All posts by JSylvor

Final Project: Analytical Research Paper + Creative Re-Mix

assignments, essays

 

Timeline:
 Monday, April 5th – Overview of Assignment and Brainstorming
Wednesday, April 7th – Share three possible ideas for your research paper topic on the blog before our Zoom session.
 Monday, April 12th – Review of Proposals (This includes possible ideas for the Creative Re-Mix)
 Wednesday, April 21st – Drafts Due
Monday, April 26th – Conferences
Wednesday, April 28th – Review of Proposal for Creative Re-Mix
 Sunday, May 2nd – Research Paper Due  
Wednesday, May 12th – Presentation of Creative Re-Mix Projects
Monday, May 17th – Presentation of Creative Re-Mix Project

 

Analytical Research Paper

 

6-8 pages, 12pt type, double-spaced, with one-inch margins
 
This is an analytical research paper.  This means that you will not simply be collecting information about your topic; you will also be interpreting your research findings and drawing conclusions about your topic.
 
Topics:  Your first task is to come up with a topic for your research paper.  Your topic must be connected in some way to our semester’s broad theme of FOOD.  On Wednesday, April 7th, be prepared to share three possible topics during our Zoom session.  As you select your topic, keep the following questions in mind:
–Is this an interesting topic?  It’s particularly important that the topic genuinely interest you!
–Can I find adequate sources to research this topic?
— Is this a topic that will yield analysis, rather than simply the reporting of information?
–Is this topic either too broad or too narrow for a paper of this length?
Research Proposal:  Before our class meeting on Monday, April 12th,  you will submit your Research Proposal in writing by uploading it to our Google Doc Folder, either in the form of a one-paragraph articulation of the topic, a traditional outline, or some combination of those two formats.   You should be able to express your topic in terms of a single question that will guide your research.  Then think about the writing of the paper as an effort to answer your research question.   
Sources: In writing this paper, you must employ a minimum of four sources.   You will cite your sources in accordance with the MLA guidelines (8th Edition).  We will be reviewing the guidelines together in class, and you will receive more detailed instructions about using and citing sources.  Think broadly about what constitutes a “source.”  This could include audio, video, blog posts, personal interviews, and other non-traditional source formats.  The sources you end up using in your research paper will be listed in a Works Cited page at the end of the paper, using MLA formatting guidelines.  At least one of your sources must be a source you access via  the Newman Library’s databases.  (Our goal here is to move away from Google as your primary research strategy!)
  

Creative Re-Mix

At the same time that you are researching your topic and writing your analytical research paper, you should also be thinking about how you want to present your topic in your “creative re-mix”. The re-mix project gives you an opportunity to explore your subject in a more creative, subjective, or personal way.  It’s up to you to decide what form your re-mix should take and how it should relate to your research paper.  Your Research Paper and Creative Re-Mix should be related, but not identical.  This is NOT about creating a powerpoint presentation that summarizes your research; it’s about producing a creative project that complements your research.

 Some possible formats you might consider for the creative re-mix are:

Comic strip/cartoon

Blog

Video

Photo essay

Creative writing (short story, poetry, song)

Visual art

Interview

Interactive map

Timeline

Social Media Based Project

Podcast

Oral History

Community Service Project

 

You will be presenting your Creative Re-Mix to the class during our last two sessions on Wed., May 12th and Mon., May 17th. We will pick numbers from a hat (or the virtual equivalent)  to determine the order of the presentations.

 

 

 

Week #9 – Spring Break

assignments, Uncategorized

I hope that each of you finds ways to relax  and replenish yourselves over the Spring Break.  This strange year has required a lot of all of us.   Even if we have grown used to the challenges of living through a pandemic, the stress has affected all of us, so it is important to have time off!

While you are relaxing, there are two things that I’d like you to think about that will help smooth the way for our last six weeks of the semester when we return.

  1.  Research Topic:  Start thinking about your Research Topic.  You have a lot of latitude here.  Essentially, any food related (or food adjacent) topics will work for this assignment.  You will start with a topic, then develop a research question, and begin doing your research.  All this will happen beginning right after spring break, so it’s time to start considering what might interest you.   Just to get your creative juices going, here are some examples of broad, food-related topics:

laboratory-made “meat”

exploitation of restaurant workers/farm workers/meat packing workers

focus on a single food: quinoa, salt, sushi, tacos, chocolate – what can we learn from its story?

hunger – focus on a particular place/time

food and ritual (focus on a particular culture/food/ritual)

genetic modification of food

diet culture

food deserts

do a food guide to a particular neighborhood

the future of food

eating insects

food and cultural appropriation

the pandemic’s effect on food/eating/restaurants

 

2. Food-Related Media

As part of our work in the next section of the course, you will be exploring a variety of different kinds of food-related sources and reporting on them to the class.  These can include: documentary films, feature films, podcasts, television programs, newspapers and more.  You are welcome to find and choose your own sources, but to help you get started, you might want to consult this list.  It will give you a sense of what’s possible!  If Spring Break leaves you with some leisure time for listening to podcasts or watching movies, you might want to choose something food related.  This will give you a head start when we come back after break.

Assignments – Week #8

assignments
  • Peer Review:  You should be completing your Peer Review work by Friday, March 19th.  I will be reading your drafts, adding comments, and checking the peer review materials over the weekend.  Please let me know if you have NOT received any feedback from the members of your group by Saturday morning.
  • Conferences: On Monday, March 22nd, we will be having conferences rather than meeting as a whole class.  These conferences are mandatory and will be an opportunity to discuss your essays.  Make sure that you have shared a current version of your draft with your group in advance of your conference.  The schedule for these conferences is as follows:

11:30 Group #1: Geselle, Kaylen, Abdu

12:00 Group #2: Samantha, Gianni, Nicole

12:30 Group #3: Melanie, Mokhitobon, Sydney

1:00 Group #4: Lorraine, Danna, Brian

1:30 Group #5: Destiny, Lelani, Mindy

  • Essays Due: Friday, March 26th.  Follow the instructions provided in the assignment.  Place your completed essay in the same folder that contains your Personal Narrative.  Make sure that you have renamed the file so that it doesn’t say “Draft”!
  • Dear Reader/Writer Letter: As you did with your first formal essay, please take some time to reflect on the process of writing your Textual Analysis Essay.  Place your completed letter in the folder that contains your essays no later than Sunday, March 28th.  In composing your letter, you may want to consider the following:

-What question were you asking in this essay?

-How did this essay writing process compare to your first essay?

-What are you especially proud of about this work?

-What do you wish had gone differently?

-What did you learn from writing this essay – both about your topic and about yourself?

-What’s a piece of useful advice you received while working on this essay?

-How would you evaluate your own work as a peer reviewer?

-What do you want your reader to keep in mind as he/she reads your essay?

 

 

 

Assignments – Week #7

assignments

This week will be focussed on your Textual Analysis Essay, the second formal essay of the semester.

1.Read Essay #2  instructions.  Please read through the post “Essay #2 – Textual Analysis” carefully, jotting down important due dates in your calendar, and noting any questions you have.  On our Slack channel, please post your initial thoughts about this assignment.  Include one take-away you have about this assignment (i.e. express some aspect of the assignment in your own words), any questions you have about the assignment, and the text you are thinking about writing about. (Don’t worry; this is not a commitment.)  Please post this to Slack by Sunday, March 14th.

2. What question will you be answering in your essay? Using my instructions as your guide, please come to class on Monday, March 15th ready to share  and discuss your question.  Please post your question here (as a comment on this blog post) before class.  Your question should include the name of the text you are writing about or its author.  Don’t over-think this.  This is an opportunity not just to identify the text you’re interested in, but to spell out what it is that you want to explore about this text.

3. Drafts Due on Wednesday, March 17th. We will be starting our Peer Review process during our Zoom on Wednesday. In order to facilitate this, please place your drafts in our shared Google Docs folder before class.  A draft doesn’t have to be complete, but it must be submitted by Wednesday.

Essay #2 – Textual Analysis

essays

Essay Length:  3-5 pages

Drafts Due:  Before class on Wednesday, March 17th.  Place your draft in our shared ENG2150 Google Doc folder.  Be sure you have included your name plus “Textual Analysis Draft” in the name of the file.

Essays Due: Friday, March 26th (placed in your private Google Doc folder)

For this essay, you will be taking a deep dive into one of the texts we’ve read so far this semester.  To some extent, the approach you take will be determined by the text you choose, but in all cases, your job is to use this essay writing process to understand some aspect of your chosen text more deeply and fully and to communicate that understanding clearly to your reader.

Possible Texts:

Toni Morrison, “The Day and its Splendid Parts”

Gabrielle Hamilton, “Killing Dinner”

Chang-Rae Lee, “Coming Home Again”

Sam Anderson, “I Recommend Eating Chips”

David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster”

Michael Pollan, “Power Steer”

 

Process:

Step One – Select your text.  Which of these texts grabbed your attention most fully or stuck with you most persistently after reading it?  Which text do you still not fully understand? Which text could you happily spend more time with?  Use these questions to determine the text you will write about!

Step Two – Reread and Annotate.  Use this re-reading as an opportunity to identify those elements of the texts that seem to you to be the most import.   That might mean zeroing in on the argument that the author seems to be making (for Foster Wallace and Pollan),  it might mean marking passages that illuminate deeper issues or relationships (in the first-person narrations).  You will be coming back to your annotations as you craft your analysis, so be sure to highlight any text that you may want to quote in your essay!  Also use these marginal notes to start naming what you are noticing in the text, describing it in your own words, and jotting down your own questions, comments, and reactions to what you are reading.

Step Three – Determine your Focus. Now that you have re-read the text, you are ready to decide on the question your paper will be focusing on.  (I am a believer in focusing on a question at this stage, rather than a thesis.)  Your question may address an author’s rhetorical strategies (through a question like “What rhetorical techniques does David Foster Wallace use to get us to think more deeply about cooking and eating lobster?”); it may delve deeply into the content of a text (through a question like, “What does Chang-Rae Lee’s essay reveal about the complicated relationship between mother and son?”); or it may focus on argumentation (as in “What does Pollan reveal about the health implications of eating factory-farmed beef?”) Make sure your question is not a yes/no question.  It should be open-ended and one that you can answer through close engagement with the text.

Step Four – Make a Plan.  Do not begin writing your essay without some kind of plan.  Your plan may look like a traditional outline.  It might be a list of your body paragraphs, spelling out the topic or main idea of each one.  It might be an idea map that places your question at the center and imagines all your ideas as growing out of that central question.  You should be referring back to your annotations here.  Use the passages you’ve marked and the ideas you’ve generated in the margins as the skeleton for the essay.  This way, your ideas will grow directly out of the text.  This tends to be a better strategy than coming up with ideas and then looking for “evidence” in the text to back them up!  If you are stuck, try doing some freewriting in response to your question to unlock your creativity and get a better sense of what it is that you really think.

Step Five – Write a Draft.  Use your plan to write your draft.  Sometimes it’s easier to start with the body paragraphs, then go back and write your conclusion once you have figured out what it is you have to say.  As you write, remember that your task here involves close reading and analysis.  This means that every body paragraph will probably include one or more quotations from the text.  Each time you include a quotation, be sure that you provide some lead-in or introduction to the quotation and then offer some analysis of the quotation itself,  explaining just what it is that you want the reader to notice about the quotation and connecting the quotation to the idea that you are exploring in that paragraph.

Step Six – Revision.  During this stage of the process, you will be integrating the feedback you have gotten from your peers and your professor and reworking your essay in order to express your ideas more clearly and effectively.  Don’t be afraid to let go of any material in the paper that is taking the reader away from your focus, and make sure that your revised paper incorporates and highlights any new ideas that you developed during the process of writing your first draft.  You will probably want to rewrite your introduction completely, so that it spells out more clearly exactly where this essay is headed.

Step Seven – Proofreading and Submission.  Just as you did for the Personal Narrative, you will be submitting your finished essay to me by placing it in the Google Docs folder that you created for this purpose.  Be sure to give the file a name that includes your name, ENG2150, and Textual Analysis.  Once you have placed the document in the folder, consider the paper submitted.  Do NOT go back into the file and make any changes, even AFTER I have read and commented on the essay.  If you decide that you want to rewrite the paper after I have “returned” it to you, make a copy of the file, identify it as a REWRITE, and use that new file to work on your revisions.

 

Common Errors – Sentence Fragments and Comma Splices

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As an accompaniment to the sentences I distributed to you on Monday, I wanted to offer you some brief explanations of some of the important categories of error you may discover through this exercise and in your own writing and that of your peers.  This is meant to be a very quick review; more more detailed explanations as well as the opportunity to practice working on these concepts, I recommend the Purdue OWL, Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab.

I.  Sentence Fragment:  A sentence fragment, as the name suggests, is a sentence that is grammatically incomplete.  In order to be grammatically complete, a sentence needs three things:  a subject, a verb, and to express a complete thought.  A sentence fragment is missing one of these three things.

Subject in grammar refers to the person or thing doing the action.  For example, in the sentence  “The chef cooked the meal,”  the grammatical subject is “chef.”  In the sentence, “Her mood seemed tense,” the grammatical subject is  “mood.”

Verb in grammar refers to the word or group of words in a sentence that expresses an action or a state of being.  The word predicate is sometimes used as a synonym for verb. In the sentences I used above (“The chef cooked the meal.” and “Her mood seemed tense.”), the verbs are cooked and seemed.

Express a  Complete Thought: Sometimes we may encounter a group of words that contains both a subject and a verb, yet fails to express a complete thought.  For example, if the sentence were “After the chef cooked the meal,” that would be a sentence fragment.  There is a subject and a verb, but it doesn’t express a complete thought.  The same would be true if our sentence were “Because her mood seemed tense;”  we have a subject and a verb, but not a complete thought.

How to fix a sentence fragment? Sometimes in order to fix a sentence fragment, all you need to do it to attach the fragment to the sentence it properly belongs to – which could be the one that comes right before or after it.  Another way to fix a fragment is to provide whichever of the three elements I mentioned above  (subject, verb, complete thought) is missing

 

II. Comma Splice: The  verb “splice” means to join or connect.  A comma splice is a type of error in which the author has connected two independent clauses with a comma rather than using more appropriate punctuation.  You know you have a comma splice if you read the words that come before the comma and see that they could stand on their own as a complete sentence and then look at the words that come after the comma and see that they could stand independently too.  For example if I wrote, “Many students have questions, the instructions were not clear,” that would be a comma splice.  I can tell that that’s the case because I could have a sentence that read, “Many students have questions,” and I could also have a sentence that said, “The instructions were not clear.”

How to fix a comma splice? Fixing a comma splice is pretty straightforward.  You have three options.  You can simply replace the comma with a period. Or you can replace the comma with a semi-colon:  Many students have questions; the instructions were not clear. We use a semi-colon to join two sentences that are closely related in meaning.  It is a slightly softer break than a period.  A third option to fix a comma splice would be to add a word or group of words to create a complex sentence.  This could look something like: Many students have questions because the instructions were not clear.

 

I hope this short post helps to clarify these two types of sentence error.  Please post any questions in the comments.  You can also use the comments to let me know what other grammatical or mechanical issues you would like us to cover in ENG 2150!

Assignments – Week #6

assignments
  1. Read your classmates’ “I Recommend Eating….” posts.  Please comments on at least three posts, sharing something specific you appreciated about the post and adding an idea of your own.  Be mindful of spreading your comments around to ensure that all posts receive feedback! (To do this, start the process by finding the post with the fewest comments and adding your voice there.) Please share your comments by Wednesday, March 10th
  2. This week we are going to begin using Hypothes.is, a web-based platform that will allow us to annotate texts electronically and to share our annotations with others. Please use this Guide to Getting Started with Hypothes.is  to walk you through the process of setting up a free Hypothes.is account, adding the Hypothes.is extension to your web browser (ideally Chrome),  and joining our ENG2150 Hypothes.is group using THIS LINK.  You will need Hypothes.is to do your work for Monday, so please let me know via Slack or email if you encounter any difficulties with this.
  3.  For Monday, please read Michael Pollan, “Power Steer”, available under the “Texts” tab above.  Once you have opened the article, click on the Hypothes.is extension you added to your browser, and begin to experiment with adding annotations to the text.  Make sure that you select our ENG2150 group. You should be able to see some annotations that I added to the beginning of the text as examples.  Add a minimum of 3-5 annotations of your own.  These could be definitions of words you had to look up, highlights of important passages, or reactions to ideas you encounter in the text.  Use this as an opportunity both to understand the text more deeply and to play around with this new tool.

 

Assignments – Week #5

assignments

1. Congratulations on completing your first “formal” essay of the semester!  Before we move on, please take 30 minutes to compose a “Dear Reader/Dear Writer” letter to reflect on the experience of crafting your Personal Narrative.  You can think about it as a letter to me, or to some anonymous reader, or as a letter to yourself, the author.  When you have completed your letter, please name the file (in a way that will make sense to you and to me), and place it in the Google Drive folder that holds your finished essay.  Please share your essay with me by Monday, March 1st.

In your letter, you may want to address the following questions.  They are meant as suggestions, so don’t feel like you need to respond to all of them.  Be sure to compose your letter in paragraphs.

–What were you trying to accomplish with this essay?

–What went particularly well in this process?

–What aspects of the process were a struggle?

–How did the peer review process go?  What did I learn from reviewing my partners’ essays? What was it like to get and give feedback?

–Identify one line or one detail from your essay that you feel particularly proud of.  What do you love about it?

–What do you wish you had done differently during this essay writing process?

–What did you learn about yourself through this process?

–What else do you want your reader to know?

 

2. Continue to work on the “I Recommend Eating….” essay you began on Wednesday.  You can find your work HERE.  Your completed essay should be approx. 500 words.  Remember that this piece is an opportunity to be playful and exploratory.   Let curiosity be your guide.  What’s in your chosen food? Where does it come from? Who invented it? How did it find its way to you? What does it look like?  How/where/when did you first encounter it?  How does it figure into your story, your life, your identity, your routine???  Be creative!  Please share your finished piece on the blog together with an accompanying image (again, feel free to select whatever seems right to you!) by Friday, March 5th.

 

3.  This week we will be discussing David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster.”  Please read the essay (which you can find under the “Texts” tab), and come to class on Monday, March 1st  ready to discuss it.  As part of your preparation for Monday’s class, once you have read the essay, please add two selected passages and two discussion questions  to a group “NOTES” document that we will use to guide our discussion.  You can find that document HERE.

Assignments – Week #4

assignments, essays

Our focus this week is on your Personal Narratives.  By the time you read this, you should have received some feedback from the members of your writing group via the peer review process and should be turning your attention to the REVISION process.  Please keep in mind that REVISION  is not the same thing as EDITING or PROOFREADING.

REVISION is the process of rethinking and reshaping both the structure and the content of your essay.  As you gain greater clarity about what it is that you really want to say, you will often find that you need to eliminate large chunks of your original draft, create new material to respond to important questions that have arisen, and reorganize the essay in order to make it more effective.  Very often, when we begin drafting an essay, we are focussed on meeting the length requirement and on simply unlocking our creative energy by getting our writing going; this usually means focussing less on content, style, and structure and more on simply getting our thoughts down on the page.  When we revise, we take a step back from our draft, review the goals and purpose of this writing project, and use this as an opportunity to refocus and refine our plan.  In short, revision (which literally means “seeing anew” focuses on the big picture of our essay’s ideas and execution.

EDITING is the process of making our writing as effective as possible.  It is during the editing process that we turn our attention to word choice, sentence structure, tone, and other elements that might fall under the loose category of “style.”  Here too we might find ourselves moving things around in our essay in order to make our paragraphs more effective.   A great strategy to employ during this stage of the process is reading aloud.  When we read our work aloud, we can hear awkwardness, errors, and stylistic issues that our eyes simply don’t catch.   Through the editing process, your writing should get brighter, sharper, and clearer.

PROOFREADING is the last step that you take before submitting work to your professor, before pressing send on an email, or printing an important document.  During the proofreading process, we look for typos, spelling errors, spacing problems and anything else that might detract from the polished quality of our finished work or distract our reader.  It is often really useful to swap papers with an eagle-eyed friend for the proofreading process.  Sometimes we have a hard time spotting our own errors.  Do NOT rely on spell-check to find all your errors for you.

On Monday, February 22nd, you will be meeting with me in your Writing Groups according to the schedule listed below.  Additionally, you should be connecting with your Writing Groups without me in order to go over the feedback from the Peer Review, get additional advice, and formulate your next steps.  Your group should decide how it would like to meet.  (Some options are Slack, group chat, facetime, or Zoom.  I am happy to schedule and host zoom meetings for you.)

11:30 – 12:00  Group 1: Geselle, Kaylen, Abdu

12:00 – 12:30  Group 2: Samantha, Gianni, Nicole

12:30 – 1:00  Group 3: Melanie, Mokhitobon, Sydney

1:00 – 1:30  Group 4: Lorraine, Danna, Brian

1:30 – 2:00 Group 5: Destiny, Lelani, Mindy

To prepare for your conference, please do the following:

  • Read your peer review feedback carefully and connect with your partners if you need further clarification.
  • Begin your revision process (as described above) and be prepared to discuss it on Monday.
  • Add an update to the #essays channel in our Slack workspace in which you share one piece of particularly helpful feedback that you received about your draft and describe how you will be addressing it through your revision.  You can also use this update as an opportunity to share whatever aspects of the process you are having difficulty with.  Keep an eye on this channel, and respond to your classmates’ updates where you think you can be helpful or encouraging. (If you still haven’t joined our class’s Slack workspace, go to the “Technology” tab at the top of the blog.  You can find a link for Slack in the information posted there.)

For Wednesday, February 24th:  Please read Sam Anderson’s essay “I Recommend Eating Chips” which you can find on the blog under the “Texts” tab.  Before class, please post to the blog:

–One word you had to look up from Anderson’s essay, together with its definition.

–A line that made you LOL or at least smile.

–If you were assigned an essay like this – a love letter to a particular food or eating experience, what would it be? Why?

For Thursday, February 25th:. Your essays are due by midnight.  As I explained in the essay assignment, you will create a folder with your name plus English 2150 in its title and share the folder with me.  Add your finished version of the essay to the folder.