Paper One

3-5 pages, double spaced, 12 point font

Due Oct. 11 through turnitin.com by 2:00 PM

(You may also turn in a hardcopy if you prefer I write comments on it.)

For this paper, you’ll need to think of a decision you’ve made before and analyze it: go around the circle of elements with this decision, thinking about what your Purpose was in making it, what Assumptions you held, and so on.  You may find the list of questions on pg. 68 in Nosich helpful for this prewriting step.

After you’ve analyzed the decision, evaluate it using the Standards.  Make sure you can hook each Standard to at least one Element as you do this.  This is still prewriting, but it will help you to come up with your thesis statement.  Your Purpose in the paper is to argue whether you made a good or a bad decision, based not on how things turned out in the end but on what your evaluation of your own critical thinking now leads you to believe. 

The body paragraphs of your paper should back up this thesis by giving specific examples of the type of reasoning you used (the Elements) and evaluating them using the Standards.  You may or may not use all of the Elements and Standards in your paper; think in terms of which are most relevant to proving your thesis about whether this was a good decision in terms of critical thinking. Think of yourself as proving your opinion to a skeptical audience.  This means somewhere in the body of your paper you should address any weakpoints (see Nosich, pg. 193).  If you’re arguing that you thought critically while making this decision, you might want to own up to an impediment or shortcut to thinking you used, then tell why/how your thinking was still critical thinking.  If you’re arguing that you didn’t do much critical thinking in making this decision, you might want to give yourself credit for having an Accurate Assumption or thinking in Depth about certain Information, then show how/why the decision was still, on the whole, not made using your best critical thinking.

Your conclusion should go beyond simply restating what your paper has said; answer the question “So what?"; show your reader why s/he should care, what s/he should take away from your analysis of this ad.

Some Pointers: If you organize your body paragraphs around the Elements of reasoning, you’ll end up writing a list.  Remember, prewriting is to help generate ideas for the paper; it does not all go into the paper, nor should it create the final organization of the paper.  Think about telling your story as a story (you can use first person) or using an organizational scheme that groups certain elements or standards together by their relevance to each other in terms of your decision. 

You do not have to use all 8+ elements of reasoning in this paper, but you should be using those that are most pertinent to meeting the assignment.  You may use Nosich’s terms for the elements without citing Nosich, but if you quote or paraphrase Nosich, he should be on your works cited page.