for the exigence of the topic, (2) pose an insightful, complex, and open-ended question that guides your exploration of the topic and opens a field of scholarly conversation, and (3) synthesize multiple perspectives on and responses to the question to demonstrate how experts and stakeholders are understanding and engaging this issue. You will also include a Works Cited page with five academic sources related to your topic.

The end result then is not to complete the investigation or take a position within the issue. Rather, your work is to assert the importance of the issue and to identify the main questions that drive it and to display for your readers the array of perspectives on the issue and responses people craft to the question you’ve identified.

First Draft Due:

Final Draft Due:

Rhetorical Analysis Assignment

Assignment: Write a 4-5 page rhetorical analysis of a persuasive text that engages your topic.

Purpose: You will choose a persuasive piece of writing that engages the topic you are exploring throughout this term. By closely reading a persuasive text about your topic, you will become more aware of the arguments and rhetorical strategies enacted by stakeholders impacted by your topic.

The Rhetorical Analysis assignment achieves two goals: first, you will learn more about the issue you’re exploring this semester, and, second you will learn about effective writing by examining how other writers create successful (and possibly not-so-successful) compositions.

Audience: Imagine that your audience is interested but is not an expert in the issue discussed in the piece you’re analyzing. Also, your audience has not read the persuasive text, so you’ll need to provide basic background information to situate the piece for your reader.

Writing the Rhetorical Analysis

  1. The first (and possibly most important) part of this project is for you to choose a persuasive piece of writing to analyze. The document you choose to analyze is completely up to you; it just must engage the topic you’re investigating this term. Whatever piece of writing you choose, it is critical that you identify one in which a writer speaks to a particular audience about a specific issue. The writer should take a stand on this issue and attempt to persuade his or her audience. In addition, the piece of writing you choose must be worthwhile: do not choose something that is poorly written or that you merely plan to criticize.
  2. When you analyze this piece of writing, your goal is to identify and examine the writer’s rhetorical strategies and how these strategies help to achieve the overarching purpose of the piece. Thus, you will need to explain to your readers how the writer persuades his or her audience, whether or not the writer’s strategies are effective, and why you think so. To provide a thorough analysis for your readers, you’ll need to research the writer, the topic the writer wrote about, the audience the writer addressed, and the historical context during which the writer wrote. In other words, you will need to understand and inform your readers about the rhetorical situation in which the writer composed this document. If you’re unsure about the rhetorical situation that your writer engages, you may need to do a bit of research.
  3. Once you choose your persuasive document and research its rhetorical situation, you will be ready to analyze the piece by describing its strengths and weaknesses. You will examine the writer’s use of rhetorical strategies and appeals and discuss how those moves meet the needs and expectations of the audience. Therefore, to compose your analysis, you’ll establish your own thesis statement—your own argument about the writer’s rhetorical strategies. You will then support this thesis statement with evidence from the text to demonstrate to your audience that your argument about this persuasive piece of writing is a reasonable one.
  4. It is important to note that when you compose your analysis, you should avoid simply pointing to a writer’s use of appeals, style, arrangement strategy, etc. Instead, you’ll want to compose your analysis by discussing both the purpose and effect of the rhetorical moves you’re focusing on, asking: (1) Why did the writer choose this appeal? (2) What effect does this appeal have on the audience? By considering these questions, you will effectively evaluate the choices the writer makes when attempting to reach his/her audience. It is important to note as well that you do not need to cover every appeal and persuasive strategy. You might focus on the strategy you found most compelling or prevalent.

First Draft Due:

Final Draft Due:

Digital Forum

The Assignment: For this assignment, you will craft a website that presents three major stakeholder positions within your issue. You will also compose an “About” page for your webpage and a “Required Reading” list that focuses exclusively on peer-reviewed, scholarly sources.

Purpose: The fourth assignment of the semester, the Digital Forum, asks you to continue to explore, research, and write about the issue you’ve engaged throughout the semester. The goal is to deepen and extend your understanding of the issue and the specific positions people take within it. Your previous assignments should provide the foundation for this project, but the purpose is for you to learn more about the issue rather than recycling what you’ve already researched and written about.

Modeled after the New York Times’ “Room for Debate,”[1] your website for the Digital Forum assignment will showcase three specific positions that stakeholders take regarding this issue. Your Digital Forum will include five pages: an About page that introduces the topic and conversation to the reader, three separate stakeholder pages that present the different positions of the stakeholders, and a Required Reading List that points your audience to five scholarly sources about the conversation. The stakeholder position pages will offer three discrete lines of argument within your debate, and here you will show how stakeholders engage, refute, or elaborate on each other’s claims. The About page and the Stakeholder pages should include at least two credible external sources each.

Audience: This project is completely online, and thus your audience is beyond the academic community. Your audience is both general and specific: while of course the digital environment would allow anyone to visit your site, your goal is to shape your forum so that you speak to a specific audience and thus use language, research, examples, and visuals that would be of interest to them.

Writing the Digital Forum

  1. This is a forum. Thus, the stakeholder position pages should be in conversation with one another. They should be debating similar topics, engaging the same stasis points, elaborating on one another’s ideas, taking up the same lines of argument, or raising concerns about the other interlocutors’ positions. In sum, you should think of the stakeholders within your forum as talking with one another.
  2. Your “About” page should introduces your audience to the issue (approx. 300 words). This page should identify the exigence of the issue, explaining to readers the reason why they should care about this topic and what the stakes of the issue are. It should also provide enough background information to prepare your audience for the forum conversation.
  3. Your three “stakeholder position” pages (approx. 300 words each) should engage your issue from different perspectives. When composing each of these pages, you should present a specific approach to or position on this issue, showing your audience how certain stakeholders or stakeholder groups engage this debate. It is important to note, here, that you do not need to pretend to be one of these people or part of these stakeholder groups. Rather, you will identify the position this individual/group might take and explain the position by drawing on research that demonstrates their perspective. Toward this aim, you should find and hyperlink to and/or footnote at least two sources to support each of the three perspectives you present. These sources can be popular sources but should be credible.
  4. A “Required Reading” page that offers five annotations (approx. 100 words each) of new scholarly sources pertaining to your issue that would be of interest to your audience. These sources should not be the ones you used for your Annotated Bibliography.
  5. You will use Weebly as your web platform. I have chosen Weebly because it is user-friendly and does not require a lot of technological expertise. That said, I do hope that you are attentive to and make use of the affordances of the website. Affordances are options available to you in different mediums that enable you to craft, shape, and present your message. A written essay has different affordances than a website or video. Thus you will want to be sure you are aware and take advantage of the specific affordances that digital platforms and technology allow. You will want to consider the following questions in thinking about how you will create your website and forum:
  • How do my choices of font, color, images, and graphics reflect the message and overarching project of the website?
  • How can I purposefully and thoughtfully make use of these features so that they add depth to my message and reach my audience?
  1. Since we will be doing a lot of online work in class, please bring a laptop to our meetings. If you do not have immediate access to one, the UMD offers a “Laptop Lending Program.” See this website for details: http://thestamp.umd.edu/about_us/information_desk/laptop_lending_program.
  2. In the case that you decide to revise the Digital Forum later this semester, please make a copy of your Digital Forum website once you have completed and submitted it to me. Once you begin revising this project, I will use this copy to see how you’ve revised your website, comparing the original to the new one you submit. Also, if you decide to revise the Digital Forum, please set the original site to “private.” You should then publish, if you so choose, the revised version. This way, you will not have two versions of your website on the web.

First Draft Due: