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Inquiry IV Assignment
Inquiry IV Assignment
Inquiry IV Assignment
Sarah
AED 668, Spring 2014
Inquiry IV
Critical Reading, Analysis, and Writing of an Issue of Concern to You
This
inquiry
is
an
opportunity
to
take
up
a
political
issue
you
care
about,
to
use
your
knowledge
of
writing,
including:
grammar,
morphology,
phonology,
style,
rhetoric,
and
discourse
to
analyze
how
others
are
writing
about
this
issue
and
to
create
your
own
analytic
piece,
addressing
the
issue.
The
personal
piece
you
write
can
be
in
the
genre(s)
of
your
choosing
but
must
present
a
clear
analysis
of
the
issue
at
hand,
the
language
practices
and
word
choices
of
others
regarding
this
issue,
and
a
clear
explanation
of
the
position
you
are
taking
and
the
reasons
for
your
position.
Part I: Critical analysis of the writing and arguments others are
constructing regarding this issue (4-5 pages (longer if you desire))
For this part, you will need to collect writing that reflects a range of perspectives
on the issue at hand.
This writing must include, but is not limited to, at least two newspaper articles
(these may be formal pieces; letters to the editor; op-ed pieces).
This writing can also draw from any other writing of your choosing: blogs,
spoken word poems, formal or informal essays, interviews, speeches, narratives,
academic research, statistical reports, rants, transcripts of radio or TV talk show
conversations, etc.
Having collected writing that reflects a wide variety of perspectives, you will
critically analyze at least two opposing pieces for:
o How the writer is constructing his or her argument and for what
purposes.
The nature of his/her rhetoric and his/her intended audiences and
purposes.
The connections between the writers rhetorical strategies, their
positioning of themselves, others, and their audiences, and the
stories they are telling.
The style of writing used to advance his/her argument and agenda.
This includes the organization of his/her ideas within and
across paragraphs.
This includes the sources informing his/her arguments.
This includes the larger conversations and social languages
from which the author is drawing and the intertextual
references upon which the author builds his or her agenda.
This includes the genre(s) of the piece and the audiences
accessed through that genre.
This includes the choices of sentence structure, and how he
or she is choosing to emphasize certain words or ideas
through sentence structure.
In class analyses of your texts or other texts, using the descriptive review process and/or
applying learnings on grammar, discourse, and ideology, etc. to your pieces.
In class drama enactments of your texts, exploring the people represented, the language
used, the style, tone, and effect of the piece on an audience, and the genre of the text.
For the critical analysis piece, you will be graded on the strength of your critical analyses
of the writing of others. This includes your awareness of the cultural conversations and
the range of positions of others concerning this issue, the range of discourses and
ideologies at play, and the genres and styles of framing these issues on behalf of specific
purposes.
For your own piece, you will be graded on the strength of the argument you construct and
the alignment of your rhetorical devices, genre and style with your purposes and your
target audiences.