This assignment will ask you to put on some slightly different lenses as you engage with media involving humans and their relationship with the planet and the natural world. The assignment requires you to summarize, analyze, and compare different media products; during the next few weeks, we will cover about a dozen different texts. You need to choose three of them and to write a paper about what the authors are trying to accomplish and how they accomplish it.
The paper you write should be about 1000 words long (3-4 pages). It will have rigorous grading criteria, as detailed below. The paper should:
– Examine at least three of the texts linked above,
– Summarize each article sufficiently so that a reader who has never encountered the text could understand its basic content,
– Explicitly identify the genre of the text and identify conventions of that genre, such as tone, type of evidence, focus, vocabulary, etc.
– Discuss how the genre shapes the content; identify both the strengths and the limitations of the genre,
– Identify the specific audience that each text is trying to reach and note how the author appeals to that audience,
– Consider how the publication (and the business model of that publication) affects the content it produces,
– Compare the three different articles, noting differences in content, tone, and purpose,
– Explicitly mention the publication in which the three text appeared, or if it′s from a book, mention the fact that it′s a book.
– Explain that each of the three publications caters to a distinct audience and articulate what/who that audience is,
– Handle names properly and refer to the articles primarily by the name of the authors who wrote them,
– Provide a citation page listing every source mentioned in the paper,
– Follow the guidelines for writing about outside sources, as explained here,
– Handle quotations well and only use quotations if they allow for some useful insight into the article,
– Maintain most of the grading criteria that applied to the narrative paper (clarity, formality, paragraphs, etc.),
– Summarize and paraphrase without plagiarizing (check the Turnitin results on the submission page)
Additional considerations:
– Use quotations sparingly and judiciously. It is a given that in an assignment that asks you to analyze and compare media, you will include some quotations. Note that there is a huge amount of considerations you should take into account when quoting, and we will cover them in class. But also please note that you should not over-quote. If any more than 10% or at the absolute most 15% of your paper is quotation, then you′re quoting too much. Most of the writing should be in your own language. Quote when there′s a good reason to do so. When there isn′t, then say it in your own words.
– You should start the paper by setting context for the reader. As is the case with nearly all college papers, you should write as if the audience is unfamiliar with the articles and the subject matter. It′s up to you to clarify these things. For instance, if you want to write about the sources that address hunting, then you should probably start by explaining what happened to Cecil. If you want to write about readings involving climate change, you could start by clarifying that the predictions of climatologists since the 1960s have proven remarkably accurate.
– Do not mistake the goal of this paper: you are not being asked to make an explicit argument about any of the topics covered in these texts. Please, don′t turn this into an argument about the ethics of hunting, or about the actions needed to address global warming, or about ease of access in national parks, etc. It is fine to have views on these things, but the goal of this paper isn′t to explicitly defend them. You′re being asked to analyze genre and publication models. If you′re making any sort of explicit argument, it should be about competing sources of information and their strengths or weaknesses.
These THREE sources must be used for the research paper:
https://graphics.latimes.com/exxon-arctic/
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2805576-1982-Exxon-Memo-to-Management-About-CO2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v＝uqMxRNVuUAk
