Local Inquiry/Public Essay Assignment FAQ

Question on Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 12:50 PM:

I still have not gotten any invitations from my group members, and I don't want to be counted off for not editing theirs. I've checked everyday for the past week for their invitations. This is a bummer for me because I'd really like some feedback so I can get a decent grade.

Response:

You won't lose points for not commenting on drafts that don't exist. It's unfortunate that your collaborators haven't offered you comments or posted their own drafts, and they will lose points for not participating. It's a little late to seek outside help on your draft now, but the Writing Center's online service may be a possibility. I know that the Center's walk-in hours have been reduced this week: 10 AM to 2 PM, Monday, December 14th through Wednesday, December 16th. Everyone feels understandably busy this week, but as a last resort you might ask a friend you know to be a good writer to give your draft a quick read and offer some oral comments.

Question on Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 12:41 PM:

I've searched the blog and drop.io and haven't figured out how and/or when to turn in each individual part. Can you send out a blog post with the answer to this because I feel like I'm not the only one confused.

Response:

The Local Inquiry/Public Essay is due as a portfolio during the final period. Our blog talks about that here:

According to the Colorado State Registrar's Office, final periods for sections 37 and 44 will both be held Tuesday, December 15. Section 37 will meet 3:40-5:40 PM. Section 44 will meet 9:10-11:10 AM. Beforehand, please review a handout on analyzing and presenting the Local Inquiry/Public Essay, whose presentation and portfolio is due the same day.

Additionally, our assignment sheet for the Local Inquiry/Public Essay says the following:

11 or 15 December 2009: In a manila folder, please turn in (1) a Public Essay of roughly 1,000 words in the same condition the text was submitted to your chosen publication; (2) some evidence of your submission, be it an online confirmation form or an e-mail showing your submission; and (3) the Visual Rhetoric that accompanied your submission.

15 December 2009: Please turn in an MLA-formatted rhetorical analysis of roughly 500 words. On this date you’ll also deliver a short presentation summarizing your essay and your analysis during our final period.

Question on Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 4:48 PM:

The assignment handout says the Public Essay is to be around 1,000 words. How far over 1,000 words is too far over? I have a lot of information I've gathered and really want to do my topic justice instead of slim it down and only report the skin and bones of the situation.

Response:

Although it's tempting to write more the upper limit for your essay should be 1,200 words, as was the case with the Academic Argument. Over-writing the essay and then condensing it is actually a great way to improve your writing's quality. Look for ways sentences can shorten as well as parts that distract from the story's core and can be cut altogether.

Academic Argument Assignment FAQ

Question on Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 3:57 PM:

The final copy does not need to be in Google Docs, does it?

Response:

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."

Group Inquiry Assignment FAQ

As we delve farther into the writing process surrounding our current assignment, as well as two additional papers we'll be writing this semester, confusion will abound. In response, our blog will collect frequently asked questions (in an anonymous fashion) and provide answers that can probably benefit everyone. See if your question about group inquiry can be answered below, then, before creating a new one via e-mail.

Question on Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 4:10 PM:

Our group is wondering if the 1,000 word requirement for the introduction is in effect for our group as well, because we only have two people. It seems that we may have trouble reaching that limit, would we be deducted significant points if we had less? What do you think would be an acceptable length for a group of two?

Response:

It's a good question, but I am looking for at least 1,000 words in the introduction (not counting the bibliography) from each group. The harder task will (or should) be for groups of three to condense their "best answers" into less than 1,200 words. Hopefully it shouldn't be too hard for your group to reach 1,000 words, as you have 10 sources to work with. Remember that some sources should get more attention in the introduction than others.

Question on Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 2:12 PM:

With our wiki's works cited, do we just use the annotations and citations from the individual annotations for the wiki's works cited?

Response:

That's right, although the works cited will need to be alphabetized by the name or title that appears first in each citation. In taking ownership of each member's work, the group may also decide some annotations or citations need to be strengthened. The quality of the annotated bibliography will be reflected in the group's grade.

Question on Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 12:41 PM:

I need a little help with my citations. This is the first one I really tried to get right, the article is located at this address. If you could let me know if I'm on the right track it would be very helpful. Thank you and hope to hear from you soon.

University of Minnesota. "Cellulosic Ethanol May Benefit Human Health And Help Slow Climate Change." Science Daily. Science Daily, 3 Feb. 2009. Web. 14 Oct. 2009.

Response:

Your rough draft on the citation is almost correct. Here are a couple of revisions. First, even though ScienceDaily suggests including "University of Minnesota" in the citation, it doesn't belong there because the the university didn't author the report. Rather, it provided source material to a writer at ScienceDaily who isn't mentioned. So the citation would simply begin with the article title. Secondly, the organization behind the publication can be found at the bottom of the page, ScienceDaily LLC. Thus the citation would look like this:

"Cellulosic Ethanol May Benefit Human Health And Help Slow Climate Change." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily LLC, 3 Feb. 2009. Web. 14 Oct. 2009.


Question on Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 5:07 PM:

Are The Anthropological Quarterly and Environmental Science and Technology scholarly sources?

Response:

Both of those sources would likely count as academic or scholarly. If you were to rate them on our scale of popular (1) to academic (4), Anthropological Quarterly (no "The") would probably rate about a four while Environmental Science and Technology, because it contains some "magazine" content, would rate about a three. Again, both would count as scholarly, and here's more information on their credibility:

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/anthropological_quarterly

http://pubs.acs.org/page/esthag/about.html


Question on Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 1:38 PM:

Are we allowed to use some of the articles we have already received through our prior activities in the class for our annotations?

Response:

That's also a good question. Let's limit the use of readings already assigned to one per person. And keep in mind that most of the texts we've read would count as popular (not academic) sources. There are also a number of climate-related texts at drop.io (tagged "text") that have not been assigned as class readings. As long as they're relevant to your inquiry, there's no limit on using those texts.

Question on Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 11:51 AM:

While finding articles to do my annotations on, the most relevant seem to be those that tend to be more academic than popular. While I have found both, is it OK to have more than two academic sources?

Response:

Good question: yes, it's fine to include more than two academic sources. Try then to include just one quality popular source, if you can.


Question on Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 8:22 PM:

We are confused on what a "more specific" question means. Are we supposed to break our inquiry question down even further and choose different sub topics of it?

Response:

As for the "more specific" question: yes, you should break down your overall question into smaller aspects, so that one of you tackles, say, gasoline and the other diesel, or car racing and human athletes. First decide exactly what your research should properly cover (think significance, manageability and scope of the question, occasion, exigence), and then decide who will find sources about what.