Unit 3

Goals

With this unit you will do the following:

Generate Texts to...

• Become familiar with and practice strategies for generating ideas or exploring specific topics, issues, ideas, or beliefs.
• Use personal writing about reading in the process of creating public writing about reading.
• Use writing to clarify thinking; demonstrate knowledge; explore, explain, and analyze ideas and experiences; and influence beliefs and action.
• Write for a variety of purposes, including those that support their own learning, growth, and development; those that promote responsible citizenship and engagement through public discourse; and those that allow them to meet the demands of their academic courses.

Use Rhetoric to...

• Develop critical and formal strategies for identifying and addressing a variety of rhetorical situations.
• Demonstrate an awareness of the intended audiences, purposes, and forums for writing.
• Presented with the need to write within a specific rhetorical situation, students will be able to identify texts that respond to similar situations and analyze the rhetorical conventions and strategies of those texts in a way that will enable them to use similar conventions and strategies in their own writing.
• Demonstrate the ability to respond to and edit other writers' texts in an effort to help the writer meet the needs and expectations of different audiences, purposes, and forums.

Respond to Texts to...

• Develop strategies to analyze various written and visual texts, both their own and other people's.
• Identify the assumptions they bring to encounters with new texts, ideas, and situations and analyze how those assumptions may shape their reading of and response to those texts, ideas, and situations.
• Use writing to become aware of and think critically about writing processes, especially their own and their classmates'.
• Use writing to become aware of and think critically about written products, especially their own and their classmates'.
• Respond to other writers about their drafts.
• Edit and proofread their own writing and the writing of others until final drafts are virtually error-free and in compliance with the grammatical and mechanical demands of the rhetorical situation.

Use Research to...

• Make sound decisions about when, why, and how to do further reading and research during the production of a text.
• Use appropriate research strategies to identify and integrate a variety of ideas and evidence from human, Internet, and library resources into original, cohesive, written texts.E. Use appropriate conventions for citing and documenting source materials correctly and ethically.

Revise

• Evaluate the usefulness of other writers' suggestions.
• Incorporate appropriate suggestions into a text.

Employ Technology

• Use technology ethically and in accordance with international copyright laws, Illinois State University's appropriate use policies, and so on.

Assignment Description

Research serves any number of purposes in the academy and beyond. Think of your favorite novelist or screenplay writer: she probably conducts no end of research before and throughout the writing process. A mystery writer will fail miserably if she doesn't research the types, origins of, and effects of certain poisons. A film maker will lose all credibility if his/her recreations of the past are riddled with historical errors.

Research illustrates a point a writer is endeavoring to make, acts as an examplem, provides a significant quote from a credible source as support, and supports the writer's ethos (credibility, authority) by showing that he/she has done his/her homework and knows the topic thoroughly. Research may also act as a bridge between you and your readers: illustrating that you are familiar with the key scholarship and key names (Freud, Marx, Milroy...the names the experts drop so effortlessly and that operate as a kind of shorthand for often complex theoretical and empirical work). Research, in other words, can show readers that you are one of them.

Research takes two forms, and while we will examine each form separately, they frequently overlap. The form you are most familiar with, no doubt, is secondary research: the gathering of information from printed sources of some kind and of varying levels of authority. Secondary research involves the library and the internet and teachers have a good time arbitrarily demanding that you find X number of sources from books, magazines, and (occasionally) the internet. But the point of research isn't to illustrate that you can locate the library on campus and can then find books that are loosely connected to your topic. Writers research when they need information. Writers research because "good" writers tend to be curious and, even, slightly nosey people.

The second kind of research involves going directly to the source of the information (rather than to a published resource): primary research involves collecting data from an experiment you conduct yourself, from an observation, interview, or survey. Both forms of research appear in all manner of scholarly and popular texts, and while you will not leave this class expert in conducting either one, you will leave with a better idea about the purposes of and uses for primary and secondary research. For this unit you will use secondary research (library and internet sources) to develop a persuasive text aimed at a specific audience on this campus.f=

So, let's get started. Begin by brainstorming possible topics related to life and study on this campus. Think of the things that annoy you about student life, dorm life, health services, food services, athletics, Greek life, clubs, student government, etc. Think about the things that can be improved upon (student relationships, tolerance issues, student involvement). Think about the things that are already good but could be better still if only… Find an issue you can research that relates somehow to your life as a student on this campus and that impacts other students on this campus. Your audience for this paper may be professors in a particular department or college, the university administrators, student government, RAs, coaches, students, or other individuals on campus.

Now, imagine that you decide to write a paper persuading food services on campus to incorporate more organic food choices or more low-carb options. The odds are good that you won't find information related to food services at ISU in the library, but you will find information that could help you build an argument persuading food services that such changes are warranted, necessary, and in keeping with a balanced diet. You won't find information related to student fees at ISU in the library, but you might find information detailing what activities the national gov't suggests universities invest student funds in. You might even find articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education or the New York Times that addresses the issue of how student fees are/should be used. you might be able to research online to discover what universities that are similar in size to ISU spend their student fees on.

You will, then, need to choose a campus issue that you care about, that you can develop a persuasive argument about, that you can address to a specific campus audience, and that will require some form of secondary research.

Here's the thing no one tells you: researching is fun. So let's have some fun with this one and see if we can't write some persuasive texts that might even bring about some changes on this campus.

Unit Requirements

You must participate in each peer review and in every activity associated with this unit, and you must provide all associated drafts, peer reviews, and activities with the "final" paper you turn in to me.

You will also include an analytical essay examining the process you went through to write this paper, the decisions you made throughout the process, and the assistance you received from your classmates and from me throughout the process. This analytical paper should be 2-3 pages (double-spaced, Times New Roman font)

This paper will be 5-7 pages (double-spaced, Times New Roman font). Please visit the class schedule regularly so that you are aware of and can meet the deadlines for each draft of this paper.

Grading

Please consult the grading standards at the back of the Course Guide to see how your work will be assessed. Note that you will be given an advisory grade with your "final-for-now" unit draft, but this grade may/will change after you have globally revised this work for the final portfolio.

Terms

For an explanation of any of the terms used in this assignment sheet, please consult the glossary of terms.