essay
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sp20e301bassignment1a1v51.docxEnglish 301B Sections 12 & 15
Prof. Guzik Spring 2020
Assignment #1: Doling out the Dopamine
Purpose:
This first assignment asks you to become a researcher by thinking about your own use of technology and then to draw conclusions as you synthesize what others have to say with your own observations and experience.
As with all essays in this class, the prompts here are purposefully broad. Part of what we’ll focus on is learning how to narrow the scope of a prompt to allow you to write about yours interests—in other words to personalize the prompt—without leaving out any parts of the prompt that must be addressed in order to create a draft that merits a passing score on the GWAR Portfolio Rubric.
With those tasks as the foundation for the topic, in terms of specific writing skills, we’ll focus on really learning techniques for decoding prompts, drafting more complex thesis statements than the five paragraph or five-paragraph-style essay encourages, and developing awareness of your own writing process. We’ll also cover the basic mechanics of citation—including both quotation and paraphrasing.
In addition, we will go over some foundational information about grammar: distinguishing between clauses and phrases using a reliable technique for finding subjects and verbs. This particular grammar lesson might not be especially fun or flashy, but it’s the foundation for many common grammar issues; finding and correcting run-on sentences and fragments, correctly using semicolons, understanding the rules of comma placement, and subject-verb agreement all require that writers have the skill to analyze what kind of group of words is on the page.
Background:
Manoush Zomorodi, a public radio host in New York City, created a challenge for listeners who were concerned that their relationship with screen-based devices (SBD) like smartphones and tablets was reshaping the ways that they thought. Although Zomorodi focused on creativity and productivity, academics have long worried about the ways in which multitasking may seem like a more efficient way to get work done but may actually have the opposite effect, especially on students both in the classroom and while doing homework. Many of today’s electronic devices, including those we see in CSULB classrooms, certainly seem to encourage multi-tasking in general.
Tristan Harris worked in tech at Google before the company asked him to think about the ethics of design in their products. Eventually, he began writing and speaking as a critic of the tech industry overall, analyzing how the applications, software, websites, and platforms we use are being purposefully designed to get us to spend as much time as possible on a specific device, app, or program. His TED Talk “How Better Tech Could Protect Us from Distraction” not only critiques the way many current technological developments are poorly designed but also offers some design alternatives that he argues can restructure technology to help us be more productive and less distracted.
In this assignment, we’ll think about Zomorodi’s and Harris’s arguments in depth. Based on what you learn from the readings and from your own observations of the world around you, you’ll be asked to craft an argument that synthesizes data gleaned from all those sources with your own research and opinions into an essay designed to convince others of your point of view in light of all that evidence.
For both prompts, you should start out by taking a mental inventory of your own personal experiences and your own observations about how you see people around you (including yourself) using technology, particularly screen-based devices (SBD).
Prompt:
In a 1500 to 1800 word thesis-driven, university-level essay, take a position on only one of the two following prompts:
argue for a SPECIFIC redesign of one app/program/platform/or website that you regularly visit and/OR USE. your proposed redesign should strive to make that technology something that contributes More than it currently does to meaningful productivity for users. MAKE SURE TO CLEARLY DEFINE WHAT YOU MEAN BY PRODUCTIVITY AS YOU USE THE TERM IN YOUR ESSAY. ALSO, be sure to explain why the redesign you propose is in line with what research says about how humans interact with THE technology you’re focusing on.
OR
argue PRECISELY HOW one key characteristic of SBD technology is potentially detrimental to the “HIGHER-LEVEL THINKING” REQUIRED IN UPPER-DIVISION CLASSES at CSULB. Write a persuasive editorial for the daily 49er and the academic senate in which you propose a specific policy that our campus should ADOPT for students ON CAMPUS to help CSULB graduates develop a more productive relationship with screen-based devices. be sure to provide clear reasoning for why that you think THAT policy IS IMPORTANT AT CSULB TODAY. ALSO MAKE SURE TO DRAW ON YOUR ACTUAL EXPERIENCES WITH HIGHER-LEVEL THINKING IN UPPER DIVISION CLASSES HERE ON CAMPUS.
Requirements:
Final drafts (both the First Final draft and the Revised Final draft) should be a minimum of 1500 words from the first word of the introductory paragraph to the last word of the conclusion. Drafts shouldn’t really be much longer than 2100 words (with the same counting protocol.) Remember that headers, titles, and works cited pages do not count toward the word count.
Papers should be in MLA format throughout. Papers must include a properly formatted works cited page in correct MLA style.
Remember that the strongest essays do not look backwards, offering homilies or advice to students who are behind you in school, younger in age, or lesser in experience with education.
Instead, the strongest essays stake out a position of authority and imagine their audience as colleagues in the university community: other undergraduate students, graduate students, and professors, including faculty outside the department that offers this class and outside your major as well.
In other words, you have to write with an authority that suggests you see yourself as a peer of not only your classmates but also as a peer of your professors. In addition, you have to do that without seeming cocky or without seeming as if you haven’t considered all possible perspectives on the issue only after looking critically at academic-level evidence.
If you don’t feel like you really have the confidence to speak authoritatively to that audience, to be successful in upper division university-level writing, you’re going to have to learn to fake it without coming off as pompous.
Essays must make use of Zomorodi and/or Harris in ways that demonstrate that the author of the essay understands the major arguments made in the book and/or talk. Passing references to Bored and Brilliant or Harris’s TED talk are not enough. Simply sprinkling a quote or two—particularly cherry-picked quotes that do not line up with the author’s actual thesis—will result in a reduction in the grade of your essay. Any essays that do not effectively refer to substanative arguments in Zomorodi and/or Harris will be marked down by one full letter grade. At least one of the arguments you use MUST come from Zomorodi.
Final drafts may include personal experience, especially that based on your own technology use and what you observe about how other people use technology. Using first person is acceptable in such instances, but please refrain from undermining your own credibility with phrasing like “I think,” “I feel,” “I believe,” “in my opinion,” or other similar means of unhelpful qualification of your argument.
The drafts of the paper that you turn in should demonstrate that you have a writing process that allows you, through revision, to improve both global concerns such as organization and quality of support and sentence-level issues (like common grammatical and mechanical mistakes.) The first final draft of this paper should be polished and the result of multiple, substantial drafts with both global and sentence-level revision.
Required Readings:
Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zomorodi (See assignment schedule for specific dates and chapters)
Tristan Harris “How Better Tech Could Protect Us from Distraction” (The TED Talks website has both a video and a transcript, so you’re welcome to watch and listen or watch and read along, or both.)
Leslie McClurg “Don’t Look Now! How Your Devices Hurt Your Productivity” (not a required reading for this essay, but you may use it in addition to the Harris and Zomorodi)
Anil Dash “Twelve Things Everyone Should Understand about Tech.” (an article published at medium.com, link in BeachBoard.)
James Doubek “Attention, Students: Put Your Laptops Away” from NPR.org
Key Terms:
The First Final draft is not a rough draft. The first final draft is the best polished draft you can produce in a few weeks of work.
At minimum, the First Final draft that you submit electronically should have been the following revision processes before you upload it to the Dropbox in BeachBoard:
*Evaluation by you to make sure that the paper’s thesis is NOT a five-paragraph style thesis, that the thesis responds to just one of the two prompts here, and that the thesis matches the full draft that you’ve written.
*Global revision to make sure that each paragraph has a connection to the paper’s thesis.
*Checking to make sure that your argument is informed by two central arguments from Harris’s and/or Zomorodi’s work.
*At least two meaningful and careful rounds of sentence-level editing. One of those rounds of editing must involve reading a draft out loud from a hard copy—not a screen on your tablet or laptop.
Due Dates and Formats:
See the A1 assignment schedule for day by day assignments, including homework. The first final draft of A1 needs to be uploaded to the appropriate Dropbox in BeachBoard no later than Friday 14 February by 1 pm Pacific time.
Please name the file as follows: sp20e301bsecXyourlastnameA1FF
Replace yourlastname with your actual last name. (I will announce to each class whether or not there are multiple students with the same last name; if there are, please use your last name and first initial.) You are always welcome to put additional information onto the end of that file name (like draft 1, draft 2, v3,v6, and so on.) Make sure that the file is in an acceptable format even if you’ve written the document in a different word processing program.
Graded copies of the essay will be returned no later than two weeks from the time you submit the essay, except in cases of instructor illness or personal emergency.
You will get a separate assignment sheet and daily schedule for the Revised Final Draft portion of A1.
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