Writing Project 3:
Open Questions, Research, and Academia

Teaching Assistant: Patrick Mooney
Writing 2
Winter 2015

Writing Strategies We Are Working on Here

In Writing Project 1, you were required to think and write about how genre and conventions influenced the meaning of your previous non-academic writing. For Writing Project 2, you paid attention to the ways in which knowledge, truth, and/or literacy are understood in a particular academic context. On this final writing assignment, you'll be applying the skills that you've learned to produce a piece of research-based writing that shows that you understand the basic approaches to academic writing in a particular area of your choice. The skills we'll be focusing on include:

• Identifying an appropriate question at an appropriate scale that allows for meaningful intervention in an established field of discourse
• Developing and supporting academic arguments with an original interpretation
• Using multiple genres, including academic texts, to support a critical argument
• Developing and implementing critical inquiry aimed at original analysis
• Writing with clarity and precision to persuade non-expert (but thoughtful and critical) readers

Readings for WP3

Readings for this unit are intended to help provide an introduction to critical thinking at the college level. Depending on the direction in which you take your WP3 project, you might also look at them as models of good critical writing that engages with and critiques basic presuppositions about various objects that exist within the academic and non-academic worlds.

• Peter Elbow, Teaching Two Kinds of Thinking by Teaching Writing
• George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
• Tom Scocca, On Smarm

Assignment Description

Research a topic, identify an open question in area in which you have something to contribute intellectually, and construct a well-supported and logical argument of five to six pages that addresses this open question. An open question, in the context of this assignment, should be understood as a point of inquiry that is a legitimately investigable issue by the methodology of a specific academic discipline; it should be something that does not have a clearly understood and generally accepted answer within that discipline. Furthermore, your paper should answer the question that you pose in a way that is:

• neither obvious nor trivial;
• not merely an expression of an opinion;
• capable, at least in theory, of being disputed by a reasonable person who is also literate in that discipline.

This open question need not be an issue of central importance to the discipline — indeed, it would likely be difficult or impossible to answer a question of central importance to a discipline in a paper of five to six pages. Instead, you should identify a particular issue that exists at a scale in which you can productively take a well-supported stand on a specific topic topic in five to six pages using four or (a very few) more sources. This assignment does not ask you to solve fundamental problems of chemistry, philosophy, nutrition science, media studies, math, economics, nursing, political science, sociology, etc.; it asks you to identify an area in which you have something new and productive to say. It is perfectly acceptable — and highly recommended — to choose a small- to medium-scale issue to work with in response to this assignment. Part of the assignment's intent is to get you to think about issues in which you do have something meaningful to say at this point in your educational career — as all of you have already demonstrated that you do on your previous writing assignments in this course.

In order to support your analysis you must analyze and incorporate at least two academic sources and two non-academic sources. A successful analysis will demonstrate your unique voice in dialogue with your sources, thus placing yourself effectively within an academic discourse community. This is a research-oriented paper, but the intent is to have you think about research in a more abstract and flexible way than you may be used to thinking about from your previous educational experience. Specifically, you are expected to synthesize your sources to produce an understanding that pulls from all of them while producing an argument that goes beyond what any of your individual sources say.

This also implies that your argument in this paper should not merely be a position piece: you are not just stating what you think (though you will also be doing this) and arguing for your position (though this will be a necessary part of the assignment), but also identifying good sources and incorporating what they have to say into a higher-level argument that works with, and goes beyond, those sources. So, to pick just one example of a similar project that is not an adequate response to this assignment: you should not simply summarize all of your sources and then declare that one of them is correct, even if you produce an argument about why it is correct. Part of the expectation for this assignment is that you will pick good sources — all of the sources you pick should have something genuine to contribute to your argument; no source should be chosen only to be dismissed. Remember that your critical selection of sources will help you frame the problem in an original way — a way that each source individually has not already done.

You should work clearly within an established academic genre (or, if you prefer to think about it in other ways: a particular academic research community; a particular academic audience, a particular discourse community ...). This may be the intended major and/or the field that you chose in analyze in WP2, and you may find that this makes the experience of writing WP3 easier and/or richer for you, but this is not necessary: you may also select a different field if you wish. If you do this, you may wish to put some thought toward what a hypothetical WP2 might have looked like this, though you are certainly not expected to write a second WP2 in a new field.

Once you have engaged in your research, construct your own original argument that addresses the key issue(s) of this problem, as you define them. Your argument will take the form of an academic methodology that interests you and will be aware of the type of knowledge it produces based on the methodology you select. You will provide a clear argument that you will advance with your own critical analysis of the collection of sources that you choose. Of course, how that analysis looks will depend on the academic methodology you choose to utilize. For example, you might choose to write on global climate change, but the knowledge you produce will be different depending on whether you approach that topic from a scientific, political, cultural, or medical perspective.

Remember that while your argument and interpretation should be your own, your overall discussion should be in dialogue with your sources. In so doing, remember that you are advancing your own argument and using these sources to support and develop your ideas. Also be aware of each source’s genre, purpose, and audience or discourse community. What work is each source doing on its own before you put it into conversation with your own ideas? That is, you will not discuss the information from a blog post in the same way you discuss the information from an academic article from a prestigious neuroscience journal: their genres respond to different writing situations. In each case, make clear the purpose you have for including a source in your WP. For example, how might putting an episode of Family Guy on stem cell research into conversation with an academic article on the same topic allow you to define the parameters of stem cell research in a new way that allows you to develop your own argument?

Some Examples

This may all seem a bit abstract, and quite intimidating simply because it seems abstract. It is worthwhile to say up front that you do not need to identify a specific question in great detail before you start your research, because engaging in research should be a central part of how you explore and frame your question. Ideally, you will let your preliminary ideas be sharpened and refined by the research in which you engage, and your ideas will become more and more specific as you complete PBE and PBF. You are not married to any phrasing or ideas from either Project Builder after you have submitted it — Project Builders for this assignment are intended to help you focus your attention in increasingly specific ways on a central research question. In the progression from PBE to PBF to WP3, you are welcome — even encouraged — to develop your research question's central focus throughout this process, or even to switch directions within your area.

So, here is an initial research idea, based on the Family Guy episode mentioned above, that is much too broad:

• Stem cell research is good/bad because Family Guy presents it this way.

This is a problematic idea for several reasons: it would be impossible to engage in even a minimally thorough examination of the relevant issues in the incredibly broad topic of stem cell research in five to six pages, for one thing. Moreover, Family Guy certainly does not present an informed, neutral overview of all of the relevant information involved in stem cell research: while it's sometimes quite a perceptive and thoughtful show, it's primarily a vehicle for entertainment, not scientific or ethical education. Too, the thesis statement above, as written, really just sets you up to take a position on the issue, not to integrate additional research. But, at the same time, there is no reason why you couldn't write a paper about Family Guy and stem cell research, drawing on episode 9 of season 6; it's just that you would need to refine your topic's specificity.

Digging in to this issue would likely require more research on your part, and, hypothetically speaking, you might reasonably go through the following chain of increasingly specific, yet still too broad, intermediate paper ideas:

• Family Guy shows how society feels about stem-cell research. (Still too broad: it is both too vague, and draws too general a conclusion from too small a data set. Does Family Guy really indicate how a whole society feels?)
• Family Guy proves that stem cell research is an effective treatment for debilitating conditions. (An animated comedy is not scientific proof of anything.)
• Family Guy shows how creator Seth MacFarlane feels about stem cell research. (A more plausible thesis, but still problematic: for one thing, an animated television program airing on a network is the product of many people's work, and likely reflects the opinions and beliefs of many people who contributed to its creation. Too, this is factually incorrect: this episode of Family Guy was written and produced during the Writers' Guild of America strike, and Seth MacFarlane did not contribute creative input to it.)
• Family Guy shows that Americans are anxious about stem-cell research.

In a lot of ways, that last one is the best proposed idea of the group, because it offers a plausible, defensible position statement. However, it's still hard to see how one episode of one show reveals anything universal about every American, or even says much about Americans in general, and it's hard to see how even a more moderate version of this would be supportable in the context of this assignment unless it's set up in the context of, say, sources about media theory and psychology. It's a better position to take, but not a perfect one.

So what would an ideal position statement be on this topic? The fact of the matter is that an ideal position to take on a topic like this would be one that:

• is developed and refined during the process of research,
• takes a specific position on a sufficiently focused issue,
• chooses appropriate sources that have something genuine to offer the argument,
• and positions itself in such a way that its sources are central to the argument that it constructs,

instead of just trying to skip the research- and question-sharpening process and model itself on something in the assignment prompt. You will know that you have chosen a sufficiently focused topic when you have written a five- to six-page paper on that topic, and fully developed a logical and analytical thinking and argumentative process in the paper, without ignoring any issues of importance in your topic. Part of your task in this paper is to learn to assess when you have met that goal.

WP Format

A complete and thorough WP3 will be a thoughtful analysis of a particular problem. You should clearly frame a question near your paper's beginning, take a thoughtful position on that question in a way that gives you a chance to enter the existing dialogue of an existing academic conversation, and spend your paper arguing for your position by engaging critically with the sources. Your paper should be executed and formatted in a way that adheres closely to the MLA standard, both at the surface level (one-inch margins, no extra space between paragraphs, 12-point Times New Roman, etc.) and at levels that show you have been paying attention to the deeper issues involved in the standard (adherence to standards of academic integrity, including avoiding plagiarism; understanding how to use evidence; understanding what it means to become a member of the academic community in the discipline in which you are working; and so forth). Think of this paper as a chance to really shine and show that you have been paying attention to both the smaller- and larger-scale issues that we have discussed this quarter. At the same time, remember that this is a low-stakes assignment from the perspective of your grade: you have permission to take risks and fall on your (metaphorical) face, even badly and embarrassingly, provided that you learn something from doing so. Remember that your final portfolio will be the single largest determining factor in your overall grade this quarter; part of the reason for this is because you will have the opportunity to learn from your errors and missteps and strengthen your work before you submit the portfolio. (Remember that WP3 is only worth 10% as much as your final portfolio is.)

Project Builders for This Assignment

Project Builders are designed to help you work through issues that you will explore in your WP and to accumulate some writing to help you begin the assignment. They should be organized and coherent, but they are also meant to serve as exploratory pieces. They are not formal essays; at the same time, by this point in the quarter, they should be a notch above being unedited, disorganized free writes. You will not merely put your two PBs together to create your WP. Instead, think about your PBs as being part of the pre-writing stage (where writing is understood as the process you go through to produce your first full draft), during which you can draft ideas and focus on developing your analysis of the materials that you will eventually incorporate and expand into your longer WP. Each of these PBs should be one and a half to two full pages — but no more.

Questions to Ponder for Your WP 3 Cover Letter

What was your research and inquiry process for this assignment like? What did you learn from engaging with your sources? How is this assignment different from other, similar assignments that you have encountered previously in your academic career? How did your ideas about your topic, central question, or thesis statement change as you engaged in your research? What did you learn about your topic that didn't make it into your final WP3 essay?

Evaluation and Assessment

I will evaluate this writing project based upon your ability to thoughtfully and thoroughly answer, in the form of an analytical essay, the questions I have provided in the assignment description. If these elements are sufficiently met, you will receive a B for this assignment. If these elements are met and exceeded, you will receive an A. If some but not all of these elements are met, you will receive a C. If you turn in something that does not even meet minimum standards for engaging with the assignment, you will receive no credit. If you do not turn in an assignment in a timely fashion, you will not be able to pass the course at the end of the term.

More information about grading expectations can be found in our crowdsourced and evolving grading rubric.