Week 11 Discussion Guide: Wednesday--Independent Research Project

        In class, we will revisit briefly the reasons why equally competent scholars in a discipline differ in their judgments, and how communities of interpretation or specialization help to manage those disputes.  Our goal is to learn "how to pick sides in a scholarly fight," and "how to find a logical bridge between scholars who appear to be fighting." 

        We also will review three ways of looking at paragraph development when you revise: paragraph size; paragraph coherence; intros and conclusions as special-purpose paragraphs of predictable structure (plus titles!).  This will be followed by a short workshop in which you will be part of a group based on your likely majors, and you will reorganize and plan the development of weakly developed paragraphs from a popular press news story, using the lines of inquiry you are learning in your declared or potential academic majors.

        Then, if we have time, I will ask each of you to explain your project to the class, and to describe what kinds of sources you have found, and what kinds of problems you have encountered.  We will try to solve some of those problems using our imaginations and online resources.  If we cannot solve the problems, at least we will try to develop strategies for how they could be solved after class.