Purpose
This essay presents an opportunity to highlight the most important pieces of research that you have found and communicate their importance in a more casual voice to an audience of your choice. You will provide evidence and analysis of your topic to a specific audience in an accessible way, and you will inform your audience of the key issues that are at stake in the conversation on your topic.
For this class, there are three benefits to this assignment: it is a low-stakes way to think about your topic (in preparation for the formal argument you’ll make at the end of the semester); it gives practice in summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting towards the goal of communicating the stakes of your topic; and it’s a chance to experiment with the audience, stance, and style so you can rhetorically adapt to other writing situations in and beyond college.
Task
Use your proposed topic and Structured Research Notes to write a 4-6 page essay with the purpose of informing a specific audience about the variety of perspectives on your semester topic. In the next assignment, you’ll be making your own claims and forwarding a cohesive argument, but the objective here is simply to summarize, inform, and analyze the diverse views already expressed about your topic without taking a position yourself.
While this assignment is based on your Structured Research Notes, you should go beyond your annotations of a source and explain how the source represents an important perspective on your topic. The Structured Research Notes ask you to explain the relevance of a source; Presenting Research Perspectives asks you to assess in detail the strengths and weaknesses of major perspectives on your topic, with the goal of informing a target audience of your choice. This prepares you to explain and analyze each source towards supporting your own position in the Final Research Paper.
First, pick a specific audience (this choice will dictate your next two) to bear in mind. What parts of your research will they find helpful for understanding your topic and what is at stake? Then, select three (3) sources from your research representing a diversity of perspectives on the issue ensuring that each source offers something unique that adds to the complexity of the issue for your audience. Next, determine an appropriate stance (the attitude you want to take toward your topic) and style (word choice, sentence structure, and level of formality) and write an essay informing your audience about the variety of perspectives on your topic, accomplishing all of the following:
Briefly summarize the main point of each source
Highlight the key points/positions that make each source different from the others
Integrate details from each source using properly cited paraphrases and quotations
Analyze the strengths and weaknesses and/or the pros and cons of each source for your specific audience. (Even if you are drawn to one position at this point, you must consider all sides, finding both strengths and weaknesses in each source.)
Second, at the end of the assignment, include a one-page, double-spaced Audience Justification Statement to reflect on the major choices in language, style, and tone that you have made and clarify the rhetorical appropriateness of your choices. This statement should:
Explain what audience you chose to target and why
Identify specific rhetorical choices you made to appeal to your audience (such as level of formality, word choices, sentence structure, your title, your choice of sources, etc.)
How You Will Be Graded
The Presenting Research Perspectives essay will be graded according to the following criteria:
4-6 pages (double spaced)
Diversity of perspectives presented
An accurate, concise, and informative summary of each source
Balance of properly cited paraphrases and quotations from each source
Analysis of strengths and weaknesses of each source
Clarity of audience choice
Appropriateness of rhetorical choices for a specific audience
Audience Justification Statement
Accurate formatting, grammar, spelling, and mechanics
Textbook Help
“Writing Analytically,” pp. 249-251
“Quoting, Paraphrasing, Summarizing,” pp. 541-554
“What’s Your Style,” pp. 667-682
“Mixing Languages and Dialects,” pp. 683-693
