Today’s Plan:
- Attendance
- Reminder: Conference Schedule
- Textbook Review: Types of Arguments
- Sentence Outline Assignment
- Homework
Conference Schedule
Remember we will not be meeting in class next week. Instead of class, I will be meeting with you to discuss the Sentence Outline assignment. The idea is to have a document that maps out your entire paper so that you are ready to begin drafting the paper when we get back from spring break.
Make sure you have signed up for a meeting time. Missing a meeting will count as two absences.
Textbook Review
Forthcoming.
Sentence Outline Assignment
This assignment works in preparation for our meetings next week. The idea is for you to generate an outline of your paper using complete sentences. The outline should include sources. You should be writing the topic sentence to every paragraph. Every topic sentence should be making some kind of claim, and indicating what evidence you have gathered to support it.
The outline should cover the main parts for your argument. While the textbook chapters will reveal different requirements, I expect each outline to reveal the following:
- A Statement of a Problem
- Evidence to indicate that the problem is real
- Acknowledgement that some people might not see it as a problem (maybe?)
- Explication as to why the reader should care about the problem
- Research Question / Thesis statement
- This is something that we have already addressed, via the Booth readings (I am studying X in order to learn more about Y in order to help my reader Z). YOU DO NOT HAVE TO USE THAT EXACT PHRASING.
- This section also often includes a discussion of your methods–your approach. If you are doing more of a scholarly project, then you want to talk about what kinds of sources you have been collecting. If you are doing a research project, then you want to talk about what kind of study you are designing. NOTE that studies are often designed to reflect other studies–so, for instance, if you are designing a survey to collect freshman attitudes toward required research courses, then you should find other surveys that have already done that and mirror/adapt their questions.
- Address opposition
- At some point your paper needs to address whoever might be opposed to your study/solution. THIS CANNOT BE A STRAWMAN. You have to do research into the opposition’s position and be able to cite their sources and present their evidence in such a way that doesn’t insult or undermine them. It is ok to call their research methods into question, or suggest that there might be factors that their research overlooks, etc. (We can talk about ways to respond to opposing research after the break).
I have put together a sample outline for an article that I have published.
Of course, my sentence outlines are quite long (8 pages) because I am working from essays that are already written. But I do think you should be able to produce something in the 5-6 page range.
Homework
I have decided to make a change. The annotated bibliographies will be due Friday, March 10th. I make this change because I want to give people more time to work on the annotated bibliography and more time to work on the sentence outline.
