The lessons and process writing you will complete in this course are geared toward developing the following major assignments:
Essay 1: Rhetorical analysis (3-4 pages)
“Critical Questions for Big Data” asks readers to develop the ability to investigate the use of large-scale search data to reveal its assumptions and biases. Authors Kate Crawford and danah boyd ask, “Will large-scale search data help us create better tools, services, and public goods? Or will it usher in a new wave of privacy incursions and invasive marketing?” When a writer conducts rhetorical analysis, they isolate details and identify the decisions represented in those details to develop an argument about the way the central text establishes a perspective and how it produces its effects. In Essay 1, writers will compare Crawford and boyd’s article with two videos that make similar and related arguments. Writers will use other texts to put in relief the rhetorical decisions these texts’ authors made about key elements of a rhetorical situation, including
- Audience: Who matters? Who is the target audience? What should they already assume and understand to belong “here?” What cultural values or concerns may they have in common?
- Exigence: What are the intended effects? What is the problem that needs to be solved
- Constraints: What values, documents, beliefs, facts, and assumptions are essential to the main audience?
Write an essay in which you identify specific details–such as terms or examples used, evidence of an attitude or relationship with the subject matter, statements of ethics or beliefs, and formal or grammatical elements–as evidence of rhetorical decisions, in order to form an argument about the way the central text operates rhetorically.
Unit 2: Lens Analysis
In Going Viral, Karine Nahon and Jeff Hemsley define memes as “units of culture that spread from person to person by copying or imitation” (37). Memes evidence viral topics but are rarely viral events in themselves. Viral events, they argue, can be read as a “mechanism or reproduction and transformation in social structures” (104). How might this be the case? Further, how do memes produced in response to a viral event reveal current cultural values, issues, or anxieties? In Essay 2, writers will pose answers to these questions using two documents that present a recent viral event and at least one of two relevant and related memes published online.
Unit 3: Annotated Bibliography / Research Portfolio
In Unit 3, your final major assignment, you will produce a portfolio that includes an annotated bibliography of at least 8 sources and a provisional paper on the perspective progressing out of and narrating your analysis of researched materials. You will choose one of the course texts assigned to you and use it as a “seed text,” mining concepts from the author(s)’s framework and finding an exhibit that inspires an intellectual problem, a set of new questions conversant with the topic of your seed text. This task requires you to establish an analytical problem for your research. Your provisional paper should
- introduce your central question(s) and a reason why your topic, issue, or question should matter to a curious, general reader;
- provide necessary contexts for understanding the issue exemplified by your selected exhibit;
- overview existing arguments about your specific exhibit or topic;
- introduce relevant theories that can be used as analytical lenses;
- analyze your exhibit using introduced theories;
- explain how the insights and conclusions from your analyses confirm, complicate, or extend existing arguments about your specific exhibit or topic;
- Identify gaps that remain in your own research;
- Raise new questions about the topic that you discover through the research and writing process; and
- Suggest new avenues for the additional research that would be required if you were to further develop and strengthen your hypothesis.
