Assignment for Thursday, 4/23

Today, we discussed the schedule for the rest of the semester: it basically follows the steps for constructing a research paper, with the exception of our May 5 in-class essay exam. We are working towards a May 5th deadline to post an entire draft to the class wiki, so set your sights on that date.

We will work our way through several steps in constructing and drafting a research paper for the remainder of the semester, roughly like this:

Constructing a research paper

1. Evaluating your sources
2. Organize your evidence
   
3. Creating a thesis statement
4. Constructing an outline: Include quotes from your sources & include citations
5. Integrating sources (Signal phrases, etc.)
6. Documenting sources (Works Cited & in-text citations)
   

Drafting the Research paper & Writing

• Paragraph-level construction
  
• Sentence-level construction
  
• Word-level construction

Organizing all of the research is only the first step. Actually writing up the research paper itself is another entire section. We'll spend much time looking at your writing but we will also read some sample essays in the Hacker and Inventing Arguments textbooks.

I will spend this week commenting on your blog posts about resources. You may find that you need a different resource if yours is not authoritative or helpful to your idea. But, for Thursday, you have some reading & writing to do:

Reading for Thursday:

• Read Hacker, Sections R2 & r3 (333-347)
• Read Hacker, Sections MLA-1B & 1c (356-58)
• Read Inventing Arguments On research & beginning to incorporate research (430-471)
  

Writing for Thursday, posted to WIKI by 12pm:

• Create thesis statement and a very rough outline
• Include quotes from your resources in the outline (not just reference to vague resource)
• Post to this writing to the WIKI by 12pm on Thurs in 1 document; name the WIKI page Research Essay Outline_[last name]
  

We will start to go over these on Thursday in the Clark classroom. If you are behind on your work, catch up now or you will eternally get behind.