Week 1 Discussion Guide: Thursday
First we will need to discuss the component parts of argument: "claim," "support," and "reasoning" (terms borrowed from Toulmin logic). The sequence, claim+support+reasoning, is extremely important to academic prose, but many student writers, in their haste to express what is on their minds, leave out one or more of the steps, or do not logically connect them to each other, or to other similar sequences in an order that makes sense to their readers. "Support" comes in various kinds, but the writer's best internal source of support is logical development and careful use of evidence chosen from the best quality sources. Those qualities present readers with what classical Greek rhetoricians called "an ethical persona," one of three elements speakers and writers can use to persuade their audiences. Because source quality plays such an important role in constructing scholarly authority, we will pay special attention to ways to test source quality (click here!). Be prepared to discuss the tests.
Another part of readers' perception of writers' ethical persona comes from their perception of the writers' "reasonableness," a sense that the writers have considered all relevant facts and others' reasoning about those facts. "Reasonableness," from the writers' perspective, often appears in the form of rebuttals of previous writers' faulty conclusions, and concessions which point out previous writers' correct conclusions. Both are important ways of addressing your "best reader's" concerns. The concept of a paper's "best reader" will be very important to our discovery of what to write and how to write it, so you should read with great care the page linked to the previous hyperlink. See box on page 165-6 for two sample ways to construct the typical academic argument. Which organizational strategy should you probably use for the Product Purchase Recommendation Paper? How should you organize your emerging source evidence to make sense of its meaning in terms your best readers would understand?
Finally, we will discuss a research tool that you may not be aware of, a way to organize data that I call "The Grid." Tools like "The Grid" can help us organize and analyze data from our research for the Product Purchase Recommendation. Click here for the assignment for the "Product Purchase Recommendation" paper (draft due next Friday; final draft due the following Friday--see the syllabus for dates).
For tips about email conferencing, email etiquette, and about how to define your PPR topic more clearly click here. Learning to use email to communicate with professional colleagues (vs. to amuse or annoy one's friends) is another crucial thing English 105 students have to accomplish. It is not listed in the College Writing Proficiency criteria, but then neither were "knowing the English alphabet" or "being able to leave a coherent and efficient voicemail message." Trust that the Goucher faculty assumed all three were necessary to the accomplishment of the rest.