Unit 2 Materials
Table of Contents

Sample Paper 2 Prompt: Chris

Sample Prompt Paper 2: Matt

Sample Prompt Paper 2 (Jenny): Comparing Strategies in Carr & Thompson

Links and Videos that Can be Used to Introduce Carr

Researching/Identifying the Conversation

Assorted (Unedited) Notes on claims, evidence & strategies in Carr

Some Early Discussion Questions

Carr & Academic Discourse

Carr Discussion/Analysis Questions & Group Exercises (Mersedeh)

Some Texts to Set up Class Debate Challenging/Defending Carr’s Position

Template Sentences for Paper 2

Steps to Crafting a Body Paragraph Focused on Analysis

Overview of Rhetorical Strategies

Aristotelian Appeals: Logos, Ethos, and Pathos

How Strategies Construct Logos/Ethos/Pathos

Group Work: Identifying Strategies

Carr Excerpts for Analysis

Carr Charting Exercise: What/How/Why (Mercedes)

Sample Rhetorical Strategy Papers

The Rhetorical Strategy of Metadiscourse

Sample Body Paragraphs Analyzing Carr

Sample Draft Carr Paper

TIPS & GUIDELINES

Evaluation

Style and Syntax as Strategy: Close Reading Tips

Frames & Framing

How Texas Teaches History By ELLEN BRESLER ROCKMORE. NY Times, Oct 21, 2015

Notes on Fallacies & the Evaluation of Argument

Analyze the Statements & Identify Weaknesses/Fallacy

Assignment 2Sample Prompts

Sample Paper 2 Prompt: Chris

Nicholas Carr argues in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that the internet “is chipping away [his] capacity for concentration and contemplation.” In this paper you will describe Carr’s overall argument, and analyze some of the rhetorical strategies that he uses to engage and persuade readers. Your paper should identify the rhetorical strategies used, examine why they were chosen, and analyze the effects they have on an audience. It should also discuss the effectiveness and relative strength/weakness of one or two of these strategies.

Introduction: In your introduction, describe the larger conversation to which Carr is responding and its significance (why we should care); introduce his text and overall argument; provide your own evaluative thesis about whether or not Carr’s argument is persuasive, and provide a roadmap for how your paper will proceed.

Body Paragraphs: Analyze two or three rhetorical strategies drawn on by Carr. You should discuss at least one of the three Aristotelian Appeals (logos, ethos, & pathos), connecting each to a set of specific rhetorical moves and choices. For example, if you are discussing ethos, you may wish to consider things like word choice, rebuttals, how the reader is addressed, evidence presented, etc. You should also examine one or two other strategies (see the Reader pp. 67-71.)
In each case you will provide 1) at least one textual example, in order to analyze and evaluate, and explain 2) how the strategy works, 3) why Carr specifically uses this strategy to advance his argument, 4) what the effect is on his intended audience, and 5) how well it furthers his central claim. For one of the strategies, you should also evaluate 6) how effectively Carr uses this strategy (strengths and weaknesses).

Conclusion: In the conclusion present your response to Carr’s argument. You can also discuss lessons you draw from analyzing Carr’s strategies – what did writing the paper reveal to you about his argument, or arguments more generally?

Requirements:

  • 6 pages (although longer is acceptable)
  • MLA format and citation
  • Works Cited page (MLA format)

Important Dates:

  • October 21stth, 9 am: 2 copies of your Rough Draft due in class for Peer Workshop.
  • October 24th, 26th, and 28th: Conferencing. Class canceled on 26thand 28th.
  • October 31stFinal Draft due

Sample Prompt Paper 2: Matt

Nicholas Carr argues in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that the internet “is chipping away [his] capacity for concentration and contemplation.” In this paper you will describe Carr’s project and argument, and analyze the rhetorical strategies that the he uses to engage and persuade readers. Your paper should identify the rhetorical strategies used, examine why they were chosen, and analyze the effects they have on an audience. It should also discuss the effectiveness and relative strength of these strategies.

In your introduction, describe the larger conversation to which Carr is responding and its significance; introduce his text and central claim; provide your own evaluative thesis about whether or not Carr’s argument is persuasive; and provide a roadmap for how your paper will proceed.

In your analysis, examine each of the three Aristotelian Appeals (logos, ethos, & pathos), connecting each one to a specific rhetorical strategy. In each case you will provide 1) a textual example, in order to analyze and evaluate 2) how the appeal and strategy work together, 3) why Carr specifically uses this strategy to make his appeal, 4) what their effect is on his intended audience, and 5) how well they further his central claim. Finally in each paragraph, assess 6) how effective Carr uses this strategy, evaluating how it successfully incorporates more than one appeal or how it might be less effective for different audiences.

Using Carr’s text as an example, conclude by reflecting on the significance of appealing to logos, ethos, and pathos through the use of specific strategies in developing arguments in general. What lessons do these appeals and strategies reveal about writing arguments?

In this paper, you will do the following:

  • Make connections between Aristotelian appeals and specific strategies in Carr’s text, analyzing how they work, why they are used, their effect on his audience, and how they develop his central claim.
  • Use the language of argument, Aristotelian appeals, and strategies in your analysis and evaluation: central claim, logos, ethos, pathos, specific strategies, etc.
  • Closely analyze Carr’s text for word choice, values, and assumptions about his intended audience.
  • Effectively organize your paper, developing clear topic sentences, using transitional phrases, providing relevant textual support, and using metadiscourse to guide your reader.

Requirements:

  • 5 to 6 pages (although longer is acceptable)
  • MLA format and citation
  • Works Cited page (MLA format)

Important Dates:

  • October 21stth, 9 am: 2 copies of your Rough Draft due in class for Peer Workshop.
  • October 24th, 26th, and 28th: Conferencing. Class canceled on 26th and 28th.
  • October 31st, 9 am: Final Draft due to Turnitin (Blackboard) and hardcopy in class.

Sample Prompt Paper 2 (Jenny): Comparing Strategies in Carr & Thompson

In this option you will work with both Thompson’s and Carr’s texts, evaluating and comparing the persuasiveness of their rhetorical strategies and appeals to determine which you think is more effective and why. You will need to provide a significant number of examples from the text, along with your own detailed analysis, to help support your argument. In this project, you will be taking a look at the larger issues they discuss (the impact of digital communication technologies), as well as at how these have been taken up for their own purposes (that is, what they choose to look at and what they seem to ignore).

Links and Videos that Can be Used to Introduce Carr

  • Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"
  • Carr'sblog pageand hiswikipedia page
  • Videos of Carrexplaining his arguments:
    1)6 minute PBS interview with Carrexplaining his main arguments
    2)video interviewwith Canadian host Steve Paikin ("Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?"16 minutes)
    3) The Harvard Book Store presents Nicholas Carr:The Shallows - What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (49 mins)
    4) Presentation at the Commonwealth Club of California, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (60 minutes - you can select "chapters" from the talk)
    5)Nicholas Carr & Stephen Fry on The Effects of Web Culture (9 minutes)
    6) Scene from2001: A Space Odyssey where Dave deactivates HAL.
  • IQ Squared debate featuring Carr (IQ Squared site,and fromYouTube- starts at about 10 minutes)

Researching/Identifying the Conversation

After Carr wrote his article many authors responded directly to the claims, and Carr was invited to a series of debates. Students could be asked to report on some of these in order to help think through both the strategies Carr uses and strengths/weaknesses in his argument.

  • Encyclopedia Britannicahosted a forum on Carr's text.Many prominent writers responded with short, lively posts (1-2 pages). Here are some examples:
    Clay Shirky:Why Abundance is Good: My Reply to Nick Carr

Nick Carr:Why Skepticism is Good: My Reply to Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky:Why Abundance Should Breed Optimism: A Second Reply to Nick Carr

Andrew Keen:The New Techno-Historical Determinism

  • Clay Shirky has been one of Carr’s biggest critics: "Does The Internet Make You Smarter?"
  • Stephen Pinker penned an op-ed disagreeing strongly with Carr’s understanding of cognition and his major lines of argument: "Mind Over Mass Media" (html) andalso as a pdf.
  • IQ squared debate in which Carr and Andrew Keen debate opponents. Short talks, many debaters tricks, could be used to look at strategies.The topic is whether smart technologies are hurting or harming our intelligence and literacy.

Assorted (Unedited) Notes on claims, evidence & strategies in Carr

Exposure to new media is altering people’s mind, reducing the capacity for sustained attention and reading complex texts. Hard to concentrate.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been littleconsideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

Evidence: his own experience finding it hard to concentrate – “the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”
Evidence:His friends, “friends and acquaintances—literary types,most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they haveto fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.”

Evidence of one person’s intuitions (near end) of playwright: In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake: I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality…As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

Evidence - research: A recently published study of online research habits…from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think..

Evidence: research/authority: Wolf.We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental

psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the

Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style

that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep

reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose

commonplace.

Evidence: Example – Nietzsche’s typewriter. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches…The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touchtyping, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

Strategy: CONCESSION AND DIVISION.
“Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell

phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our

medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self.

THE NET SWALLOWS ALL CLAIM – AND IT RESHAPES TRADITIONAL MEDIA

p. 1 For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.

p. 4: In a paper published in 1936, theBritish mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as atheoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processingdevice. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printingpress and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image.It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

[BUT CLAIMS THE NET DOES IT – NOT! COMMERCIALISM DOES. Educational hypertexts didn’t operate this way.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles,introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March ofthis year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article

abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick

“taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading

the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

“But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s,

media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the

process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and

contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly

moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a

guy on a Jet Ski.”

IDEA THAT MEDIUM IS MESSAGE. “You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part

in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns,

from rhetoric to telegram style.”

OBJECTION – the net is not one thing. It’s true that writing, print, etc. had a big impact, and shape thinking. But the internet, precisely because it swallows all, is not just “media.” It is books, and radio, and tv, etc.

PLASTICITY ARGUMENT

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think

that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our

skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s

not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study

at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old

connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly,

altering the way it functions.”

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. InTechnics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock“disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world ofmathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point ofreference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. [BUT BAD EXAMPLE – SURELY WE LIKE THE CLOCK!!! IT WAS A GOOD TRADE OFF!!]
As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaumobserved in his 1976 book,