writing assignment

HUMN 100: INTERACTING WITH TEXT

DUE DATES & DETAILS Length & Format: 800-1000 words Audience: An academic audience at Emily Carr Initial draft due: Week 9 Final draft (with evidence of revision) due: Week 12

ASSIGNMENT DESCRIPTION This assignment asks you to respond to a single written text based on your own contexts and experiences. You will be writing this time, however, for an academic audience—best imagined, perhaps, as your professors and other university-educated people—who have certain expectations about what makes a “critical” response to a written text. There are many ways to react to a text (many of which we will discuss in class), but academic writing values certain kinds of response that are both respectful of a text’s author and reflectively address the points the author is making. As a result, this assignment asks you to write a balanced essay which fairly summarizes and discusses a published text, while offering your own response to the ideas presented in the text. Rather than a pure summary of the text or a pure reaction based only on your opinions and experiences, aim for more of a “conversation” between you and the author—one that takes your own ideas and the writer’s seriously. You also need to choose a focus for your own response that may not (and probably should not) “cover” every point the author makes. While you are asked to summarize the text’s main theme or argument, also let your own interests, ideas, experiences, and reactions be the guides for what positions or ideas in the text you choose to respond to. Imagine this essay, then, as a response to a text for an academic audience who is interested in what you think about the author’s ideas. The center of the essay is you and your ideas, but this time we will also work on integrating your experience with that of the different contexts/opinions/experiences offered in the published text in ways that will appeal to an academic audience.

WRITING GOALS

• To examine your own position in relation to a published text and to write both with and against this text.

• To explore (through reading) and practice (through writing) the various options that writers have for positioning themselves in relation to the writing of another.

• To ethically represent through paraphrase, summary and quotation the ideas of another writer/text. To understand and use MLA citation.

• To engage in critical analysis of text. To present your own views with this analysis.

• To continue to practice the writing process (generative writing, drafting, revision, editing.)