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Community 101 your project for this course Eng 100 - College Writing I - Fall 2011 other pages welcome | course | essay | syllabus | reports this page choosing a research area list of your research topics | searching developing your topic rhetorical modes

When you learned about Medaille, you may have read on the web site or on a printed document:

preparing learners for career success and a lifelong commitment to a civic and sustainable future in Buffalo, the region, and the world.

We take that so seriously that we deliberately work it into the curriculum. In this course, we use the idea of a learning community.

Working in groups called learning communities, first-year students extended their learning beyond the classroom with projects that explored the history, ecology, technology, and urban landscape of Buffalo.

You can see on the video where we are headed. In three months, that event will occur again in the gym, and you will be there at one of the tables in front of a poster or laptop telling people about what you learned when you "extended their learning beyond the classroom with projects".

Your specific learning community doesn't have a name yet. We have four sections, with an overall group member list to be available after registration has settled down.

The dozen of you are one section. Everyone in your section is also taking Meghan Harrington's RDG 125 as well as Amanda Sauter's INT 110.

I have a section of ENG 110 paired with Pat Fazioli's GEN 110.

Pat has another GEN 110/ENG 110 pair with Erika Hamann.

Erika has another ENG/GEN pair with Jennifer Foster teaching the GEN 110 part.

We want all these sections to share a loose structure about Buffalo's past, present, and future. We would like you to put together a newspaper about Buffalo's past in the 1800's, a magazine about Buffalo's present, 2001-2009, and a wikiabout Buffalo's future in 2050. Beyond that, the content is open for discussion. On December 9 at the Community 101 Fair, all three will be available on the table you stand in front of and your four tables will all be together. In addition to the three publications, we're going to need some posters explaining what we have.

What are you going to do in this course, day by day?

You learn to write by writing. For this course, you are going to write several short pieces that would be appropriate to a newspaper or magazine, and then two longer essays that would be more appropriate for a magazine or wiki.

We will spend several class sessions in a workshop/game film mode looking closely at your writing.

We're going to need a considerable amount of class time for making the newspaper, magazine, and wiki.

We're also going to take advantage of the three-hour time frame for the two sections to go on some field trips.

Finally, just before the December 9 event, we'll make the posters together in class.

What are you going to write about?

The obvious ones are Buffalo institutions, communities, or features. For example, Buffalo architecture or Buffalo history or Buffalo poverty. The less-obvious ones are perhaps even more interesting. What about Buffalo as depicted to the rest of the world on YouTube videos?

These are just topics. You still need a rhetorical situation.

In general, the best topics are what are called wicked problems, messy complex situations with no clear way forward. That's what organizations pay college graduates to do -- solve the messy problems. If the company already know where they're going and how to get there, what does it need you for?

Choosing a research area

Find the data first!

Components of the rhetorical situation

Finding an audience

Who will read your writing? Why will they be reading it? To write for the teacher for a grade, while real and true, does very little to help you make decisions while you write. When the teacher is the audience, there is no plausible context for most essays.

You will make much more progress is you put all of your writing in a plausible context -- readers with a purpose. Whether you reveal that context to the reader is a separate decision. But without that context, you are making the writing much harder than it needs to be.

In an organization, on the job, you will almost always have a context for your writing -- a reader or more likely readers with a purpose. Their overriding goal is to, as quickly as possible, stop reading what you have written. That is, they want to get the information they need to get and then move on to something else.

You can see from the job descriptions below the context in which recent college graduates would need to do the kind of research and writing that we're practicing in ENG 110.

Thus, successful writing is that which gives the audience what they want -- or need, because sometimes they don't know enough about the topic to know what they want. It is the writer's job to anticipate the questions the readers have as well as the questions they don't have but should have.

This is a college course, so we're working backwards. First, we're finding a topic, then the data, and only then an audience. And only after looking at the data and the audience's needs can you come up with a thesis statement for an essay, that is, something to tell the audience. In the real world, your boss and the organization's goals would pre-suppose the audience before the topic. In either case, the best way to approach their needs and wants is through questions.

What do they need to know?

Audience

Primary audience. You make your writing more effective by writing to a specific audience. The more specific the better. If you can, boil it down to one human with a face and emotional reactions. Pick one. Take his/her picture. Put the picture in front of you when you sit down to write. When you get stuck, look at the picture and think of what he/she would ask next or want to know next.

Secondary audience. Your writing will often have a secondary audience that can be more numerous and more important to you than the primary audience. Write to the primary audience, but keep the needs of that secondary audience in mind. An example would be something that you write for a client, the primary audience, but which will be reviewed first by your boss, the secondary audience.

Purpose

Generally speaking, we use information for two purposes, two solve problems and to make decisions. How will your primary audience use this information? What problem needs to be solved? What decision needs to be made? How will your secondary audience use it? Please note that your personal opinion is not relevant here.

Other solutions or options

It is seldom true that there is one and only one correct solution to a problem and all the other potential solutions would have led to disaster. It is seldom true that one and only one option is best and everything else is the absolute worst.

In other words, the world is full of grays, not blacks and whites. Solutions and options are contingent and relative: "it depends".

What are some of the other solutions and options that your audience should be considering in order to increase their chances of making better decisions rather than worse decisions? What are the opposing viewpoints? How strong are they (the viewpoints, not the people holding them)? Where are their weaknesses?

Analytical framework

From what perspective are you going to look at it? A good way to answer this might be to think what course it would be in. For example, if your topic is romance, you can use a psychological framework (individual relationships), sociological (men vs women), financial (marketing flowers to forgetful males), historical, etc. If you were working in an organization, your department would determine that framework: marketing, finance, production, R&D, etc.

In organizations, the process of defining the problem is often called an "environmental scan". When you take a snapshot of a situation, what perspective are you going to bring to it?

Another way of asking this: any situation is part of several systems. Which are you going to use to define your situation? The conventional categories are PEST: political, economic, social, and technological. For example, if you're looking at the welfare system or the Haitian adoption system, do you look at it as part of a political system, an economic system, a social system, or a technological system?

Why is this important?

1) The reader needs to know the context in order to understand your essays.

2) You need to know in order to focus your research. If you look at welfare as part of a political system, then you will use keywords like "US congress welfare policy" and "welfare reform". If you look at welfare as part of an economic system, then you will use keywords like "agricultural subsidies" and "supply demand food prices". If you look at welfare as part of a social system, then you will use keywords like "class resentment" and "socio-economic status poverty". If you look at it as a technological problem, then you will use keywords like "farm technology distribution infrastructure".

Major questions to guide your thinking

Now that you have a topic, audience, and purpose, you are ready to plan your essays.

Your writing will close a gap between what the foreground audience knows and thinks now and what they'll know after reading what you wrote. So put yourself in their shoes and think of the questions they might have to close that gap. Your research and writing will answer some of (not all of) those questions.

To help you organize those questions, we're going to look ahead a little to the essays you are going to write.

What's the situation? Definition

What's the difference? Compare / Contrast

How does it happen? Process

So what? Cause/Effect

Developing your topic

As you start choose topics, I'll start using them as examples here.

gap analysis

the difference between the situation as it is now and as it should be or could be

Answering the questions about your research

Over the centuries, we have developed half a dozen or so patterns of organizing our ideas. In general, we call these patterns "rational". That is, a person who uses them -- who can read and write with the patterns, are called rational people. Their arguments are called rational arguments. They gain legitimacy just for following the basic patterns.

People who can't use these patterns are difficult to communicate with because they aren't playing by the same rules, so to speak.

In Eng 100, we are calling those patterns rhetorical modes. Mode is another word for pattern, and rhetorical means that we're going to use them in essays to support a thesis.

Inferences

What does the data say?

What inferences can you draw from your data?

What are inferences? Just as there are patterns for organizing ideas (see rhetorical modes below), there are rules to play by.

What are the problems?

fallacies

cognitive biases: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias

Learn more on the Essay page of this course web.

turning questions into topic sentences

While topic sentences can be phrased as questions, it is usually more clear to phrase them as declarative statements. A useful topic sentence will make a claim that needs support and explanation.

For example, What is domestic violence? To turn that into a topic sentence, you need the answer, which will come from your research.

The topic sentence (or "controlling" sentence) for a definition paragraph might start: XXX

Looking above at the organizing principles, definitions group and separate. What group does it belong to? How is it different from every other member of that group? You can probably do that in a couple of sentences. Then extend that basic definition with the support the the claim (topic sentence) needs.

The group that you put it into makes all the difference. Domestic violence could be defined as a kind of violence. The definition would then separate it from other kinds of violence such as public violence or stranger violence.

In not all cases will the grouping/separating be so straightforward.
Another example:
Every year, xx thousand Pakistani women are physically beaten at least X times by a male relative.

Developing topic sentences into paragraphs

Put your topic sentence first. What comes next? The support for the claim or assertion in the topic sentence (the bullets) as well as the explanation of what it means, how the support relates to the claim (pulling the trigger).

Process of writing an essay response to a teacher's question.

This course is called College Writing because it prepares you to do the kind of writing you will be asked to do in other courses' term papers and essay exams. In some cases, especially term papers, you can write your own thesis statement. In many cases, however, you will be responding to a question or instructions posed by the teacher. In that case, here's the strategy that you're learning in this course.

1 - Determine the rhetorical mode(s) being asked for: description, definition, comparison, process? It may well ask for a mixture or combination or hybrid, but one will probably (hopefully) be dominant.

2 - Imagine in detail the audience / scenario. Even if you never mention it in the essay, having one is a major crucial assist in writing effectively.

3 - Write a helpful thesis statement. It should include all the important words from the teacher's question. In addition, it should lay out a clear, manageable focus and plan for your whole essay. The dominant rhetorical mode should be unambiguous. If the teacher's question does not give you enough, add to it by connecting it to other ideas. Cause and effect relationships are especially effective. "Because", "due to this", "as a result" and other such phrases will give you something to discuss in the body of the essay.

4 - With your audience / scenario firmly in mind, establish a direct, friendly tone or voice in the introduction and sustain it through the whole essay.

5 - Use transitions between body sections and between ideas to clearly direct the reader and keep the flow going.

6 - In the body, make claims (gun), use evidence (bullets), and explain how the evidence supports your claims, develop your ideas (pull the trigger). Don't just present your evidence and support as though it speaks for itself. Use your essay voice to tell the reader what to think about it. Develop the implications.

7 - Drop names. Reference all your sources, preferably in the flow of the text.

8 - In the conclusion, give a sense of closure and make sure you work in all the important words from the original question and the ideas (if not the exact words) in your thesis statement.

9 - Try to use vivid, concrete images. Write pictures. Humanize it.

10 - As a cherry atop a cake, try to come up with a snappy title. If you can't, just use the most important words from your thesis statement.

11 - While you are working on the essay, use the College-wide evaluation rubric as a guide.

Writing Assignments

Tip | This is not a course or a project with One Right Answer.

intro: the pain points experienced by the reader and the problems caused by those pains establish credibility with the reader

Why is it better for your writing to be displayed publicly in class rather than passed privately between you and me?

Communicating is the point of the writing you will do in the kind of job you want. On the job, your writing doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the organization that pays your salary. In this course, I'm not asking you to write about anything personal or private. I emphasize writing for an audience. Also, it's good for you as a writer to have not some vague theoretical audience, but a real audience. You'll write it differently (and, I believe, better) if you know your peers are going to see it than you would write it if only an authority figure (me) is going to see it. Finally, I think you as a student can profit by reading what your classmates wrote and how I responded. You can apply it to your own writing. It's not fair for that process to be one-way -- you get to see theirs but they don't get to see yours.