Course Notes for January 12

Chapter 6 Review Notes

Chapter Six presents the basic criteria for writing an essay that argues for a specific position. Although your specific assignment requires you to focus on an argument about your choice of major, the basic principles of argument and the criteria for evaluating argument presented in this chapter also apply to your first paper for this class.

Please read each sample essay carefully and come to class on Monday prepared to explain how each essay deals with the basic features presented on pages 262-263: a focused presentation of the issue (a problem that is settled for your paper by the specificity of your assignment), a clear position, plausible reasons and support, and anticipating opposing positions and objections.

As you read the chapter, you should also look for techniques and approaches that you might want to incorporate in your own writing. I include all but the first of these four criteria among the six criteria by which I will evaluate your first paper for this class.

In this chapter, the first three sample essays effectively introduce the elements of effective argument, but the third essay probably provides the best example of thorough paragraph development. Notice the careful construction and development of ideas in Stransky's paragraphs. They offer an especially strong model for your work.

Please also pay attention to how all of the essays employ different methods and forms of reasoning and support and how they incorporate and properly document material from outside sources. We will want to discuss these different techniques for working with and documenting sources in class.

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Paper #1 Research and Invention Activities

At this point in your process of composing this essay, you should have two journal entries, your interview questionnaire, and some notes from our 1/9 class discussion. From our class discussion, you should have ideas for finding books and journals using Scotty and some leads and ideas for finding web sites that can help you develop support and reasons for your argument.

Research

Activity #1: Field Research

Based on our class discussion today, complete your "interview" form. Then using the web and any other resources and connections that you have in mind, find at least two people who will complete your interview form. One should be a college professor or advanced graduate student in the field; the other "interviewee" should be a professional working in the field. Given that you attend UCR, you should have no trouble finding the first. The second will probably require a bit more creativity and determination. Send out your interviews to your targets and if you have not heard back in two days, send a follow up email.

A few warnings: 1) do not interview undergraduates or first year graduate students. They are too new to the game to help you, 2) in order to get two completed interviews you will probably have to send out 6-10 interview requests. Remember to include your questions in the email and keep your survey short. Make sure to save a copy of your final questionnaire and. of course, the answers you receive from your interviewees.

Activity #2: Academic research

Now that you have started your field research process, you should complete two searches for academic resources.

First, use Scotty to search for books that might help you with your paper. While I have no minimum requirements for how many sources you must use in a paper, you will probably want to browse through at least five to ten books. From that group pick 3-5 that you will find really useful. For those 3-5 books you should jot down research notes (I like to do these on computer, but you can do them by hand if you prefer) that include your evaluation of the book (how might you use it; is the text helpful, etc.) and any quotes, passages, statistics, or ideas from the book that you may wish to incorporate into your essay. Remember to carefully document any material that you use from these sources so that you can properly site it when you draft and revise your essay.

Now see if you can find some journals or periodicals that you can browse for sources and ideas. First, try to find a very recent book in or about your major. It could be a book about the major itself or it could just be a book in the field, preferably even about an American social issue that is important in the field. Then go to the bibliography and look for which scholarly journal and other periodical articles appear in the bibliography. You will know which entries in the bibliography are from periodicals because the articles will be in quotes and the bibliographical entry will include an underlined or italicized periodical or journal name. Look for the journals or periodicals that seem to be mentioned several times in the bibliography. They are probably your best place to start. You can also do a subject search in Scotty using the name of your major or field and the word "periodicals." For example, you could type in the following in Scotty: business periodicals. This would give you a list of all the business related periodicals at UCR. The problem with this approach is that it will call up too many texts (sometimes more than 100!). So you are better off finding journals listed in books or provided to you by your interviewee and then going to Scotty and typing in the name of the journal in a TITLE search. From there you can head to the shelves, browse through the journal, and find some interesting articles. Take notes on the most interesting and photocopy the pages that you think you are likely to refer to in your paper.

Web sites: We talked about these in class and the book covers them in detail, so I won't say too much here. I recommend that you do this search on your own computer so that you can save the sites you like using your favorites button (or your bookmark button). But just like with books or journal articles, you will need to take down some notes for the web sites that you think you might use for your essay.

By Monday, you should come to class having identified books, web sites, and journal articles that you can use in your essay. You should also have some good notes on what in these sources supports your essay. Save these research notes on your disk (or if you have handwritten them, bring them to class with you).

Now that you have at least started your research, you can return to the invention stage of the process.

Invention Activities:

From this point on, you should be able to use the invention, planning, and drafting guidelines in SMG. On page 269, you will see invention activities labeled "developing your argument," "anticipating readers' objections and questions, and "anticipating opposing positions." Read through these sections answering all of the questions and completing the suggested activities. Save all of these invention activities in a word file titled major_invention and save a copy of that file on the disk that you bring to class.

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Page last updated: 28 January, 2004