Assignment Sheet For Project: Navigating Sources That Disagree

Assignment Sheet For Project: Navigating Sources That Disagree

Assignment Sheet For Project: Navigating Sources That Disagree

SUBJECT MATERIAL: The sources that you use must be focused on some aspect of environmental sustainability.

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NUMBER OF SOURCES: Two separate sources, with competing viewpoints, must be used.

LENGTH: 4 Pages, not including documentation page

FORMAT: Typed, hard-copy, with 1-inch margins, including a title centered in the middle of the page, with your name, date, course information, and my name, in the upper right. Please make sure you maintain copies of your drafts in distinct files on your computer. Don’t throw away or delete anything! Please make an attempt at correct citations and documentation of your sources in APA style.

NOTE: When writing analysis, convention dictates that you don’t include first-person pronouns in your writing. So statements such as “I think that…” and “I believe that…” are unnecessary and slow down your sentences. Try to eliminate them and just say directly what it is you think or believe instead.

DESCRIPTION: For this assignment, you will examine texts that appear to disagree and analyze them rhetorically in order to understand how and why their authors disagree. You will further propose your own thesis that may side, at least in part, with one or the other, or both, positions represented by your source material, or may offer an entirely distinct and specific viewpoint from either of your sources. The key will be to make sure you’re defining all the terms in play so the reader doesn’t just know that the sources disagree with each other, but how specifically they disagree with each other. It isn’t enough just to recognize that opposing viewpoints are at work; you will need to analyze exactly what those viewpoints are and why they are at odds with one another. Don’t pick unwieldy or lengthy sources or you won’t be able to analyze them within the space limitations. Although you may choose to use one source from class (either from LTE or from posts on Moodle), the other source must be new to the class context. You may also opt to choose two totally new source-texts.

You may choose any issue that has to do with environmental sustainability that is currently being debated publicly, either in your local campus community or in a larger state or national or global arena. Make sure that this is a complex issue rather than a simple black-and-white problem. The more nuanced or more difficult the debate is, the more useful your analysis will be—to you as well as others.

We’ve looked at several different issues within the environmental sustainability arena and some source-texts presenting differing perspectives on those issues. Now you should follow these steps as you prepare to draft your paper:

• Carefully choose two different sources within the same debate that do not agree. Look for texts that demonstrate nuanced kinds of disagreement rather than just settling for obvious “pro” and “con” sources. (Remember that the point of this assignment is to help you learn something about how texts are constructed and how meaning is made. If you choose obvious texts to analyze, you won’t learn nearly as much as you could have—and your paper will be harder to write.) If you already have an issue in mind you want to work on, you can most certainly find two sources that discuss the issue in competing ways.
• Once you have chosen your two sources, begin to analyze them. An obvious place to start would be to sketch out the rhetorical situations for each text, as well as for the larger context of the debate in which they exist. You might also ask who the authors are and what their values, motivations, and constraints might be. You may decide not to use any of this “background” analysis in your actual draft, but it will help you to pinpoint what’s at issue for each source.
• Next, you should analyze the arguments that the authors are making. What are their points? Do they disagree on everything? Some things? What are they? What kinds of evidence do they use? Do they seem to believe that the same things even count as evidence?
• Take notes as you do this work of analyzing your sources and find ways to organize your notes. You might consider grouping the sources’ consistencies together and inconsistencies together or to make a chart of questions with space for answers about each text–however you can find to start seeing the similarities and the differences between your sources.

Now that you have conducted the research and analyzed the texts, take a step back and ask yourself what you found. Go back to your original question and try to answer it: How and why do the authors of these texts disagree? You might have one clear answer to this question, and you might have several potential ideas regarding why they can’t agree. Go ahead and make some claims in answer to the question and start marshaling the evidence from your notes to support your claims.

Write an analytical, research-based essay in which you provide an answer to the question: Why do the authors of these texts in the debate on X disagree? Be sure to do the following in your essay:

• Provide background information on the debate and the two texts you chose to analyze.
• Make your claim(s) in answer to the question and provide the textual evidence from your analysis to support your claim(s).
• End your essay with some sort of “so what?” Tell your readers why these particular viewpoints are significant in the debate and how your own position links into theirs or rejects theirs, in whole or in part, and why. Where do you believe they fail? Where do you believe they succeed? If you are specific about this agreement or disagreement, it will better serve you than just a blanket rejection such as, “I don’t really think this author made her point well.” You should wrestle with the issues and enter the debate as an “expert.”
• Organize your essay for efficiency (economize the points you want to make!) and so that your reader can follow along without having to work to figure out where you are going.
• Present a polished and edited piece of writing so that your reader understands what your arguing and is not distracted from your claims by surface errors.

You will thus be looking at the STRATEGIES behind the words on the page of the two source-texts—how specifically they disagree with each other. It isn’t enough just to recognize that opposing viewpoints are at work (although you definitely need to summarize those viewpoints for your reader); you will need to analyze how the two writers approach their argumentsand, ultimately, assert how effective those two arguments are to you, their reader—and why they are effective or not (this assertion serves as your thesis statement). Here are some considerations that have to do with CONTENT:

• How do your two writers employ ethos, logos, and pathos strategically in their attempts to persuade you to agree with their side of the debate? (Try not to lump this discussion of the three appeals all together in one paragraph when you analyze your source-texts, but instead use these terms sparingly and when warranted to identify how your writers are being effective and crafty and smart about their choice of supporting evidence.)
• What specific choices in threads of language and words can you identify that suggest bias in your writers and/or an emotional investment that is not neutral or measured? Or that serves to distract the reader or use fallacies to divert attention away from the issues being discussed or debated? What about overall tone? Does the writer of your source-text ever outright demean or condescend to the opposition or its members? Are there any ad-hominem attacks?
• Are there unsubstantiated or unsupported or unproven claims made by your writers? Is there enough evidence provided to make their cases? Do the types of evidence they include differ from each other, and, if so, what effect do those different choices have on how effective their arguments are? Have your writers decided to include concessions to an opposing viewpoint (as a means of demonstrating his or her rationality and reasonableness and thorough understanding of the issues)? Have your writers sought to find common ground with the opposition—points at which they agree—to emphasize their even-handedness? Or not? How does that affect their argument?
• What about the context of your sources? What publications did the source-texts appear in and what explicit or implicit biases can you identify in these publications? When you do your detective work on these publications, look specifically at the “About” page or the “Sponsors” page (if they are in online sites) and see if you can identify who or what entity is contributing to or benefitting from this organization. Are they peer-reviewed? Is their published work vetted by experts? Did they have an editor or an editorial board that had authority over their piece? Do they accept donations or advertising revenue from corporate sponsors and/or do they stand to make a profit from their research or from their publications? Who’s on their Board of Directors? Are they for-profit or non-profit? Are the writers affiliated with the publications or are they hired on spec or are they independent scholars or researchers? What is the relationship between the writer’s specific training or expertise or profession and the subject matter about which they’re writing?

Now that you have conducted the research and analyzed the texts, take a step back and ask yourself what you found. Go back to your original question and try to answer it: How and why do the authors of these texts disagree? You might have one clear answer to this question, and you might have several potential ideas regarding why they can’t agree. Go ahead and make some claims in answer to the question and start marshaling the evidence from your notes to support your claims. Provide background information on the debate and the two texts you chose to analyze.

When you revise for FORMAL issues, please keep these considerations in mind:

• Organize your body paragraphs around TOPIC SENTENCES. Make sure you’re making your “paragraph sandwiches” in the body of your paper—set your paragraphs up so that they focus on ONE SPECIFIC POINT and back it up within that paragraph with evidence that “fits” that topic sentence and only that topic sentence. Follow this pattern in your paragraphs: TOPIC SENTENCE/SUPPORTING EVIDENCE/ANCHOR SENTENCE. Tie back each paragraph to your thesis.
• End your essay with some sort of “so what?” Tell your readers why these particular viewpoints are significant in the debate and how your own position links into theirs or rejects theirs, in whole or in part, and why. Where do you believe they fail? Where do you believe they succeed? If you are specific about this agreement or disagreement, it will better serve you than just a blanket rejection such as, “I don’t really think this author made her point well.” You should wrestle with the issues and enter the debate as an “expert.”
• Organize your essay for efficiency (economize the points you want to make!) and so that your reader can follow along without having to work to figure out where you are going. Eliminate all your vague language (“many,” “various,” “a lot,” “some”).

Present a polished and edited piece of writing so that your reader understands what your arguing and is not distracted from your claims by surface errors. Have someone read your drafts for you or take them to the Writing Center to get another pair of eyes on your writing to protect yourself against sentence fragments, run-on sentences, subject-verb agreement errors, spelling errors, and typos