Composition Forum 22, Summer 2010
http://compositionforum.com/issue/22/

Appendices from “Standardizing English 101 at SIU-Carbondale”

Ronda Leathers Dively

This page contains all appendices from “Standardizing English 101 at SIU-Carbondale”. For printing, a PDF version is also available.

Appendix 1: Overview of English 101 at SIUC

[These introductory notes are presented here as they are presented to students, with the exception of some submission and formatting guidelines (irrelevant to the essence of 101) that have been removed. This document was authored by Dr. C. L. Costello and Dr. Ronda Leathers Dively, with miscellaneous contributions from various other Writing Program staff members.]

ENGLISH 101 DESCRIPTIVE OVERVIEW

English 101 provides students with the rhetorical foundations that prepare them for the demands of academic and professional writing. In this course, students will learn and practice the strategies and processes that successful writers employ as they work to accomplish specific purposes. In college, these purposes include comprehension, instruction, entertainment, persuasion, investigation, problem-resolution, evaluation, explanation, and refutation. In addition to preparing students for academic communication, this Core-Curriculum course prepares students to use writing to realize professional and personal goals. Accordingly, class discussion and readings will address the function of rhetoric and of composing processes in a variety of contexts, with attention to various audiences. Throughout the course, while engaged in a diversity of composing endeavors, students will learn to respond constructively to their peers’ texts and to use peer responses (along with extensive instructor feedback) to improve the quality of their own work.

COURSE GOALS

After taking English 101, students should be able to:

generate effective compositions using various methods for critical thought, for the development of ideas, for the arrangement of those ideas to achieve a specific rhetorical goal, for the application of an appropriate style, and for revision and editing;
demonstrate understanding of the ways that language and communication shape experience, construct meaning, and foster community;
analyze and describe rhetorical contexts and use such descriptions to increase the efficacy of communicative acts;
analyze and use the forms and conventions of academic writing, particularly the forms and conventions of argumentative and analytical writing;
produce texts that demonstrate an understanding of how purpose, process, subject matter, form, style, tone, and diction are shaped by particular audiences and by specific communicative constraints and opportunities;
understand the importance of research to writing, explain the kind of research required by different kinds of writing, and compose effective texts by judiciously using field research, library resources, and sources retrieved from electronic media;
employ critical reading and listening as forms of invention;
efficiently compose reading and lecture notes that are concise and clear;
synthesize different and divergent information, using the integration of information from multiple sources to engage in critical discourse;
use Edited American English appropriately.

COURSE WORK

During the semester, your instructor will require you to write frequently—for a variety of purposes, for a variety of audiences, and in a variety of forms. Most of this work will provide direct or indirect contributions to the culminating project of English 101, the course portfolio (explained below). The portfolio will contain revised versions of your major assignments and an analysis of your writing and your communicative development during the semester.

Unit Projects

English 101 is divided into five units. By the end of each unit, you will produce a significant “formal” composition that is the equivalent of three to six double-spaced pages. For each unit, your instructor will distribute detailed assignment guidelines for the major composition associated with it.

Unit One—Literacy Narrative: For an audience of your 101 class, you will narrate and address the significance of an experience in which you learned the literate practices of a given field or community and, as a result, gained access to that field or community.

Unit Two—Advertisement Analysis: For a business audience, you will compose a report that evaluates the effectiveness of a given advertisement in the context of the magazine in which it appears.

Unit Three—Summary/Rhetorical Analysis: For an academic audience, you will summarize an article to be assigned by your instructor, as well as critique the rhetorical strategies employed by that article’s author.

Unit Four—Literature Review: For an academic audience, you will synthesize information from various sources about a controversial or debatable issue as designated by your instructor.

Unit Five—Reflective Introduction: With attention to course readings and activities, as well as to the contents of your portfolio, you will compose an essay, targeted for readers in English 101, that discusses your development as a writer during English 101.

Each of these texts will emerge from a process approach to writing, in which you engage in invention activities, planning activities, drafting activities, and revision/editing activities (including peer review). The formal composition for each unit and the materials used to write the composition will be submitted in a “working folder,” which is a folder that documents your work during a particular unit.

Submission of Working Folders: During each of the five units listed above, your instructor, on pre-determined due dates, will collect preliminary informal exercises (idea sheets, plans, drafts, peer comments) for purposes of providing you with some feedback, and he or she will keep track of your timely and engaged attention to these exercises in his or her grade book. At the end of the unit, your instructor will collect some or all of this material again as part of a “working folder,” or a record of your effort and development during the unit; thus, it will be imperative that you retain all informal exercises produced in the context of the unit. Failure to submit your responses to such assignments in timely and thorough fashion relevant to their original due dates will result in a deduction from the unit grade.

The working folder for each unit will also contain a draft of the major assignment or essay associated with that unit. The entire working folder contents for a given unit, then, will be assigned a grade that ultimately will account for 10% of your course grade. In addition, your essay will be assigned an “advisory grade,” or an indication of its quality at the time you submitted it. The advisory grades will not contribute to your final grade for the course since you will be able to revise most essays until the end of the term, but the unit drafts will be an integral part of the holistic working folder grade. Indeed, it will be impossible for you to receive higher than fifty percent of the points available for the working folder grade without having submitted a substantial draft of the unit essay in addition to the informal assignments required by your instructor. (Important note: Because you will need to consult the working folder contents for all units at the end of the semester as you are assembling your portfolio and composing your reflective introduction, you will need to keep all the working folder contents from previous units in a safe, readily accessible place as you embark on each subsequent unit.)

Informal Exercises

In some sense, each unit project will serve as a model for the portfolio that you will submit near the end of the semester. The working folder for each unit will be a collection of your work during that unit (the major unit assignment and smaller daily assignments). Each working folder that you compile should provide evidence of your growth as a writer during a specific unit (much as the course portfolio will provide evidence of your growth as a writer during the semester). During each unit, you will engage in work that will assist in preparing the text that you will submit for review at the end of the unit. Often, these small assignments will constitute stages in your own writing process for a particular major essay, but they might include other documents such as a peer review of a classmate’s work or a detailed summary of a reading. In determining the grades for working folders at the end of each unit, the instructor will “weight” exercises in accordance with their length and complexity. Though this course does not have a specific participation grade, the informal exercises will indicate your level of effort and engagement.

Portfolio

This course has been designed to increase your ability to communicate, particularly in writing, by encouraging you to develop and then exercise a rhetorical sensitivity by which you identify the constraints and opportunities of any communicative challenge and respond appropriately. To improve this ability (which you already posses), this course is structured around a portfolio system, in which a large portion of your grade (fifty percent) is based on texts that you will be able to revise for much of the semester, drawing upon the rhetorical sensitivity that you develop, your instructor’s comments, your peers’ comments, and other resources that you might employ (for instance, the Writing Center). Near the end of the semester, you will submit your portfolio by gathering essays that you have completed during the semester and polished to “presentation quality” text. You will present this work to your instructor (in a two-pocket folder) as evidence of your ability to write and as evidence of your learning during the course of the semester. This collection of finished essays will be graded on the quality of the writing, not on effort. (Effort will be rewarded in the context of the working folder.)

Your instructor will judge the portfolio by engaging the collection of texts largely as an experienced reader (rather than an as educator). As he or she will have made regular comments on your writing (if you submit your rough drafts and visit him or her during the semester to discuss revision), your instructor will read your portfolio attentively but no longer with the kind of attention that supports formative commentary. Your instructor will read these texts against a rubric, based on the course guidelines, to see if your work is rhetorically effective and indicates that you have achieved the communicative goals set by the English 101 objectives. In the process of preparing your portfolio for presentation to your instructor, you will be asked to compose a Reflective Introduction (Unit 5 essay) that comments on your development as a writer as evidenced by the other formal essays that you’ve decided to submit.

Exam

In this class, you will be required to take a final exam during the officially scheduled exam period. The exam will ask you to generate an essay (employing strategies explicitly addressed in the context of English 101) on a subject matter to be announced near the end of the semester.

Percentages

Unit 1 working folder (including draft of Literacy Narrative) 10

Unit 2 working folder (including draft of Advertisement Analysis) 10

Unit 3 working folder (including draft of Summary/Response) 10

Unit 4 working folder (including draft of Literature Review) 10

Unit 5 portfolio (including Reflective Introduction) 50

Final Exam (in-class essay—form and subject matter TBA) 10

[The overview of English 101 presented above is distributed to students at the beginning of each semester in a document that also contains all course policies.]

Appendix 2: Literacy Narrative

[The following essay assignments are presented here as they are presented to students, the only difference being that some submission and formatting guidelines (irrelevant to the essence of the composing activities) have been removed. These assignments were authored by Dr. C. L. Costello and Dr. Ronda Leathers Dively, with miscellaneous contributions from various other Writing Program staff members.]

English 101—Spring 2010
Unit 1: Literacy Narrative

Assignment

In light of the current, national debate over healthcare reform, the importance of health literacy has become increasingly apparent. This climate provides a timely invitation for you to compose a “Literacy Narrative” about the experience and development of your literate practices relevant to a specific health-related issue. This narrative should be targeted for an audience of your English 101 class.

Commonly, the term “literacy” is used to refer to reading and writing abilities. In this case, however, you should conceive the term more broadly as your awareness and understanding of communication relevant to a specific situation or context. For this assignment, then, you should consider your “literate practices” to be defined as your ability to recognize, learn about, analyze and/or communicate matters related to health. To focus your essay, choose a specific situation or focal event that illustrates how you learned about and analyzed a specific health-related matter (the term “health” encompassing a variety of phenomena: diet, nutrition, exercise, healthcare plans, illnesses, natural medicine, prescriptions drugs, stress, and mental health).

Because this paper is a personal narrative, it should proceed more like a story than a traditional essay. More specifically, it should make use of a subtle thesis that establishes the significance of the focal event (as opposed to stating the thesis at the end of the first paragraph or announcing it as the “moral of the story” in the narrative’s final paragraph), and it should relay the importance/meaning of the experience for you and/or for a larger community. For example, if you were to acquire literacy relevant to an illness (such as the “swine flu”) that you or a family member contracted, then your literate practices might involve your ability to skillfully conduct research on the condition, consult with doctors to separate facts from myths, gain an understanding of the most effective treatments, and make informed decisions about solutions and preventative measures. In other words, the literacy narrative should not be a simple account of an injury or an illness.

* Please keep in mind that you are not expected to (nor should you) divulge sensitive and/or private health information about yourself or someone else. The general topic—health—is broad enough for you to select a focus that would be appropriate for an audience of your English 101 peers and instructor. If you have questions about the appropriateness of your focus, please consult your instructor. (Suggested page-length: 3-5 pages double spaced, 12 pt. font, 1” margins.)

Useful Models

Didion, “In Bed,” Mercury Reader, Unit 1

Douglass, The Narrative, Chapters 6-9

bell hooks, “Writing is My Passion,” Mercury Reader, Unit 1

Klass, “Learning the Language,” Mercury Reader, Unit 1

Rose, “Hell and Back,” Mercury Reader, Unit 1

Walker, “Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self,” Mercury Reader, Unit 1

Additional Readings

Allyn & Bacon Guide:

Chapter 1, “Thinking Rhetorically About Good Writing”

Chapter 7, “Writing an Autobiographical Narrative”

Chapter 19, “Composing and Revising Open-Form Prose”

Mercury Reader:

Unit 1, Minot, “Theme: What’s Your Point?”

Unit 1, Minot, “Creating Structure”

Unit 1, Minot, “Literary Concerns: Style, Tone, Suggestion”

Unit 1, Quigley, “Knowledge is Not Enough: Advancing Health Literacy through Lessons from History”

Portfolio Keeping:

pgs. 1-16, introduction to portfolios and working folders

pgs. 24-31, working with other writers in a community

Writer’s Resource pgs. 42-48, “Exploring Your Ideas”

pgs. 61-62, descriptive language

pgs. 140-142, “Personal Essays”

pgs. 189-191, memos

pgs. 417-431, active verbs and precise language

pgs. 478-489, pronoun usage

pgs. 489-495, adjectives and adverbs

Contexts, Definitions, and Rationales

The term literacy has traditionally been used to refer to reading and writing, but literacy can be used to characterize a broad range of abilities or practices that allow humans to act effectively within various environments. For this unit, you should write a personal narrative that 1) tells the story of a particular experience or event about your literate practices relevant to an aspect of health, and 2) analyzes these literate practices and the larger, broader implications of your ability to understand and communicate within this context.

Writing this narrative will assist in heightening your composing flexibility by requiring you to use what Ramage, Bean, and Johnson (Allyn & Bacon Guide) refer to as “open-form prose,” which may violate the conventions of academic essays you’ve been assigned to write in the past. Indeed, much of the writing that you practiced in high school (and will practice in college) is what Ramage, Bean, and Johnson refer to as “closed-form prose,” which has an explicitly stated “thesis supported with effective points and particulars arranged hierarchically into unified and coherent paragraphs” (546). This course aspires to establish that writing is not a formulaic enterprise, that there’s no blueprint or recipe for college-level writing, no “right way” to compose a given piece to which your ideas must conform. Rather, writing is a process of understanding available models of communication (and their advantages and disadvantages), solving problems, and making meaning for a given audience, which could be the self. As we move during the semester toward different types of “closed-form” prose, which could present more constraints than “open-form” prose, you will see that there is still plenty of room for the active, creative mind to maneuver. In fact, effective writing will demand that it do so. As the authors of the Allyn & Bacon Guide remind us, “writing exists on a continuum from closed to open forms” and “many features of open-form prose can appear in primarily closed-form texts” (546). For example, the dominant composing strategy of this assignment—narration—is often applied to closed-form writing, even “academic” writing.

A final issue to consider as you are composing and revising your literacy narrative is the importance of addressing the significance or implications of the selected focal event. Addressing these implications will involve analytical skills that you will use in future 101 assignments, your other courses, and in the workplace. The implications of the event that you narrate for this unit could be for you personally: How did this event alter you and/or your life? Or, these implications could be for humanity in general: What does this focal event suggest about your relationship to the world outside of that context? How did your ability to understand this situation affect your ability to negotiate other such situations or within society at large?

Literacy Narrative Guidelines

A. The completed narrative should be submitted in a file folder (your working folder) with (1) a copy of the assignment, on which you have placed your initials next to each guideline, thereby indicating that you’ve read the guidelines, (2) all the informal exercises required by your instructor for this unit, and (3) the peer review you received along with any comments from your instructor. Additionally, email or post to Blackboard (as directed by your instructor) a digital copy of your narrative as a rich-text-format (RTF) document; label this file with your first initial, your last name, a hyphen, and “Unit 1” (e.g., RSmith- Unit1).

B. The narrative should explore an event that exemplifies your literate practices relevant to an aspect of health.

C. The narrative should have a thesis, which addresses the importance of this literacy event either for you personally or for people generally. Ideally, this thesis should be subtly developed (rather than explicitly stated).

D. The narrative should have a title and an introductory paragraph that promote interest.

E. The narrative should support claims about your literacy through vivid description and analysis of the focal event, the activity you took part in, and the people involved.

F. The narrative should have effective transitions (between sentences, paragraphs, and larger sections).

G. The narrative should be free of mechanical, grammatical, and usage errors. Pay particular attention to the following:

pronoun clarity
gender inclusive language
precise language
punctuation

Appendix 3: Advertisement Analysis & Evaluation Assignment

English 101—Spring 2010
Unit 2: Advertisement Analysis & Evaluation

Assignment

For this assignment, assume the role of an advertiser working for a company that specializes in the promotion of health products. One of the company’s marketing directors, Maria Denton, has asked you to contribute to the development of a new ad campaign by evaluating a competitor’s marketing strategies. At this point in the campaign’s development, Ms. Denton would like you to compose a report, in which you 1) analyze how another advertiser uses visual and verbal rhetoric to promote a competing product in a particular magazine and 2) evaluate how effectively the ad connects with that magazine’s readership. Your task, then, is to select an advertisement that promotes a product or event related to an aspect of health and to evaluate this advertisement based on your analysis of its use of visual/verbal rhetoric and its connection with the magazine’s audience. Examples of possible ads could include but are certainly not limited to: ads for prescription drugs, anti-smoking campaigns, ads for cholesterol-free food products, ads for home fitness equipment, etc. Ms. Denton expects you to convey this information in a carefully organized report, accompanied by the ad you analyze. (Suggested page-length for draft: 5-6 double-spaced pages, 12 pt. font, 1" margins.)

Useful Models

Allyn & Bacon Guide, 311-13 (analysis model)

Allyn & Bacon Guide, 269-74 (analysis model)

Allyn & Bacon Guide, 275-84 (analysis model)

Cole, “Generation X,” Mercury Reader, Unit 2 (example profile)

Hempel with Lehman, “The MySpace Generation,” Mercury Reader, Unit 2 (example profile)

Drogin and Reston, “How the Election was Won—and Lost,” Mercury Reader, Unit 2 (evaluation)

Berger, “The Comics,” Mercury Reader, Unit 2 (evaluation)

Oliu et al., “Formal Reports,” Blackboard

Oliu et al., “Informal Reports,” Blackboard

Additional Readings

Allyn & Bacon Guide :

Chapter 5, “Seeing Rhetorically”

Chapter 11, “Analyzing Images”

Chapter 15, “Making an Evaluation”

Chapter 18, “Composing and Revising Closed-Form Prose”

Mercury Reader:

Unit 2, “Elements of Effective Layout”

Unit 2, “Advertising’s Fifteen Basic Appeals”

Unit 2, “Making the Pitch in Print Advertising”

Writer’s Resource:

pgs. 21-27, reading critically, including visual texts

pgs. 81-85, paragraphing and transitions

pgs. 93-101, effective report design

pgs. 189-191, report format

pgs. 403-406, parallelism

pgs. 424-432, 417-419, language precision, including verbs

pgs. 446-459, sentence boundary issues

pgs. 501-514, commas

Contexts, Definitions, and Rationales

The Unit 1 essay (Literacy Narrative) required you to engage in a number of analytical activities, which, according to Ramage, Bean, and Johnson, require one “to divide or dissolve the whole into its constituent parts, to examine these parts carefully, to look at the relationships among them, and then to use this understanding of the parts to better understand the whole—how it functions, what it means” (Allyn & Bacon Guide 285). In the Literacy Narrative, you analyzed how a particular experience/event relevant to an aspect of health affected the development of your literate practices and, in some way(s), affected how you operated in the larger world. In Unit 2, analysis will be used to evaluate a primarily visual text—that is, a magazine advertisement that promotes a product related to an aspect of health in such a way that appeals to the magazine’s readership.

When you draft and revise this analysis, you will examine the “parts” of the advertisement—its various visual and linguistic appeals, as they presumably create an overall rhetorical effect on the intended audience. Of course, all evaluation requires criteria or standards of judgment. For instance, the quality of a car is determined by how well the car meets certain standards (e.g., of fuel efficiency, cargo space, or horsepower). But criteria are themselves determined by a “user” profile. If you’re not concerned with gas mileage, then the fuel efficiency of a vehicle is probably less important to you than cargo space and horsepower. In this assignment, therefore, you will have to determine how well the ad meets the criteria implied by a profile of the readers of the magazine in which the ad appears. The standards by which you judge this ad will be influenced largely, then, by the readership of the magazine and not by you alone. However, it may be beneficial to choose a magazine that you read, as you would be considered a member of its target audience.

In order to establish these standards of judgment, you will have to determine who reads the magazine and what these individuals are like. You will develop a profile of the ad’s intended audience by examining the magazine itself. Your role is to explain how this ad does or does not meet these readers’ presumed expectations. You will have to explain 1) how the ad works rhetorically and 2) how the ad fits this particular magazine and attempts to connect with the magazine’s target audience. In short, you will explain how the advertisement sells a specific product by connecting the advertised product with the people reading the magazine. You are not merely analyzing the ad’s composition and evaluating it on its own merit; you are analyzing the ad as a rhetorical act and how effectively that act speaks to an audience’s interests.

Advertisement Analysis and Evaluation Guidelines

A. The completed report should be submitted in a file folder (your working folder) with (1) a copy of the assignment, on which you have placed your initials next to each guideline, thereby indicating that you’ve read the guidelines, (2) a copy of the focal advertisement and the written approval of the advertisement, (3) all informal exercises required by your instructor for this unit, and (4) the peer review that you received along with any comments from your instructor. Additionally, email or post to Blackboard (as directed by your instructor) a digital version of your report as an RTF file. Label the file with your first initial, your last name, a hyphen, and “Unit 2” (e.g., RSmith-Unit2).

B. The report should describe the ad so that the firm’s creative directors can visualize it without seeing it. The ad or a color copy should be submitted with the report. (If the original ad is submitted, it should be neatly mounted on a sheet of paper.)

C. The report should provide a clear and detailed analysis and evaluation of the advertisement. The report should identify the thesis of the ad and explain how the ad supports that thesis; the report should explain how well the ad persuades its audience to accept this thesis.

D. The report should support the analysis and evaluation with evidence. The support must be clear and logical.

E. The report should have an introduction that (1) introduces the topic and (2) provides a thesis statement about the ad’s approach and effectiveness. The introduction should be concise, but it should be written so that the firm’s creative directors could read only that portion of the text and understand the ad’s approach and your evaluation.

F. The report should be divided into appropriate sections labeled with appropriate headings. Each section should have its own introductory paragraph that makes a claim, and each section’s “body” should support that claim.

G. The report should comprise sentences and paragraphs that logically develop your evaluative argument. The transitions between sentences, paragraphs, and sections should be clear.

H. The report should be free of grammatical, mechanical, and usage errors. Pay particular attention to the following:

parallelism
language precision, including verbs
commas
sentence boundaries
paragraphing and transitions

Appendix 4: Summary & Rhetorical Analysis Assignment

English 101—Spring 2010
Unit 3: Summary & Rhetorical Analysis

Assignment

For a general academic audience, compose an essay in which you 1) summarize one of the approved readings on food and health and 2) analyze the rhetorical strategies used by the author to support her or his argument. Many of the essays you composed in high school may have asked you to read an article and to react to the opinions of the author in a personal way. In contrast, a rhetorical analysis asks that you identify the rhetorical techniques that the author employs and to explain how these techniques seemingly support and/or undermine the author’s apparent purpose(s). Your analysis might focus on the perceived effects of any or all of the following: rhetorical appeals of ethos, pathos and logos; elements of form; figurative language, vocabulary, etc.—basically any feature of the writing itself that might persuade readers to accept the author’s ideas. (Suggested page-length for draft: 3-5 double-spaced pages, 12 pt. font, 1" margins.)

Approved Articles for Summary/Analysis

Feine, “McBastards: McDonald’s and Globalization,” Mercury Reader, Unit 3

Jordan, “That Lean and Hungry Look,” Mercury Reader, Unit 3

Kulman, “Food News Can Get You Dizzy, So Know What to Swallow,” Mercury Reader, Unit 3

Martin, “Love Your Fat Self: Rejecting Fear, Loathing, and Sacrifice,” Mercury Reader, Unit 3

Petrini, “Excerpt from Slow Food: The Case for Taste,” Mercury Reader, Unit 3

Raloff, “Inflammatory Fat: Unraveling the Injurious Biology of Obesity,” Mercury Reader, Unit 3

Schlosser, “Food Product Design,” Mercury Reader, Unit 3

Schwartz, “Fat and Happy,” Mercury Reader, Unit 3

Additional Readings

Allyn &Bacon Guide:

Chapter 2, “Thinking Rhetorically about Your Subject Matter”

Chapter 3, “Thinking Rhetorically about How Messages Persuade”

Chapter 6, “Reading Rhetorically: The Writer as Strong Reader”

Chapter 14, “Writing a Classical Argument”

Chapter 22, “Incorporating Sources into Your Own Writing,”

Portfolio Keeping :

pgs. 17-23, “Becoming a Reflective Learner”

Writer’s Resource:

pgs. 255-265, 525-531, effective incorporation of quotes and paraphrases

pgs. 261-265, 275-283, correct attribution and citation

pgs. 283-309, 322-323, works-cited page

pgs. 406-411, 413-417, clear use of modifiers

pgs. 459-466, subject/verb agreement

Context, Definitions, and Rationales

For the first unit of this course, you began exploring your own literacy through “open-form” prose—or, more specifically, a Literacy Narrative. Not only did this assignment provide you the opportunity to practice writing in response to a subject with which you are probably quite familiar (i.e., yourself), but it likely heightened your consciousness about the importance of literacy for human beings. As you reconsidered the acquisition of a particular literacy, you probably became more aware of the benefits of literacy—specifically how an understanding of literacy in a certain context allows people to function effectively within that environment and often as a member of a defined group of human beings. In Unit 2, you explored the relationship between literacy and group identity by examining how an advertisement used a specific language to sell a product by demonstrating a familiarity with the audience and its standards.

In Unit 3, you will continue to consider the relationships among group identity and language, but, for this assignment, you will use your writing as a way of participating in a community’s conversation (rather than describing how a community works). In this unit, you will join a conversation of a specific community, an academic community, by analyzing and critiquing an argument about a topic with which you undoubtedly have had considerable experience: health, broadly conceived. For this essay (a relatively closed-form text), you will summarize the content of a published author’s article and analyze the rhetorical strategies employed by that author.

For the summary portion of the text, you must convey in your own words the thesis of the article and its supporting points. To summarize the text effectively, you must radically reduce the length of the author’s argument (to approximately 200 words), but this reduction must accurately and coherently present the author’s argument and the manner in which he/she supports it. The key to composing this summary is to imagine that you will be writing for an interested reader who will not read the article but who needs to use the information that the article contains. In other words, you must make sure that you convey the thesis and explain the most important supporting points that the author makes.

In addition to composing a summary, you will compose a rhetorical analysis of this article. This analysis is especially significant for your future success in many venues, as it prepares you to participate in the critical discussions that occur in all disciplines.Regardless of the discipline to which you belong, you will be expected to read others’ texts and respond to them critically. This essay should analyze the author’s argument, as well as “how [the] text is constructed, what rhetorical strategies it employs, and how it appeals to logos, ethos, and pathos” (Ramage, Bean, and Johnson 122).

The second portion of this analysis is important for your work in English 101, asking you to identify and explain the workings of the rhetorical techniques you’ve studied all semester, describing how the author presents his/her ideas, how he/she appeals (or attempts to appeal) to a particular audience, and how, in the language of the second unit, he/she sells these ideas to the audience. By analyzing how the author makes an argument, you will begin to develop your own academic literacy, which means that you will be able to understand how the conventions of academic language operate and how you can, in turn, use them to present your own ideas to other members of the academic community. As Ramage, Bean, and Johnson note in the Allyn & Bacon Guide, rhetorical analysis requires that you locate “a few rhetorical points that you find particularly intriguing, important, or disturbing to access or probe” (122). The authors do not exaggerate the pervasive importance of this form of analysis and communication in education (and business). In some form or other, you will compose such a text in nearly every class: you will write analyses of other authors’ texts as distinct assignments or incorporate such analyses in larger compositions (like sustained scholarly arguments) or literature reviews (English 101’s fourth unit).

Summary and Analysis Guidelines

A. The completed Summary-Analysis must address an approved article from The Mercury Reader. The Summary-Analysis should be submitted in a file folder (your working folder) with (1) a copy of the assignment on which you have placed your initials next to each guideline, thereby indicating that you have read the guidelines, (2) all the informal exercises required by your instructor for this unit, and (3) the peer review you received and all comments from your instructor. Additionally, email or post to Blackboard (as directed by your instructor) an RTF copy of the Summary-Analysis; label the file with your first initial, last name, a hyphen, and “Unit 3” (e.g., RSmith-Unit3).

B. The Summary-Analysis should have an interesting title that identifies the subject and suggests a focus.

C. The introduction of the Summary-Analysis should have a lead that captures your reader’s attention and prepares the reader for the discussion. The introduction should be concise but should identify the author, the text’s title, the author’s subject and thesis, and it should provide an encapsulation of your analysis. Your reader should be able to read only the introduction and know the subject author’s thesis and your overall assessment of his/her text.

D. The Summary-Analysis should clearly summarize the argument of the article. The summary portion should be concise, accurate, and should present the article in your own words.

E. The Summary-Analysis should clearly convey your analysis of the article’s rhetorical purpose, form, and techniques.

F. The Summary-Analysis should effectively integrate material from the article with your own writing. The Summary-Analysis should include at least one quote. The Summary- Analysis should distinguish between the claims made by the author of the article, on the one hand, and claims made by you, on the other hand. The article’s material should be carefully attributed to its author, and the material must be properly cited using MLA guidelines.

G. The various points that you summarize should be effectively connected to your rhetorical analysis. The transitions between sentences, paragraphs, and larger sections should be clear and establish the relationships between ideas for your reader.

H. The Summary-Analysis should be logically developed. The rhetorical analysis of the article should be clearly argued, and claims must be supported with textual evidence that is properly cited.

I. The Summary-Analysis should be free of mechanical, grammatical, and usage errors. Pay particular attention to the following:

clear use of modifiers
effective incorporation of quotes, paraphrases, and summaries
correct attribution and citation

Appendix 5: Literature Review Assignment

English 101—Spring 2010
Unit 4: Literature Review (Synthesis)

Assignment

Tate Hilbert, a professor of Nutrition, has been asked to present a paper at a professional conference for a panel session entitled “Health Awareness and the American Lifestyle.” In preparation for this event, Professor Hilbert has asked you, his research assistant, to gather and synthesize information on some aspect of this topic into a Literature Review that might assist him in locating a viable focus for his presentation. To help expedite the process, he has provided you with a list of articles on the topic (see below), but he also wants you to locate a few sources on your own. Professor Hilbert has asked that your Literature Review take the form of an academic essay, and, therefore, he expects it to be written in a voice and style appropriate for scholarly exchange. In addition, he is careful to remind you that the purpose of synthesizing or reviewing literature is not merely to inform; rather, it is to forward, based on the material you’ve read, some specific observation or assertion about the status of knowledge on the focal issue. This essay should draw from a minimum of five sources (three from The Mercury Reader—see the list below—and two from credible venues of your own choosing and which are approved by your instructor). These texts must be cited and carefully attributed to their respective authors.

(Suggested page-length for draft: 5-6 double-spaced pages, 12 pt. font, 1" margins.)

Preparatory Literature Review/Synthesis Models

Raloff, “Researchers Probe Cell Phone Effects,” Mercury Reader, Unit 4
Gould, “Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of the Dinosaurs,” Mercury Reader, Unit 4
Lance, “Gender Differences in Heterosexual Dating: A Content Analysis of Personal Ads,” Mercury Reader, Unit 4
MacAulay, “Technology’s Peril and Potential,” Allyn & Bacon Guide, 352-55

Focal Articles Provided by Professor Hilbert

Feine, “McBastards: McDonald’s and Globalization,” Mercury Reader, Unit 3

Jordan, “That Lean and Hungry Look,” Mercury Reader, Unit 3

Kulman, “Food News Can Get You Dizzy, So Know What to Swallow,” Mercury Reader, Unit 3

Martin, “Love Your Fat Self: Rejecting Fear, Loathing, and Sacrifice,” Mercury Reader, Unit 3

Petrini, “Excerpt from Slow Food: The Case for Taste,” Mercury Reader, Unit 3

Raloff, “Inflammatory Fat: Unraveling the Injurious Biology of Obesity,” Mercury Reader, Unit 3

Schlosser, “Food Product Design,” Mercury Reader, Unit 3

Schwartz, “Fat and Happy,” Mercury Reader, Unit 3

Additional Readings

Allyn & Bacon Guide:

Chapter 13, “Analyzing and Synthesizing Ideas”
Chapter 20, “Asking Questions, Finding Sources”
Chapter 21, “Evaluating Sources”
Chapter 22, “Incorporating Sources Into Your Own Writing”

pgs. 187-190, information on annotated bibliographies

Writer’s Resource:

pgs. 204-219, locating and managing resources
pgs. 226-234, evaluating sources
pgs. 275-310, MLAreference section
pgs. 525-530, quotation marks
pgs. 531-537, “specialized” punctuation marks
pgs. 549-552, italics, underlining
pgs. 552-554, hyphens

Contexts, Definitions, and Rationales

Synthesizing information from various sources—while also integrating it with one’s own observations—is an especially demanding yet relatively common composing challenge to be faced in your college courses and in the professional world. Academics engage in Synthesis and/or generate Literature Reviews based on published research to establish the status of knowledge about a given topic and to sort out the accepted truths, gaps, flaws, and spaces for elaboration or refinement with regard to that knowledge base. In the business world, employers frequently expect staff to synthesize various data on a given product or service and to forward recommendations about the future of that product or service based on what the data reveal. The unique nature of the challenge stems from the fact that it is highly complex, requiring the writer to tap numerous composing strategies and skills (summary, analysis, response, assertion and support of major and minor claims, attribution and citation of sources) and to merge them in the context of generating a single document. Of course, the good news is that you have already practiced many of these strategies and skills in English 101, so you should be up to the challenge.

Though a general topic for this essay is assigned, you will need to spend considerable time on invention as you work within a broad subject matter area to appropriately narrow your focus (an aspect of a specific issue relevant to that which the professor has assigned) for a five-to-six-page paper. In light of this challenge, your instructor will be guiding you through invention exercises that will be crucial to future college writing experiences. To be sure, many assignments encountered in college will ask you to locate a viable focus within broad parameters. Building the skills required for doing so requires a clear understanding of strategies for selecting and narrowing a topic and plenty of practice at applying those strategies.

Reading the sources required for this essay will help you focus your topic and will also serve as the objects of your Synthesis. While you will be able to use the internet to conduct some additional research for this project, you will be expected to understand and apply strategies for locating academically respectable sources and for judging their credibility. Because this assignment is more dependent than others on the use of external sources, you will be reading additional textbook selections that reinforce source attribution strategies and rules for accurate MLA citation. Along these lines, as you are composing the Unit 4 essay, be sure to consult the quick reference guide to MLA documentation in your course handbook—A Writer’s Resource.

Perhaps the most important principle to emphasize in this overview of the Unit 4 essay assignment (because it points to a very common source of confusion) is that a Synthesis or Literature Review is not to be regarded as merely informative, a piece in which the author simply summarizes or collects in “cut and paste” fashion what others have had to say about the focal issue. Rather, the Synthesis or Literature Review requires you to forward a thesis, or a comprehensive assertion about the material that you have gathered and analyzed. In other words, based on the sources you have studied (and will be integrating in this essay), you will offer an interpretation of where the authors in question stand on the issue and/or will offer some evaluation of their thinking about or attitudes toward it.

Literature Review Guidelines

A. The completed Literature Review should be submitted in a file folder (your working folder) with (1) a copy of the assignment, on which you have placed your initials next to each guideline, thereby indicating that you’ve read the guidelines, (2) all the “informal” exercises required by your instructor for this unit, and (3) the peer review you received along with any comments from your instructor. Additionally, email or post to Blackboard (as directed by your instructor) an RTF copy of the Literature Review; label the file with your first initial, your last name, a hyphen, and “Unit 4” (e.g., RSmith- Unit4).

B. The Literature Review should address the broad topic designated in the assignment prompt.

C. The Literature Review should synthesize information from at least five external sources, three from The Mercury Reader and two from credible venues of your own choosing. The two self-selected sources must receive written approval before the submission date, and that written approval must be included in the working folder.

D. The Literature Review should have a title and an introductory paragraph that promote interest.

E. The Literature Review should contain an explicitly stated thesis that comments on the current status of knowledge regarding the focal issue. That thesis should reflect your understanding of and/or reaction to current knowledge regarding the focal issue.

F. The Literature Review should provide adequate support for all claims about the focal issue and/or the status of knowledge on the focal issue.

G. The Literature Review should have a logical organization aided by effective transitions between sentences, paragraphs, and larger sections.

H. The Literature Review should demonstrate thorough, accurate, and stylistically effective attribution of source material (and should demonstrate the ability to use both attributive tags and parenthetical citations).

I. The Literature Review should be free of mechanical, grammatical, and usage errors. Pay particular attention to the following:

citation of sources
use of quotation marks
attributive tags
sentence boundaries

Appendix 6: Reflective Introduction and Portfolio Assembly Assignment

English 101—Spring 2010
Unit 5: Reflective Introduction and Portfolio Assembly

Assignment

For an audience of college-level instructors and students, compose a Reflective Introduction for your course portfolio. In this essay, you will apply your understanding of rhetoric and your own writing processes to discuss (1) the texts that the portfolio contains (particularly the rhetorical choices that you made with regard to their initial composition, the revisions you made to them, and your reasons for including them in the portfolio) and (2) your development as a writer (or lack thereof if that was your experience of English 101). (Suggested page-length for draft: 5-6 double-spaced pages, 12 pt. font, 1" margins.)

Useful Models

Finger, “A Single Reflection on an Exploratory Essay,” Allyn & Bacon, 687 (student example)

Urbanik, “A Comprehensive Reflective Letter,” Allyn & Bacon, 688-689 (student example)

Scott and Plumb, “A Case Study of the Writing Experience,” Blackboard

James, “Preface” to The Ambassadors, Blackboard

Readings

Allyn & Bacon Guide:

Chapter 25, “Assembling a Portfolio and Writing a Reflective Essay”

Portfolio Keeping:

pgs. 32-60, “Part Two: From Process to Product—Preparing for Assessment”

Writer’s Resource :

pgs. 73-93, tips for revising and editing

pgs. 101-103, tips for compiling a portfolio

Contexts, Definitions, and Rationale

During the course of the semester, you have been studying rhetoric as both an act of persuasion and a science of persuasion. You have learned about theories of communication and have evaluated texts based on those theories—including your own texts. Above all, in responding to the English 101 essay assignments, and in interacting with your instructor and your peers in the context of your composing processes, you should have learned that effective, sustained, formal writing is ordinarily well planned and involves considerable effort.

Though much of the work in this class involved investigating others’ writing, considering the reasons for their choices, and assessing the efficacy of those choices and the resultant communicative acts, the focus of this class has been your own rhetorical endeavors. You have studied rhetoric and others’ uses of rhetoric in order to improve your writing processes and, in turn, the texts that you compose through those processes.

To demonstrate your growth as a writer, your understanding of your composing processes, and your appreciation of rhetorical choices (particularly your own), you will compose a portfolio of your revised and polished work (3 of 4 units), what Reynolds and Rice refer to as a “presentation portfolio” (4-5). Certainly, an essential component of this presentation portfolio is a new composition, the Reflective Introduction, which provides an overview of your revised work and comments on the processes and feedback that have contributed to its current status.

The Reflective Introduction’s importance in your portfolio derives from its status as a metacognitive composition—a text in which you demonstrate, according to Reynolds and Rice, that you “know beyond your own knowing” (6). Herein you will write about your own writing—the assignments that you had, the original choices that you made, the comments that you received, and the consequent choices that you made during revision. This introduction to the portfolio will indicate that you have become a “reflective” writer, that you can “take a careful look at your own work to identify your patterns, strengths, and preferences for negotiating writing tasks, for learning new skills, and for putting those skills into practice,” specifically in response to the demands of different rhetorical contexts (Portfolio Keeping 6).

Neither the process nor the substance of this text is foreign to you. You have been engaging in similar work all semester, as the material in your working folder will indicate. For instance, after each unit assignment, you composed a postwrite, in which you explored your experience with each assignment, from your initial reaction to the guidelines to the challenges you faced while drafting in response to self assessments and peers’ responses. Even the unit assignments have prepared you for composing this Reflective Introduction. In Unit 1, you composed a piece about an incident in your (literacy) education, and in the portfolio introduction you will write about your (rhetorical) education. In Units 2 and 3, you analyzed and assessed the rhetorical choices that another writer made, a form of rhetorical criticism you will now apply to your own compositions.

The second unit is particularly useful to consider because of its evaluative nature. As you did in the Ad Analysis, in the Reflective Introduction you should make clear judgments. In this case, those judgments will be of your writing processes and their end results. These judgments should culminate in some overall (self) assessment of your performance and/or your growth as a writer during this semester. Most of you will likely give yourself a positive assessment. And you should. But the actual assessment is not as important as the text by which you convey that assessment. Even if you judge yourself to have performed poorly and to have minimally developed (or even regressed!), you could compose an effective Reflective Introduction that clearly and powerfully explains that performance and the reasons behind it.

The quality of the Reflective Introduction depends on how well you demonstrate an understanding of rhetoric and your own writing processes and how well you marshal evidence—from class discussions, from readings, and from your own texts—to support your thesis. This text stands as a natural capstone to the course, not only because it explains your performance and the quality of your final project, but because it requires the rhetorical techniques that you have honed in your portfolio’s composition: You will have to narrate (as you did in Unit 1); you will have to analyze and evaluate (as you did in Unit 2 and Unit 3), and you will have to synthesize texts (as you did in Unit 4).

Reflective Introduction Guidelines

A. The completed Reflective Introduction should be submitted with the course portfolio as an overview of the collection of essays and your development this semester. Additionally, the Reflective Introduction—and the other Unit Assignments in the portfolio—must be submitted in digitized format (RTF or PDF). See the portfolio guidelines for further explanation of the portfolio’s composition.

B. The Reflective Introduction should provide evidence of your acquisition of “content knowledge” during the semester. It should demonstrate your understanding of rhetorical theory and the composing processes.

C. The Reflective Introduction should provide evidence of your acquisition of “metacognitive knowledge” during the semester. It should demonstrate your critical engagement with your own writing process and your appreciation of how rhetorical theory applies to your own writing.

D. The Reflective Introduction should provide evidence of your facility with the level of written communication expected of college students. It should demonstrate your ability to make wise choices about how to frame your work for the intended audience.

E. The Reflective Introduction should have a title and introduction that foster the reader’s interest.

F. The Reflective Introduction should present a clear thesis that conveys an evaluation of your work and development.

G. The Reflective Introduction should provide sufficient evidence from a variety of sources (assigned readings, drafts, finished essays, peer and instructor commentary, postwrites) in support of claims. These sources must be attributed and cited appropriately and accurately.

H. The Reflective Introduction should have a logical organization aided by effective transitions between sentences, paragraphs, and larger sections.

I. The Reflective Introduction should be free of mechanical, grammatical, and usage errors.

Appendix 7: Final Exam

English 101: Spring 2010
Unit 6: Final Exam

Assignment

For a general academic audience, compose an essay in which you summarize and rhetorically analyze one of the readings assigned from Unit 6 in the Mercury Reader. In this summary and rhetorical analysis essay, you should summarize the reading and then analyze the author’s rhetorical strategies, as you did in Unit 3. When you analyze the author’s rhetorical strategies and the structure of the argument, you should consider our discussions of rhetorical technique, particularly the three rhetorical appeals. This assignment is essentially a repetition of the Unit 3 assignment. Though I will take into consideration the time constraints of the test, I do expect you to compose a text similar to the one that you composed for the third unit.

To this exam you should bring the following materials:

a one-page (8.5x11 inch) outline, which should be in sentence fragment form (though an introduction paragraph may be completely composed in sentence format)
a dictionary
your handbook
two or more pens
a sufficient amount of lined paper (8.5x11 inch) to compose your essay
a copy of the article

During the two-hour exam period, you will compose this summary and rhetorical analysis essay from the outline that you bring in (if you choose to compose one). At the beginning of class, I will collect the outlines and spend five to ten minutes reviewing the outlines to make sure that they are in the proper format (i.e. that no outline is so developed in its structure that it constitutes an essay, as this test requires you to develop the essay based on an outline of its structure). I will then return the outlines and you will begin the exam.

Final Exam Guidelines

A. The completed essay should be submitted in blue or black ink on lined 8.5x11 inch paper.

B. The essay should have an interesting title that identifies the subject and suggests a thesis.

C. The essay’s introduction should have a lead that captures your reader’s attention and prepares him/her for the discussion. The introduction should be concise but should identify the author, the text’s title, the author’s subject and thesis, and it should provide an encapsulation of your critical response. Your reader should be able to read only the introduction and know the author’s thesis and your overall assessment of his/her text.

D. The essay should clearly summarize the argument of the subject text. The summary portion should be concise and accurate. It should present the subject text in your own words.

E. The essay should clearly analyze the author’s claims and rhetorical techniques.

F. The essay should integrate material from the subject text with your own writing. The summary and rhetorical analysis should include at least one quote. The summary and rhetorical analysis should distinguish between the claims made by the author of the subject text, on the one hand, and claims made by you, on the other hand. The subject text’s material should be carefully attributed to its author, and the material must be properly cited using MLA guidelines.

G. The various points that you summarize and analyze in this essay should be effectively connected. The transitions between sentences and paragraphs should be clear and establish the relationships between the ideas.

H. The essay should be logically developed. The critical assessment of the subject text should be clearly argued, and claims must be supported with evidence from the text.

I. The essay should be free of mechanical, grammatical, and usage errors. Please review all the mechanical and grammatical guidelines from past assignments, and pay particular attention to MLA format for citation and a works cited entry.

Appendices from “Standardizing English 101 at SIU-Carbondale” from Composition Forum 22 (Summer 2010)
Online at: http://compositionforum.com/issue/22/siuc-appx.php
© Copyright 2010 Ronda Leathers Dively.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License.

Return to “Standardizing English 101 at SIU-Carbondale”.