That's right, it does not. Revisions to the final draft of your Academic Argument should take place in Word and on your desktop, not in the Google Docs draft that you've shared online. This allows us to preserve the comments your collaborators have provided in the context of your rough draft, and award points for participation. This point was
reiterated on our blog on Saturday:
You can edit and format your final paper without the comments showing by clicking "File" and "Print settings." Uncheck the "include comments" box, and the click "OK." Now you can select "File" and "Download file as" to save a copy of your draft as a Word document (without the comments).
Question on Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:29 PM:
I was just curious to see what you wanted the title to our Academic Argument to be. Should it just be "Academic Arguement" or do you want it specific to our paper?
Response:
I'm glad you posed this question. Unless you're told otherwise (think "Works Cited," for our annotated bibliographies), most arguments, essays, and research papers in MLA style require a creative title that departs from the name of the assignment. An example of this comes in the paper Diane Hacker includes in her
supplement, "Online Monitoring: A Threat to Employee Privacy in the Wired Workplace." Another example comes in the argument we discussed on Monday, Crystal Sabatke's "Welfare Is Still Necessary for Women and Children in the U.S." Note in both cases that titles of academic papers appear longer than titles of short stories, plays, and other fictional works. Sometimes they also involve a colon.
Question on Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 8:26 AM:
I was wondering would it be appropriate to put a picture into my argument? Mine is on deforestation in Indonesia and it seems my argument would benefit from a visual. If not that is okay too, I just wanted to ask.
Response:
That's a good question. It would be fine to include an illustration, and for formatting guidance you should see pages 50 and 51 of
Diane Hacker's MLA supplement, where the writer of a sample text includes a "Dilbert" comic strip. Note that there's a reference in the text to the illustration's figure number, and that the illustration's caption includes this figure number ("Fig. 1") as well as a source. Also, for our purposes, the illustration won't affect the argument's required length. In other words, you should still have at least 1,000 words but no more than (the equivalent of) four pages of written text.
Question on Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 3:01 PM:
I was not clear on if we should have completed any research before coming to our conference with you? I have written the majority of the outline but I have not done any research; do we need to have that completed by the time we come for our conference? The sample paper had tons of research and a works cited page. Will we need to have all of that prepared as well?
Response:
Here's what our
proposal assignment handout asks about research, under "Evidence and Arguments":
What kinds of evidence has your research revealed so far that might support an argument shaped by the tentative thesis statement above? Summarize different key arguments about this issue that you have discovered during your research so far, focusing especially on those that support your claim. (Be sure to cite sources here.)
And here's what our blog
says about the sample paper:
please note that the sample proposal runs too long as a text and does not conform to MLA guidelines or our assignment handout's specifications. Still, it does respond to many of the same questions that serve as prompts for your proposal, and it shows a student carefully researching and designing an argument in proposal form.
That last part is important to note: it's hard to write an effective proposal without doing some preliminary research on the evidence to support it. Your question-at-issue, your claim or position on that question, and the factual information to support that claim should all feel
tentative at this stage, and that's okay because you're only proposing an argument, not actually drafting it. Still, this proposal needs to be grounded in sources you
might rely on, and that is why you see the author of the sample proposal discussing and citing a few
potential sources––that kind of source-based discussion is also expected in your proposal.
Question on Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 10:46 PM:
I was looking at the sample argument proposal and it was talking about a group. Are we supposed to include reflection on a group proposal as well as a new individual proposal?
Response:
No, that's not the case. I think what you're noticing is that the proposal writer references her inquiry group's research question ("The question-at-issue for our group was: What are the effects of global warming on Polar Regions?"). So in this case she has chosen to pursue an argument related to that question. However, as you'll note in the
Academic Argument Assignment handout (just posted), you can choose to refine your own group's question, refine another group's question, or invent a new climate-related question entirely. In the proposal you'll discuss just one question, and the important thing is that it becomes narrow, debatable, and significant both to you and an academic audience. The question should prompt you to make a claim of fact or definition, cause and effect, value, or policy/solution, or a combination thereof.
Question on Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 4:08 PM:
The question I'm interested in pursuing is: How has climate change affected polar bear populations? Is this too narrow or irrelevant? Also, because none of the groups on the wiki looked into this subject, am I required to find my own research for the proposal or do I merely state how I plan to research this topic?
Response:
On its face the question doesn't seem too narrow, but consider the other criteria for questions-at-issue in the Academic Argument: is it debatable and significant? What kind of claim will result? Can you form an interpretive thesis that doesn't just describe a piece of reality? If you can locate a particular debate about the extent to which climate change is affecting the polar bear, then you may have fertile ground for argument, but you may also find overwhelming consensus about the severity of climate change's impact on that species. Now that you have a topic that feels personally significant, how can you tweak your question to generate arguments about the polar bear's ecological worth, or its iconic status as a symbol in climate change rhetoric? Those are just some possible avenues for debate. As to the research query: two groups researched ecology, and I'm noticing sources on
those wiki pages that provide a starting point for inquiry, such as:
Berteaux, Dominique, et al. "Keeping Pace with Fast Climate Change: Can Arctic Life Count on Evolution?"
Integrative and Comparative Biology 44.2 (April 2004): 140-151.
Web of Science. Web. 18 Oct. 2009.
In the end you may not use this source, but at minimum it should provide an interesting works cited list, some names of Arctic scientists, and a journal for further exploration. Plans are great to include, but the proposal also needs to specifically cite
potential sources and stakeholders under "Evidence and Arguments" as well as "Rationale and Audience."
