Lecture 9

rnwchondafwrsythe

FinalpaperShepard.docx

Home >English homework help >Lecture 9

· Lecture 9 - Prep for Final Paper & Final Paper Topics

· 1. 'Opinion' and Consensus vs Fact and Advanced Composition and Citation

2. Essay Form

3. Pre-Writing and Drafting

4. Text Based Knowledge

1. 'Opinion' vs Fact

This is advanced composition, which is a sequence of two courses--English 119 and English 120. 119 is the introduction to advanced writing, drafting, and essay form. The writing you do is in response to essays (that you find in your textbook, STEPS TO WRITING WELL. In 120, you will be writing in response to articles, editorials, and handouts.

Both courses require writing essays that illustrate, expand on, or prove a THESIS (a THESIS is a claim that you will defend or support in the body paragraphs of an essay. 119 is writing in various forms, called 'rhetorical forms; 120 is only one form--argument, but in 119 argument is only one of five forms--argument, comparison, contrast, narration, and description. The forms are mentioned in your syllabus. 119 is set up to introduce essay form to you, basic composition of essays, and writing to support a thesis.

Another aspect of 119 is the fact that as you write these various forms, each one is different but each one requires a THESIS (a central claim from your intro) that you construct an entire essay to defend or illustrate. ARGUMENT requires you to SUPPORT your thesis. DESCRIPTION requires you to describe things that describe ideas about your thesis. COMPARISON and CONTRAST require your essay to show similarities and differences between things you've introduced in your thesis. NARRATION means that your essay will tell a story, but that story should illustrate your thesis. In all these 119 forms, the thesis is the point.

119 also prepares you for 120 by introducing elements of essay writing--COLLEGE ESSAY FORM (the basic form of college essays), DRAFTING (which means the discipline of revising your writing before submitting it), SOURCES and CITATION (how to properly cite--quote--your sources), and RESEARCH (seeking out and quoting or referring to written and published writing that you can use to expand your support for a thesis).

119 is in many ways your chance to practice these elements, as well as to practice the writing forms. We will look more closely all those elements next week in lecture 3.

The issue of 'OPINION' is to be rejected in advanced composition, it really has no place in your research and in your writing. Opinion is personal and almost never based on fact or reliable evidence--fact, research, extensive reading. You are learning academic thought, reading, research, and writing. Opinion is actually pretty useless to an academic, to a debater, to a professional, a scientist, someone engaged in a technological profession in particular, and certainly opinion is useless to an academic intellectual. THAT is what you are learning in 119 and will have to further perfect in 120.

One exception to this is what is called knowledgeable or informed opinion' which means your opinion is a projection of the knowledge, reading, research, and skills you have already acquired.'informed opinion' is usually something you hear from someone skilled in and well read in the particular subject that person is giving you an opinion about.

Thus, the saying, "everybody's opinion is as valid as anyone else's" is a lie. To say that your opinion matters in a bar full of drunk friends is common, and in a drunken argument, if you express your opinion forcefully and loudly enough, you might win a drunken argument.

But to say that your opinion matters in an argument or dispute over Einstein's general theory of relativity insofar as the general theory's tensors adequately explain the source of gravity or not, if you know nothing about the meaning of the general theory, is laughable. You will lose the argument, and it won't matter how angry or how loudly you spout your nonsense, the physicist you are arguing against (whose INFORMED opinion not to mention her supporting details) will thrash you, and in fact, most of the physicists standing nearby listening to you will wonder if you are drunk. Why are you even bothering to say anything about Einstein's tensors?

No, your or my simple opinion in a formal college essay matters for nothing at all, academically and rationally speaking, unless we KNOW SOMETHING (again, through research, and through reading) to back that opinion up--meaning to support it, illustrate, and provide citations--sources. for the opinion you state. Experience, as it should be clear now, does not count as a rational defense for a simple opinion without research behind it. By the way, 'experience' also is usually useless in academic argument and particularly in academic writing. By its nature, your experience can be drawn on for NARRATION writing and for COMPARISON, but all by itself, it cannot be tested or verified, and so it is usually not meaningful for 119 writing of essays that support or illustrate a thesis. Any charting of least valid to most valid truth value entails the number, value, strength, validity, soundness, and accepted documentation of SUPPORT (received belief to documented, accepted fact used to legitimize supporting details)

________________________________________________________________

Chart from least valid rhetoric to most important academic concept

0.1 Belief; 1. 'Opinion'; 2. INFORMED Opinion; 3. Consensus; 4. Data;

5. Information; 6, Theory; and 7. (ACCEPTED) Fact.

_________________________________________________________

'Consensus' means the idea, or the belief that is most common to the largest number of people. The term, 'Reality By Consensus' means to decide what is real based on what the greatest number of people think. In the 1500s in Europe, the overwhelming consensus among Europeans was that the Earth was flat. Needless to say, that consensus was wrong.

A student once argued that consensus can be correct sometimes, and so should not be dismissed. I responded that he should look up at the clock on the wall--at the downtown campus back then, most of the clocks in the classrooms were either wrong or broken. That clock in that room on that day was broken. Even though it is true that a broken clock is correct twice each day, it is still a broken clock, and academic writing depends for support on sources better than a broken clock. Broken clocks cab be correct coincidentally, but not ever because they function correctly.

2. 'Essay Form

More on essay form next week, but for now, here it is in outline, from your syllabus:

I. Introductory Paragraph

Topic Sentence (first sentence)

Thesis Sentence (second sentence)

Summary of Support (third sentence--essay map)

-no quotes, no rhetorical questions, no statistics, no footnotes, no plot summary

-at least three supporting details in the essay map

-ONLY THREE SENTENCES, for a proper intro

II. Body Paragraphs (‘expansion’/’development’ paragraphs)

-two body paragraphs for each supporting detail (6 body paragraphs total)

-topic sentence taken from essay map

-the topic sentence controls everything in the paragraph (expansion)

-expand on your essay map’s supporting details one in each paragraph

-all quotes, statistics, footnotes, citations, rhetorical questions, etc. (development)

- all examples, sub-topics, etc. (expansion)

- paragraph development in the form of in-line quotes, block quotes, presentation and explanation

-comparisons, contrasts, definition, process (this is both expansion and development)

III. Concluding Paragraph

1. Restate your thesis (first sentence)

2. Summarize your entire argument (second sentence)

- ONLY TWO SENTENCES should be used in a concluding paragraph

That is what each of your informal and formal papers must look like (without the outline numbers of course but in simple essay form with actual paragraphs). Your essay due today should be in essay form--as much as you can do so at this point, don't worry if you did not even try, that's Ok.

Essay form is a rock bottom basic form for all college writing. You learn it for the first time in 119 and practice with it in 119. By the time you reach 120 you need to be very well skilled in essay form--because essay form will help you incredibly in all your upper level humanities courses and even in your science courses after you transfer from WCCCD to a four year school to finish your BA.

3. Pre-Writing and Drafting

'Drafting' is revising your writing.

You need to do three drafts before you can say you are finished. The first draft is what is called 'pre-writing' (you first do the reading, secondly, you check your notes, and third, you do a preliminary draft--DRAFT ONE, which is also called 'brainstorming'--which you ought to remember from high school). The second draft is focused only on college essay form. Your third draft is the final draft. To remind you, here it is, and it is also an attachment to this lecture:

DRAFTING:

A FIRST DRAFT is a draft for 'brainstorming', in which all your thoughts and ideas are put on paper or written on screen without attention to format, form, spelling, or grammar, in order to create rough material with which to truly begin to write.

A SECOND DRAFT is done in order to pay strict attention only to proper essay form: topic sentence, thesis sentence, and a summary of supporting details that uses a non-fragmented summary of support (that features independent clauses, semicolons, and proper transitions; that features the formation of proper body paragraphs that expand on your supporting details used as topic sentences,; with each body paragraph displaying adequate paragraph development, etc.

A THIRD DRAFT is your 'cleanup' draft, in which attention is paid to smaller elements such as spelling, agreement, conjugation of tenses, parallelism, elimination of redundancy and of nominalisms, formatting (correct line spacing, margins, header and footer, block quote alignment, use of in-line quotes and block quotes, paragraph expansion, paragraph development, proper clarification of a summary of support and of the summary's transition to an essay map for formation of body paragraphs, etc.). In revision with a third draft you make certain you are turning in a final draft that has the fewest possible errors in spelling, punctuation, agreement, orchestration of tenses, modifiers, determiners, noun phrases, diction, subordination of noun phrases and of dependent and independent clauses, and in which attention is paid to avoidance of clichés and of sentence fragments, etc.

Note: a college essay of academic worth, even a short essay (3-6 pages is a short essay; a long college essay is 7-10 pages or more), should be drafted and revised to show thought and application or argument and application , as well as coherence and clarity as a result of ALL THREE STAGES of the drafting process being displayed in the final draft.

This apparent presence of the work of drafting is basic in order to achieve consideration as an 'AVERAGE' college essay. Grades of "F", "D" or "C-" are generally considered below average, meaning below the minimum expected amount of academic work and rigor described above, all other things being equal. Higher grades than "C+", either "B" range or "A" range, are generally possible only beyond evidence of all three stages of academic drafting and writing having been worked out with rigor and with due diligence. Higher grades are a reflection of:

1. A final draft that demonstrates a cumulative command of the breadth of all readings, class discussions, and lectures up to the assigned out-of-class paper.

2. A final draft that demonstrates an ability, at least an effort made, to display thought and application or argument and application , in 119, to systematically exemplify a thesis that compares, contrasts, describes, argues, or declares a process; in 120 to argue a clear, direct, and critical argumentative thesis in college essay form, achieving a final draft that is predominantly free of incoherence, vernacular, incorrect speech form rather than correct essay form, free of the habits of documentary or speech form (which include vernacular, conversational habits, over-dependence on visual cues), free of informality, spelling and grammatical error, free of syntactical error, cliché, slang, fallacy, ad hominem, redundancy, and oversimplification. While perfection is not necessary or even possible, a crucial element is a demonstration of diligence, rigor, and effort made.

The very purpose of a college and university education is the acquiring and the habitual use of these very skills and principles in a process of close reading of texts, and practice with extended readings of varied texts in a process of coming to understand deeper levels of meaning in texts, doing academic work such as note taking and research, such as evaluation of research sources, and such as learning to identify core reasoning among authors as well as learning to identify the structure of authors' arguments. This includes the development of study habits, and the practice and strengthening of academic rigor in formal composition.

I will definitely talk more about drafting next week in lecture 3. If you are not familiar with all of the words used in that drafting outline don't worry, I will look at it in detail next week. Vocabulary is one of the things this course focuses on--building your college vocabulary. You need to go through the process of drafting with all the essay assignments but particularly with your FORMAL papers. INFORMAL papers are less strict, and if you are sticking closely to essay form you may find you don't need to focus as much on drafting.

4. Text Based Knowledge

I have spoken a great deal in this lecture about being 'academic' and about the less useful aspects of 'opinion', as well as the value of being objective and rational. All of these things point to the fact that in advanced composition the value of speculation and of experience and beliefs are not the values 119 and 120 focus on. We focus on TEXT BASED facts, research, and data.

Opinion: knowledge based on experience, beliefs, habit, consensus, and prejudice

Consensus: knowledge based on what most people think and say

Data: information that is a collection of observation of the physical and the rational world, for instance, 'Earth has only one moon', or, '2+2 = 4'.

Information: Data that has been interpreted or used to arrive at facts that can be trusted or used to support claims (or a thesis)

Fact: Information that has been established as trustworthy, testable, provable, and true to the scientific method.

Scientific Method: Proposition, experiment (or research) hypothesis (thesis), Analyze data, establish fact (accept the truth of the thesis or hypothesis) = knowledge, or knowing that something is most likely true.

TEXT Based Knowledge: is of higher value than the habit of 'stating opinions' out of the habit of consensus or personal experience--it is the academic and rational skill of testing and researching those ideas you are used to thinking, which may actually be correct, may actually qualify as knowledge, but not until after testing and researching them in order to find support through sources. 'Text based' is a term that stands for those sources and that research: BOOKS.

Even the word 'book' does not necessarily mean a paper object in a binding with pages, but means that which has been researched, verified, and comes from trustworthy sources in order to qualify AS a source. What 'book' does not stand for is stand alone web sites with no substantiation, and so in119 internet sources do not count as valid unless the source refers back to PUBLISHED KNOWLEDGE--so that what the website says can be validated. In advanced composition we value FULL TEXT internet research (which means using the internet to READ books, articles, newspapers, and academic papers ONLINE--texts, rather than stand alone websites), More about that in Lecture 3.

II. ASSIGNMENT for NEXT MEETING NEXT WednesdayThursday, 5pm (April 14)

We willl discuss the next paper assignment on "Black Panther in Context". The article, by Rayfield Waller, is extremely critical of the movie, "Black Panther" and supplies very definite supporting details for it's thesis that depend on supporting details. You need to re-read it thoroughly and to find the paper's thesis and at least some of its supporting details.

FINAL PAPER ASSIGNMENT:

Topic Suggestion – Final Paper

7-10 pages! (Due on last day of class--due date listed in the syllabus) – CHOOSE ONLY ONE TO RESPOND TO

(requiring at least 3 research sources and a standard bibliography, MLA style)

1/ How do “Battle of the Ants” and Us and Them" by David Sedaris to demonstrate Saderis' major theme of the ugliness of xenophobia ? Your topic sentence must introduce the idea of xenophobia. Then, next, second sentence, argue a thesis on this topic (NOTE: you are free to argue against notions of suspicion, bigotry, and xenophobia, etc., as you are ALWAYS free to construct arguments against ideologies presented by authors or in class lectures, but you cannot simply 'object' or ignore Sedaris' themes and then offer your own 'opinions'. You must take account of the authors’ themes, not ignore them. You need a thesis based on reading the texts; you must support rational, coherent arguments in this class whether agreeing with authors' perceptions or disagreeing with them). NO RESEARCH IN THE INTRO, NO QUOTES, NO RESEARCH SHOULD BE USED AS SUPPORTING DETAILS

2/ What is the religious/social/or psychological significance of one of the essays from class--any essay from the semester that you want to write about, and how or why does the author create their specific religious, social, or psychological theme? Argue a thesis on this topic. Your topic sentence should state whether you are looking at religious, social, or psychological meaning, your thesis should argue your claim or your position--not the author's YOURS, and your summary of support should support your thesis and supply topic sentences for body paragraphs. NO RESEARCH IN THE INTRO, NO QUOTES, NO RESEARCH SHOULD BE USED AS SUPPORTING DETAUILS

3/ Choose any two of the films we've discussed in class this semester to argue which one represents it's themes better than the other. Your topic sentence should state the two themes of the two films, or if you want, the shared single theme of both. Your thesis sentence should argue YOUR claim of which film is better at presenting its theme, and your summary of support should support that thesis. NO RESEARCH IN THE INTRO, NO QUOTES, NO RESEARCH SHOULD BE USED AS SUPPORTING DETAUILS

College Essay Form (REQUIRED)

(use this outline as a checklist for all papers and reader responses, which must conform to outline)