Friday summary and what's due this weekend, and on Monday in class

https://flic.kr/p/4LM6qB

You worked hard at peer review in class today. Great job! 

Now that you have a first draft, you can take a deep breath: but don't drop the ball! You need to significantly revise your draft for Monday, when you will bring a printed copy of your significantly-revised draft to class!! 

What do I mean by "significantly revised?"

1. Often the best way to significantly revise your first draft is to rewrite it, rather than trying to fix it, especially if your first draft was unfocused and disorganized. You now have a better idea of what you want to say, and how it needs to be reorganized and tightened. Often the conclusion of a first draft contains a better, more detailed, more focused thesis statement than the introduction. Take that thesis statement and rewrite the QRG using it. Trust me: the second draft will be much faster to write, and you'll be more focused. 
2. If your draft is already well-developed, your revisions still need to be significant: your thesis can be more focused, points can always be improved, evidence better cited, examples better explained. Focus on organization and the clarity and sophistication of your argument, and transitions between sections.  
3. At this point do not worry so much about grammar, mechanics, usage, and fluidity: that is next week's focus. Right now you are working on the skeleton to make it as well organized as possible: next week we pay more attention to fleshing it out elegantly. 

NOTE: You also need to complete Blog Posts 14 and 15 by the Saturday midnight deadline!

Reminder: Bring printed draft of your QRG to class!

Reminder For Friday

Bring a printed copy of your first draft of your QRG to class!

Blog Post 15: Peer review and revised thesis

Revise your thesis statement 

1. After Friday's in-class workshop, Blog Post 15: "Peer Review and Revised Thesis Statement." Discuss how the peer review process helped you, both by reviewing other's papers and the comments on your own. Revise your thesis statement according to your new understanding and copy it into the blog post.

2. Find two other students who do not yet have comments on their revised thesis statement (students not in your in-class editing group), and tell them what you expect their QRGs to be about from their thesis statements. Because we know what we are trying to say, we as writers often read into our own writing what isn't really clear. Fresh eyes can help point out where the thesis statement fails to accurately forecast the content and argument of the QRG.

Blog Post 14: Thoughts on Drafting

This was also in the week's summary, but I'm posting the prompt here again. 

Now that you’ve actually started the project, reflect back on the act of working on putting a draft together for your peers. For context, doing this exercise is going to help prepare you to conduct peer review.

In writing your draft, you were asked to think critically about the book’s advice on:

• Drafting a Thesis Statement 
• Writing paragraphs in PIE format 
• Writing introductions 
• Organizing information 
• Writing conclusions 

Review that Student’s Guide reading (pages 49-58), as well as the 5 example QRGs linked on the Project #1 Breakdown.

Title your blog post “Thoughts on Drafting” and in your blog post, provide meaningful and developed answers to the following questions: 

1. What parts of the book’s advice on the above bulleted topics are helpful for writing in this genre? 
2. What parts of the book’s advice on these topics might not be so helpful, considering the genre you’re writing in?

Blog Post 13: Practice Quoting

This was posted previously in this week's overview, but I think some of you may have overlooked it, since I posted other blog prompts as separate posts. If you have already done this, you don't need to do it again! This is just for those who may have missed the prompt. 

Blog Post #13: "Practice Quoting"

• Read Student’s Guide Section 5.4 “Quotation: The Source’s Words” (pages 85-90) and review the section of the style guide for formatting in-text citations in your citation style. 
• Choose a good, long-ish to mid-length quote from TWO DIFFERENT sources that are listed in your Annotated Bibliography that will help flesh out details in your QRG (that means, a quote from each source). The two quotes you choose should be roughly about the same topic: a particular event, situation, person, place, etc. But they should represent two different points of view on this topic. In a blank Google Doc, write a concise but detailed mid-length paragraph (about half a page? I’m flexible on this but it should be long enough to get the job done without being unclear or rambling). 
• Audience: The paragraph should be written for an audience that doesn’t know as much as you know about this topic. Depending on the topic, they might know nothing at all. 
• Purpose: To explain how the two people/sources quoted disagree or have differing opinions about the topic at hand. Integrate these two significant quotations directly into the paragraph, following the guidelines for in-text citations as defined by the style guide for your citation style.
• Be sure to to do the following FOUR things in your paragraph:

1. Use appropriate signal phrases to mark the boundaries between your words and the sources’ words (see the explanation of this in MLA-style on Rules for Writers pages 473-4 and then, if you’re using a different citation style, double-check your style guide to see what, if any, differences there are). 
2. Establish the authority of the people/sources being quoted (see the explanation of this in MLA-style on Rules for Writers pages 474-5 and then, if you’re using a different citation style, double-check your style guide to see what, if any, differences there are). 
3. Put the source material into effective context (see the explanation of this in MLA-style on Rules for Writers pages 476-7 and then, if you’re using a different citation style, double-check your style guide to see what, if any, differences there are) 
4. And EITHER use the ellipsis mark to eliminate unnecessary words from the quote in order and/or force it to conform to your sentence’s grammatical structure OR use the brackets to insert your own words into the quote in order to clarify something and/or force it to conform to your sentence’s grammatical structure (see the explanation of this in MLA-style on Rules for Writers pages 470-71 and then, if you’re using a different citation style, double-check your style guide to see what, if any, differences there are). 

• Use the highlighting function in Google Docs, (familiarize yourself with how to change text and highlight color if you don’t know how) and use four different colors to mark these four things (signal phrases that mark boundaries around direct quotes; your establishment of your sources’ authority; your contextualization of the source material; your use of either the ellipsis or brackets).
• Take a screenshot of the highlighted quote. You don’t need blank space in this screenshot, so useGoogle Docs’ zoom feature to edit out blank space and make sure your quote is highly legible to the reader. 
• Upload and/or paste in the screenshot of the highlighted quote. Include a legend that explains what each highlight color represents in the screenshot.

Reminder For Friday

Bring a printed copy of your first draft of your QRG to class!

Wednesday's summary

Today in class we discussed:

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/celestinechua/10706603194/

1) the week's plan and deadlines
2) time management and the "tyranny of the urgent"
3) examples of rhetorical analysis thesis statements

• Student's Guide p. 192,  215
• in-class analysis of the introductory paragraph from http://www.vox.com/2015/7/20/9001639/bernie-sanders-black-lives-matter
• in-class work on the thesis statement

If you bought Writing Public Lives, pages 200-201 contain a useful summary of what we are trying to do: 

The Main Features of a Controversy Analysis are: 

• Its thesis could be stated in the form of a focusing question (see the headline of the black-lives-matter QRG linked above). [To make sure your thesis is analytical, try posing it as why question. Why is this controversy happening? Why does it matter?]
• It presents at least two--and frequently more--different arguments in answer to the question. 
• It has researched the arguments it presents so as to present them thoroughly and fairly, using the words of those who have made the arguments
• It examines how the arguments speak to each other
• It analyzes the arguments to show how they are constructed and what their strengths and weaknesses are 

What a Controversy Analysis is NOT:

• A controversy analysis is not taking sides in an argument: You are not advocating or refuting a particular view point on the issue. You are laying out for your audience the various arguments addressing a particular question about the issue. 
• A controversy analysis is not just a summary of the arguments: You are not just reporting who is saying what, but also how and why, and how effective those arguments are for their audience. 
• A controversy analysis is not a report: You want to help your readers understand the controversy as a whole, in it's context...The introduction should give some background, and at the conclusion you should project what seems to be the future, as you see it, of the controversy. 

Logical Fallacies: Online Resources

Rules for Writers and The Student's Guide each have some short sections on logical fallacies. 

Source: https://flic.kr/p/7W4WMp

Here are some online resources as well:

• Purdue's Online Writing Lab (OWL) page on logical fallacies
• UNC's Writing Center page on logical fallacies
• The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a very long list of fallacies and a taxonomy of them, if you are interested in delving into the topic in depth.

A few usage mistakes I've noticed in your blogs

Source: Jo Guldi on https://flic.kr/p/JiPf2

Employers often complain that the college graduates they employ lack basic writing skills. Here, for example, is a post from Businessinsider.com noting frequent usage mistakes:
http://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-steven-pinker-misused-words-2015-9

I will not mark up your blogs or drafts for grammar and usage problems, although they do affect your grade if they are pervasive. Part of what you are learning in this course is to take responsibility for your own writing. Be proud of what you write, and be passionate about it!! That means taking the time to be self-critical, and editing your own work for clarity, usage, grammar, and spelling.

My task is to point you to resources that may help you to develop this practice of self-editing. 

=>>Review RFW "Glossary of Usage" (596-609).  This is an excellent reference, so keep it open by your computer as you write, and consult it frequently. I have seen several mistakes from this list in your blogs. 

Week Four: Drafting the QRG

Source: https://flic.kr/p/9M2WW4

ENG 109H Week Four

We have a lot to cover this week. You will be composing and peer reviewing your first draft of your QRG. We will be discussing drafts in class Friday, so you should have your first draft ready by then for class discussion!! Keep to the following schedule as much as possible for this week and next:


For Wednesday:


1. Read/Revise/Reflect on Blog Post #12: "QRG: The Genre"

• Use the Blog Directory for your course section to find three classmates without comments or replies on their “QRGs: the Genre” post. Read each post and then leave a reply engaging with the text. Read and engage with their analysis; be sure to leave a reply discussing what you agreed with (or not) and why. Explain anything you think they might have missed about the conventions of writing in this genre. 
• Go back to your own “QRGs: the Genre” post. Go into editing mode and at the bottom of the post, leave a reflection about what you learned from your classmates. 
• Be sure to also list who you replied to and provide hyperlinks to each individual’s “QRGs: the Genre” post (if you don’t provide the links, I can’t assign you full credit for this exercise).

2. Blog Post #13: "Practice Quoting"

• Read Student’s Guide Section 5.4 “Quotation: The Source’s Words” (pages 85-90) and review the section of the style guide for formatting in-text citations in your citation style. 
• Choose a good, long-ish to mid-length quote from TWO DIFFERENT sources that are listed in your Annotated Bibliography that will help flesh out details in your QRG (that means, a quote from each source). The two quotes you choose should be roughly about the same topic: a particular event, situation, person, place, etc. But they should represent two different points of view on this topic. In a blank Google Doc, write a concise but detailed mid-length paragraph (about half a page? I’m flexible on this but it should be long enough to get the job done without being unclear or rambling). 
• Audience: The paragraph should be written for an audience that doesn’t know as much as you know about this topic. Depending on the topic, they might know nothing at all. 
• Purpose: To explain how the two people/sources quoted disagree or have differing opinions about the topic at hand. Integrate these two significant quotations directly into the paragraph, following the guidelines for in-text citations as defined by the style guide for your citation style.
• Be sure to to do the following FOUR things in your paragraph:

1. Use appropriate signal phrases to mark the boundaries between your words and the sources’ words (see the explanation of this in MLA-style on Rules for Writers pages 473-4 and then, if you’re using a different citation style, double-check your style guide to see what, if any, differences there are). 
2. Establish the authority of the people/sources being quoted (see the explanation of this in MLA-style on Rules for Writers pages 474-5 and then, if you’re using a different citation style, double-check your style guide to see what, if any, differences there are). 
3. Put the source material into effective context (see the explanation of this in MLA-style on Rules for Writers pages 476-7 and then, if you’re using a different citation style, double-check your style guide to see what, if any, differences there are) 
4. And EITHER use the ellipsis mark to eliminate unnecessary words from the quote in order and/or force it to conform to your sentence’s grammatical structure OR use the brackets to insert your own words into the quote in order to clarify something and/or force it to conform to your sentence’s grammatical structure (see the explanation of this in MLA-style on Rules for Writers pages 470-71 and then, if you’re using a different citation style, double-check your style guide to see what, if any, differences there are). 

• Use the highlighting function in Google Docs, (familiarize yourself with how to change text and highlight color if you don’t know how) and use four different colors to mark these four things (signal phrases that mark boundaries around direct quotes; your establishment of your sources’ authority; your contextualization of the source material; your use of either the ellipsis or brackets).
• Take a screenshot of the highlighted quote. You don’t need blank space in this screenshot, so use Google Docs’ zoom feature to edit out blank space and make sure your quote is highly legible to the reader. 
• Upload and/or paste in the screenshot of the highlighted quote. Include a legend that explains what each highlight color represents in the screenshot.

By Friday morning in class:

3. Complete a first draft of your QRG in Goggle Docs. Make sure the permission allows anyone with the link to comment.

In your draft, be sure to clearly present and explain the controversy to your audience: 

• Who’s involved 
• Who’s saying what (include a mixture of summary and direct quotation here so that sometimes you’re condensing a lot of information down for your reader and sometimes you’re showing your reader exactly how people are talking) 
• Why people are upset 
• What the facts are vs. what the opinions are 
• What contextual or surrounding information might be influencing the way this controversy is unfolding
• Anything else you feel is relevant for your specific topic 

Try to follow the general guidelines for composing a draft laid out in Student’s Guide Section 3.5. However, be aware that the section is seemingly written with only one genre - the traditional college essay - in mind. We’re writing in a different genre, with some conventions that are extremely different than the essay genre and some conventions that are very similar. Think critically about the book’s advice on: 

• Drafting a Thesis Statement 
• Writing paragraphs in PIE format 
• Writing introductions 
• Organizing information 
• Writing conclusions

What parts of the book’s advice on these topics could be helpful to you while writing in this genre?

4. Blog Post #14: Thoughts on Drafting
Now that you’ve actually started the project, reflect back on the act of working on putting a draft together for your peers. For context, doing this exercise is going to help prepare you to conduct peer review.

In writing your draft, you were asked to think critically about the book’s advice on:

• Drafting a Thesis Statement 
• Writing paragraphs in PIE format 
• Writing introductions 
• Organizing information 
• Writing conclusions 

Review that Student’s Guide reading (pages 49-58), as well as the 5 example QRGs linked on the Project #1 Breakdown.

Title your blog post “Thoughts on Drafting” and in your blog post, provide meaningful and developed answers to the following questions:

1. What parts of the book’s advice on the above bulleted topics are helpful for writing in this genre? 
2. What parts of the book’s advice on these topics might not be so helpful, considering the genre you’re writing in?

Project One: QRG assignment sheet

Project #1 Breakdown:

Quick Reference Guide to a Contemporary Controversy

Research Question for Project 1: 

“What kinds of public debates and arguments are taking place in my major/field/discipline?”

Andross, “Steve Urkel: Haters Gonna Hate.” October 2014. Know Your Meme via Imgur.

You will craft your very own Quick Reference Guide to a Contemporary Controversy in your field of study. Using the examples listed below as guides to the genre’s conventions, you’ll compose a document that uses those conventions dynamically and effectively to reach your audience and achieve your purpose.

You will compose all drafts of this project in Google Drive.

The final version of the project will be published to your course blog, either directly or as a working link to your project, for grading and assessment, along with a reflective blog post explaining your process.

Genre Examples

Examples of Quick Reference Guides

• http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/stemcells/quickref/
• http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/14/the-only-guide-to-gamergate-you-will-ever-need-to-read/
• http://www.vox.com/2015/7/10/8924517/puerto-rico-bankrupt-debt
• http://www.thewire.com/global/2014/02/sochi-olympics-opening-ceremony-explained/357847/
• http://www.vox.com/2015/7/20/9001639/bernie-sanders-black-lives-matter

As you prepare and plan your project, consider the following questions:

• What do the conventions of this genre - the Quick Reference Guide - seem to be?
• How are those conventions defined by the author’s formatting and design choices?
• What does the purpose of these QRGs seem to be?
• Who is the intended audience for these different QRGs? Are they all intended for similar audiences? Or different? How & why?

The rhetorical situation for this assignment is as follows:

Audience/Who are you writing for? Students and other educated individuals who are interested in your field of study and want to know more about this important debate/argument. Your audience includes students who are majoring or minoring in your field, but also students who may take a class or two that touches on your subject area and become curious about it.

Purpose/What are you trying to accomplish? You want to give these students and other readers a clear, detailed portrait of the controversy in all of its complexities. You’ll want to outline:

• the relevant background information and contextual detail needed to understand the controversy itself (Only as much detail as we need to get a clear, vivid and  informed portrait of the controversy) [HINT: This should probably be presented in some kind of introduction/introductory section of the QRG].
• the major figures who are engaging in public debate/argument about the controversy (this includes individuals, organizations and/or corporations).
• where these figures are voicing their opinions - what genres of media, what publications or other means of communication they’re using.
• what these different figures are specifically saying - you’ll both summarize and directly quote from their arguments and explain key turns of phrase they’ve employed
• An explanation of the fears and anxieties being expressed by the different speakers in the debate.
• An explanation of the deeper beliefs and values represented by the different speech acts you’re presenting.
• An explanation of which public speakers in the controversy come across as the most reasonable and why.
• An explanation of which public speakers in the controversy come across as lacking credibility or trustworthiness and why.
• Some sense of where you see this controversy going - how you might see it resolving, or how you see it leading to other problems or getting worse in a specific way [HINT: This should probably be presented in some kind of conclusion/conclusory section of the QRG].

Context/What are the important circumstances surrounding the creation of this project?

Who is this project intended for? See “Audience” above.

What am I trying to accomplish in my project? See “Purpose” above.

What genre will I be working in? The Quick Reference Guide genre, following the conventions and aesthetics articulated by the 5 examples you looked at for Blog Post #12.

What materials will I use to make the project? As you can see from the examples, the QRG is not an essay. At all! It means making important decisions about color, images, white space, text, headings and subheading, font styles, margins and a host of other design elements.

Where will I be working on this project? Entirely in Google Drive. All of your drafting, revision and peer review will take place in Google Drive, though you’ll be asked to link readers to your work from your Course Blog

Death by Exile, “Haters gonna hate with fish.” August 2014. Know Your Meme.

Assessment for the Project

Process Work on Course Blog Posts 6-12  (10 points)	10 % of Project Grade
Annotated Bibliography (50 points)	30% of Project Grade
Peer Review of Project (15 points)	10% of Project Grade
Published, Final Version of Project (75 points)	50% of Project Grade
TOTAL (150 pts)	100% of Project Grade = 15% of Course Grade