Cementina Essay I Guidelines

The first major assignment for my 2100 class is a comparison & contrast essay. Our class has been considering songs and music videos as texts for the beginning of the semester. My hope is that these accessible texts will make it easier for the students to become acquainted with rhetorical and literary terms like tone, audience, purpose, diction, etc. Then, when we move on to academic essays, newspaper articles, and creative non-fiction pieces, the students will already feel comfortable with the vocabulary of rhetorical analysis, even if they find some of the content more challenging. Also, the theme of the course is “representation of self in the public sphere,” and I think there is much to say about this topic when considering musicians. For the comparison & contrast paper, the students are being asked to compare and contrast two of the songs we have discussed.

I think students often find thesis statements challenging, so I am interested in any ideas for exercises/activities on thesis statements to help them prepare for the essay. Of course, suggestions of any kind are welcome.

I would like to present on Feminist Pedagogical and Rhetorical Practices. I’m actually not particularly informed on this topic, but it is the one in which I am most interested, so I would love to use this presentation as an opportunity to learn.