Paper 2: Incorporating Critical Reading into a Standards Check--Evaluating How Good a Job a Thinker Has Done
Due in
Turnitin.com by 5 pm on Thursday March 4 (Alert: if
you take an extension on this paper, I will not be able to get it graded before
the drop deadline)
Revision required*
OK, now that you’ve practiced the Nosich elements by going around the circle and we’ve discussed them in class, and you’ve practiced breaking down shorter readings and videos using the Method of Writing Analytically (p. 37), it’s time to scale it up to academic-level reading. This involves moving from analysis (breaking it down) to evaluation (making a pitch or thesis-based argument of your own about the text). The article for this paper will ask you to work on developing necessary intellectual traits as well--courage, humility, perseverance, and empathy. (So, hint, expect a controversial article.) And this will be a deductive argument--you get to have a thesis this time, and support it using the SEE-IT strategy.
Your Task
You will write a 5-8 pp. paper (exclusive of Works Cited)
in which you evaluate a piece of academic-level writing
and make your own pitch about how effective it is for its intended
audience, based on the CAIR
standards from ch. 4 of Nosich. You'll be using the technique of
“Evaluating Around the Circle” on p. 163 of Nosich.
The essay you will be evaluating is Kendra Okonski's "Is
Water a Human Right?" in the Spring 2009 issue of The New Atlantis,
pages 61-73. (For a .pdf version of the essay that preserves the original page
numbers, click
here.)
Your task is to evaluate how successful Okonski's pitch is for
her intended audience,
based on the standards laid out in chapter 4 of Nosich.
Good prewriting will involve thinking about your
FBIs and how they shape your reactions to
Okonski’s
pitch. Your previous commitments, especially political and
economic ones, may come into play; intellectual courage may be involved here.
You might also give some attention to context; what was going on in the world
around the time of Spring 2009? How were environmental issues being covered in the media,
for instance? And what can you figure out about the intended audience of the
scholarly journal The New Atlantis? (BIG hint: check out the journal's
website. I'm just saying...)
As in paper #1, each of you will have an individual pitch or opinion on Okonski’s argument., but this paper should take a more familiar shape for you--a deductive, thesis-based, persuasive essay. Your task is to make a persuasive, well-supported argument to support your pitch about the quality of Okonski's essay. Her piece is a complex academic essay, and it will require a determined application of the principles you’ve been reading and practicing from Writing Analytically. Chapters 5, 7, 9, and 10 of Writing Analytically offer essential help for success in this paper; make sure you take them into account. (If it helps you prepare, do Nosich exercises 4.7, 4.10, 4.11, 4.12, and 4.13 as you work on this assignment; you can post the answers on the Facebook discussion board as your weekly entries if you like.)
The
pitch will form the basis of your thesis, so take some time to evolve a
really good one. Your thesis should express an evaluation
that deals with how successful you think Okonsik's essay is. (If your thesis
expresses an evaluation of Okonski's intelligence or an evaluation of the right
to clean water, revise it. You're on the wrong path.) You will want to
use the SEE-IT technique to support your argument with plenty of specific,
concrete evidence that is tied into the development of your pitch.
Remember that you need to take into
account all of the elements as you go around the circle to evaluate Okonski's
pitch--in the past there's been a temptation to jump to knee-jerk conclusions
and that doesn't lead to successful thinking or writing. Intellectual humility
and perserverance will really apply here. Decide which elements give you the
most to talk about; there's no absolute requirement that you talk about all
eight. You will want to use the SEE-IT strategy to support the assertions you
make in support of your evaluation.
Notes:
Nosich’s evaluation questions are to help you
assemble a wide range of information upon which you can base your conclusions.
The order in which you present that information in your paper is up to you, and
may be very different from the order of the questions in the book.
You may focus on three or four of the standards or you may
want to bring in more; it's up to you, depending on the pitch you make and what
you decide will best support it. Spend some
time thinking about and testing different organizational strategies and see
which one, in your opinion, works best to convey your pitch. Again, Writing
Analytically ch. 10 will help you if you use its advice. Make sure also that
you perform a Standards Check (Nosich 166-67) on your own writing as an
editing/revising task.
All quotations, paraphrases, and summaries, whether from the article or from our textbooks, must be correctly documented in MLA style, which means you must also include a Works Cited page in 2009 MLA style. You are not required to do outside research for this evaluation, but if you do want to look for outside sources, make sure they are scholarly and disciplinarily-appropriate--not Wikipedia-type materials. And of course, these must be documented as well.
As always, submit your paper to www.turnitin.com and also give me a hard copy if you want handwritten grades.