Research-Based Argumenative Essay

15% of course grade

In a 7-8 page double-spaced Research Argumentative Essay, address the dominant conversation happening around a social issue. Your essay will expand upon or deepen this conversation, or point your audience to an overlooked point of view. 

Goals:

• • • Learning how to read and digest scholarly/ academic research, incorporate it into your own writing, and add your own ideas
    • Drawing conclusions based on compelling and credible evidence
    • Developing a position (a thesis/ claim), and tailoring prose to fit a specific rhetorical situation: an academic research paper written for an academic audience
    • Supporting your thesis with evidence
    • Organizing writing in logical and coherent ways
    • Revising and editing, based on peer and professor feedback, so that your ideas evolve over time rather than right before the deadline

GRADING

Thesis/ Focus: 20% What is the point of the piece? What insights does it offer, or what arguments does it make about your chosen topic? You show us how this argument matters because it addresses a belief that needs to be updated or expanded upon, and because the argument has important, real-world consequences.

Support for your thesis: 20% You provide details that make the essay come to life, you avoid generality, you provide rhetorically persuasive reasons and evidence to support your thesis, you directly acknowledge the “dominant conversation” in our society as relating to your thesis, and you expand upon it. Images, graphs, and videos are highly encouraged but page count should be adjusted accordingly.

Integration of sources: 20% You summarize, paraphrase, and quote directly in syntactically sophisticated and ethical ways from the sources you’ve used for your research (at least 5 sources). These sources should represent a variety of perspectives and should be credible for this rhetorical context.

Organization: 10% You organize your paragraphs in such a way that your readers can clearly follow your main argument; your readers can easily follow how you develop and support that argument in each paragraph; you group information together that goes together; you use a new paragraph when you “switch gears” to a new subject, but you recognize that there can be multiple paragraphs within one “subargument,” and you use ample transition words and phrases

Style/ Editing/ Proofreading 10%

Anntoated Bibliography 5%

Process: 15% Research proposal, draft, peer review, conferences

Paper specs:

• • • First Draft 2 pages: 11/22
    • Second Draft 4 pages & Writer’s Letter: 11/29
    • Final paper 7-8 double-spaced pages : 12/6
      
    • You will lose points if you go under the minimum, and beyond 1 page above the maximum
    • Revisions to final paper (with documentation) will be accepted until 12/9
    • You will submit your final paper as part of a Portfolio containing an Annotated Bibliography with any updates as needed, your Drafts, your Writer’s Letter, and a Reflective Writing assignment that addresses, in specific detail, what you revised and edited throughout the process