Course Recap for Thursday, December 1, 2016

End of the Semester Assignment List

• Revision Project (Extra Credit) Due Monday December 12th- You can revise one of your Project 1 or Project 2 papers for a higher score.  That means one of your two narratives or one of your two analysis papers. There are two catches:
• The revised paper must have 50% new material.  This can come in the form of expanding the narrative longer or reworking large sections of the paper or a combination of both.
• You can only revise a paper that you actually completed.  So if you did not submit a narrative or an analysis paper you cannot revise that project.
• Logical Fallacy Assignment (Extra Credit) Due Friday December 9th You can repeat he Logical Fallacy Assignment 5 more times to receive 30 extra credit points  The first one you do will be worth 10. The other 4 are worth 5.  You will receive points based on how accurately you identify the Logical Fallacies
• First Draft of Research Paper(MANDATORY) Due Friday December 2nd- You will be submitting this via Google Docs and ELI Review.  I want you to break your paper into 3 sections about 1.5 to 2 pages long each. If your piece is longer than 6 pages you will be allowed to have more pages in each section.  You can mark them Part 1, Part 2, etc or you can give them actual subtitles like The Dangers of Smoking or How to Quit just break your paper up.(We'll discuss next class exactly how subtitles should be formatted)  In Google Docs highlight the section you want me to review for you.  You will also be submitting each part into ELI separately.
• Genre Project (MANDATORY) Due Tuesday December 6th- Bring in 3 examples of the genre we agreed upon for your 2nd Persuasive Genre. See Genres of Writing for ideas. GENRE MUST BE APPROVED BY ME.
• Genre Project (Continued) (MANDATORY) Due Thursday December 8th-Bring in the example of the genre that YOU created.  
• Final Draft of Research Paper(MANDATORY) Due Friday December 16th

Course Recap for Tuesday, November 29, 2016

First Draft of Research Paper

Make sure that your draft attempts to do the following things: 

1. Prove your community has a problem.  What is the issue?  Why should people care? Where's the proof that this is happening in your community? 
2. Provides solutions.  What can we do to fix this issue?  How do we know this solution will work?  Is there any research to back up the effectiveness of the solution?  Remember for those of you exploring issues that deal with issues of public policy and law to give at least one solution that YOU as a member of your community could do to help the issue.  Let's say your issue is poor sex education in the school system.  Getting a better curriculum implemented in the schools is a solution but what can the students do to help the issue.  Maybe they could form some sort of anonymous online group where students can safely ask questions and receive answers from professionals.  We want to call everyone in your community to action on this issue not just the people in charge.
3. What are the counterarguments? What are the potential obstacles that could prevent you from implementing your solutions?  What reasons might people give for why your issue shouldn't be addressed?  Looking again at poor sex education, you might have people who argue that the current curriculum is fine or that the curriculum you are proposing will promote promiscuity.  How can you handle these objections?  This does not necessarily have to be a section of its own.  Many of you will address these issues when you answer questions 1 and 2 but you want to keep it in mind as you write.
4. Try and have at least one source for each of the 3 questions above. What tends to happen with this paper is people pack all of their sources in one section of the paper (usually the one addressing the problems).  If your solution is to form a smoking support group, find a source that talks about the effectiveness of support groups.  If the issue is the wrestling team is underfunded, what are the benefits of funding the wrestling team?  What does being on the wrestling team do for students?

Second Genre

While I want your research paper to be the main focus over the next couple of days, it is time for you to think about your secondary genre.  Your secondary genre piece's goal is to complement your research paper.  It's purpose is to help your audience see your issue through a different form of writing.  Under Class Documents there is a list of Genres of Writing. Look it over and think about what other genre of writing best fits your topic and will help you further prove your point.  Your genre might focus primarily on illustrating the problem, for instance, a powerful magazine ad that talks about the effects of domestic violence or a play that illustrates gender fluidity, a poem expressing what it's like to have anxiety and depression as a college student, or it might look at the solution: greeting cards to give to students who are suffering from homesickness, a month long menu of healthier cafeteria options, an illustrated how-to guide on proper running form.  All the examples, I gave are things students have done in the past.  Come to class Thursday with some ideas of what you want to do that you can bounce off of me.

Homework

• Read Letter from Birmingham Jail page 121 in Readings for Writers Due Thursday December 1
• Think about what second genre you want to do. Due Thursday December 1 
• First Draft of Research Paper Due Friday December 2 via Google Docs and ELI Review

Course Recap for Thursday, November 17, 2016

Annotated Bibliography 

You are creating an annotated bibliography of 10 sources.  For each source you will include an APA reference entry and then an annotation, a paragraph where you summarize and evaluate the source.  Check the example below.

Burden of tobacco use in the U.S.  (2016, May 20).  Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention.  Retrieved from

http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/campaign/tips/resources/data/cigarette-smoking-in-un

ited-states.html?gclid=Cj0KEQiAx7XBBRCdyNOw6PLHrYABEiQAJtyEQ-HLy

eWOIcGYnGqQelBcqGp5wEY6l2GxA5nctMaJ40YaAttP8P8HAQ

This site provides statistics about smoking. It talks about the prevalence of smoking amongst different demographics and the number of deaths caused by smoking. This article helps to show that smoking affects a large number of people from many different backgrounds. It also shows how many are negatively affected by smoking, providing statistics that show the number of smoker who have developed and/or died from smoking-related illnesses like lung cancer or emphysema. A large number of people who are killed by smoking aren't even smokers "...with more than 41,000 of these deaths from exposure to secondhand smoke" ("Burden of Tobacco," 2016). According to “Burden of Tobacco Use in the US” (2016) There is a higher rate of smoking (26.3%) in people below the poverty line than those above it.  

You are going to do this for 10 different sources. Here are some tips for creating a good annotated bibliography.

• Start your search with the WMU library website. You have to have 2 scholarly articles but it won't hurt to have a few more. Once you've exhausted this resource, check out Google. This is a good way to ensure that the majority of your sources are valid.
• Check out the questions on page 37 of your EasyWriter book under the Analysis section to determine what types of things you should discuss in your annotation.
• Use your annotation to help yourself gather all of that source's useful information in one spot. Include any useful quotes or statistics so that you don't have to go searching for them later.
• Make sure when you quote from a source that you use proper APA formatting.
• If you use a citation creator like EasyBib or KnightCite, make sure that what that site generates is the same as the formatting provided in the APA Formatting Guide I created or the APA Formatting Guide located in your Easy Writer book (starts on pg 263).
• If at anytime you feel confused, referring to your EasyWriter book about APA formatting will be really helpful. It's what I use to determine how to format sources in APA. It has a very detailed guide on APA from how to quote sources to how they should appear on your reference page. If you weren't here, or if you forgot what I taught on Thursday or if you find my guide a bit confusing (I added a lot of notes in there), this could be the next best route.
• Please put in effort. I will know when you haven't done so and you will be graded accordingly.

Homework

• Create the annotations (description of sources) for the two sources we added to your bibliography on Thursday. (Due Sunday Nov 20 at midnight via Google Docs)
• Completed Annotated Bibiliography (Due Tuesday Nov 22 at midnight via Google Docs)
• Enjoy your break!!!

The formatting of this post is wonky because I was trying to show you how to format the bibliography. It should still be easy to read though.

Course Recap for Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Conferences are over, and I hope that they were helpful.  This Tuesday we had peer review.  I hope that peer review gives you all a good idea of what I will be looking for in your final drafts.  The place where many of you lost points in the first project was your failure to actually revise your papers.  Please use the feedback your classmates gave you to help you make actual changes to your paper (correcting grammatical errors are a good start but I also want revision in your content).  If you feel like you didn't receive good feedback from your classmates, look over the peer review  sheet and ask yourself if you're missing any of the things mentioned there.  Maybe you don't need to include historical context to make your point, but you know it would make your analysis stronger.  Revision isn't just about fixing what's wrong.  It's about taking what you have and making it better.  There is no such thing as a perfect paper.

Also I'm including in the Class Documents the Works Cited Page we worked on together in class to help you when formatting your Works Cited Page.  It includes the entries for the 3 short stories.

Homework

• Analysis Paper #2 via ELI Review and Google Docs Thurs Nov 3 11:45pm
• Peer Review of Analysis Paper #2 in ELI Review Due Sunday Nov 6 11:45pm
• Final Draft of BOTH Analysis Papers Due Friday Nov 11th 11:45pm

Course Recap for Thursday, October 13, 2016

Song Analysis

We analyzed a few songs together.  We looked at how the lyrics, the music, the time period the song was written, the background of the artist, etc all can be used to help us determine the meaning of the song.  The two things I want you to keep in mind as you choose your own songs is the fact that a set of lyrics can mean different things to different people depending on who's listening and to pick songs where some of the lyrics are up for interpretation.

Homework

• Outline for Movie of your choice.  Check out the Sample Analysis Outline. Due Tues 10/18 in class
• Read Sonny's Blues (underneath Class Documents) Due Tues 10/18 in class
• Outline for Song of your choice Due Thurs 10/20 in class
• Read The All-Girl Football Team and Virgins Due Thurs 10/20 in class

Course Recap for Tuesday, October 11, 2016

How to Determine a Good Thesis

Your thesis is the most important part of your paper.  It gives your paper structure.  Determining what the thesis of your analysis paper is will help you determine what details from the piece you should include in your paper and which ones to exclude.  I had you guys answer several questions about the movies you are thinking of analyzing.

1. What are the larger issues or topics your piece talks about?  For Carrie this would include bullying, religion, abuse, sexuality, high school, etc.  Then I asked you to ask what you feel the piece says about those topics? For Carrie I could say that the piece talks about how bullying can turn people into monsters or that sexuality especially in women is a bad thing.  These would be potential theses for an analysis of Carrie.
2. Next I asked you to consider the type of conflict you have.  There are 5 archetypal conflicts that are usually present in most stories. Man vs Man, Man vs Self, Man vs Nature, Man vs Technology, Man vs Society.  Determine which of the conflicts you have. Then think about who wins the conflict and why, what does that say about that thing?  For instance, nature wins in Titanic, why?  Because humans underestimated it.  They thought they built something indestructible but nothing is indestructible. Or in Carrie we have man vs man and everyone loses, why?  Maybe because everyone who refuses to stand up to bullying is just as complicit as the bullies and so everyone suffers in the end.
3. Next think about how the societal descriptors like race, class, gender, sexuality for the characters in your movie and how they may affect your character and the piece.  In Carrie, Carrie's religious background and her gender has an effect on the piece.  A potential theme could be how these things affect her.
4. How does the history surrounding the piece affect your interpretation of it?  What real life events might the piece be influenced by?  The feminist movement was hitting it's stride in the 70s when Carrie was released, and so it is pretty significant that de Palma made a movie with a mostly-female cast where just about every woman is crazy.
5. Know your director.  Know who they are and know some of their other work.  Sometimes a good way to find a theme is to spot the reoccurring images or themes throughout their body of work.  If nothing else, this information can provide you with good background  info that you can use to support whatever your thesis is.

Course Recap for Thursday, October 6, 2016

Analysis of Carrie

When analyzing a piece, one of the things that helps us establish the message is examining the patterns that we see in the piece. What things do we see being repeated over and over and what do those things mean?  What message is being sent intentionally or unintentionally by the repetition of these images and ideas?

In a movie, another thing to pay attention to is who in the movie is successful and who in the movie fails.  What is the difference between those who get what they want and those who don't?

Homework

• Read Cult Movie Review: Carrie by John Kenneth Muir and Horror, Femininity, and Carrie's Monstrous Puberty by Shelley Stamp Lindsey.  As you're reading these articles, take notes on the different themes these writers saw in the movie Carrie.  What did they feel the movie had to say about the world, about high school, about womanhood, and any other topics the movie addresses?  Also make note of what things from the movie they believe help illustrate these themes. (The Horror, Femininity, and Carrie's Puberty is a VERY dense piece.  Please give yourself enough time to parse through it.  The intro in particular can be a bit hard to understand but it becomes less so as you continue.  Do not give up.  Summarize it the best that you can.) Due Tuesday October 11 in class
• If you could analyze two movies for your next paper, which movies would they be?  Have them in mind when you come to class Tuesday.