Assignment
Compose an 8-10 page position paper plus a Works Cited page featuring at least 12 appropriate sources.
Purpose
You have been working towards this essay all semester, gathering research throughout the term and considering (and re-considering) your position as well as others in order to determine the strongest argument or best course of action. Your work in this essay is to take a position within the debate that youve investigated and meditated on for a good deal of this semester. Your position should thus build on your work in the Inquiry Presentation, Research Mini-Projects, and Literature Review.
Keeping in mind this courses central interest in academic writing as a skill that enables civic engagement and communal participation, the goal of the position paper is to build on what youve learned so that you can now (finally!) take a position within the conversation and make a new claim within your issue. This argumentative essay will be the place where you can share the fruits of your research and argue for the ideas you have developed through your writing and research process, keeping in mind what is at stake and for whom.
Audience
You will identify an audience for this project. When you do, remember the genre of the essay: you are making an academic argument. However, this genre should not be seen as limiting. Academics are not the only people who read academic arguments, and academic arguments are often found in widely read publications. Thus, you should think of your audience as an interested group who expects to encounter a thoughtful, informed, and persuasive essay.
Guidelines
You may feel as if youve said all there is to say on your topic, but our work during these last weeks of the semester turns your attention to rhetorical strategies that take up concerns of definition, cause and consequence, evaluation, and proposals for new action. Thus, you might work in this final paper to pinpoint the cause and the consequences of the problem you have been exploring and then propose a solution. Such a focus on proposals and solutions is indeed welcome, for we can all identify problems. The challenge is to create solutions with maximum benefit to the community.
For this project, you are required to have a Works Cited at least 12 sources. A minimum of 8 of these sources need to be academic (i.e. scholarly books or journal articles); the others might include blogs, interviews, magazine or newspaper articles, YouTube videos, or graphs from government or think tank websites. All sources must be reputable, credible, and useful for your case. Of course, you should draw on the research you conducted for the Inquiry Presentation and Digital Forum. Youll also, though, need to do more research. A great part of your success in this assignment will be determined by how well you employ your research.
One of the trickiest parts of a long argument is organization. You need to give an overview, stake your claim, offer evidence, refute evidencehow will you put it all together? There are two rhetorical tools to help you here.
The first is the stases. You can use the hierarchy of the stases, the way that an issue in one stasis depends on or interacts with an issue in another stasis, to help shape the paper. If you are making an argument about action, for example, you might introduce your thesis, but then bring in issues from fact/definition to establish background, issues from cause/effect to show exigence, issues from value to further develop a sense of importance and urgency, and then come to more extensive support for your claim about action.
The second piece of rhetorical theory are the arrangement strategies found in Fearless Writing. These strategies offer guidelines about how to begin and offer background and how to lay out a map for the paper.
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeArgument
How persuasively does this paper make a sophisticated argument that engages an exigent community issue, provides thorough background information, and asserts a well-defined action or proposal while also addressing counterarguments?
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeArrangement
How clearly and logically is this paper organized so as to (1) engage readers, establish exigence, provide background information, and articulate a clear thesis and proposal in the introduction; (2) present a logically-sequenced set of claims (both confirmation and refutation) throughout the body; (3) conclude by addressing bigger issues or questions about the topic?
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeEvidence
How convincingly are all general claims supported with specific evidence from a variety of credible and relevant scholarly and popular resources through the use of summary, quotation, and paraphrase?
This criterion is linked to a Learning OutcomeStyle
How coherently are the sentences and paragraphs linked together to form sections that effectively guide the reader and sustain the overall argument?
