Assignment Sequence

Your instructor for ENG 2100/T will design the course around a guiding thematic focus, but the underlying subject of the class is critical analysis, research, and the craft of writing. The following series of assignments or major projects make up the core of each section of ENG 2100/T, each building on the one before and each connecting back to the core learning goals of the class. Your particular assignment for each of these genres depends on your particular class and professor, and on the course’s thematic focus and readings.

Major Project 1: Literacy Narrative

(see pages xx-xx for more information and essays on “(re)Making Language”)

This project situates you within the context of the course theme and allows you to approach course readings, and the questions that arise from them, from your own perspective and experiences. “Literacy” in this context means more than learning to read and write (though, depending on your course theme, you may be asked to reflect on important experiences in this regard). Literacy is what you know about a certain subject (the course theme for example) and how you came to know it.

How it relates to the rest of the course:

In a sense you could say that this portion of the class asks you to analyze your own experience with language and its relationship to identity and knowledge and craft a thesis (claim or argument) about your experience, using parts of your own story as the grounds or evidence to support that thesis. The project could include ethnographic methods such as interviews of people in your family and/or narratives of their own experiences, focused on how the questions raised by the course theme and readings relate to their lives. Work in this assignment ideally will lay the groundwork for the rest of class and scaffold into (build up to or relate to) your analysis project and your final project, a research-based argument.

It relates particularly to the second of five course goals:

• Compose with an awareness of how intersectional identity, social conventions, and rhetorical situations shape writing: Demonstrate in your writing an awareness of how personal experience, our discourse communities, social conventions, and rhetorical considerations of audience, purpose, genre, and medium shape how and what we write.

Major Project 2: Analysis

(see pages xx-xx for more information and essays on “Analyzing Texts”)

Analyzing texts is a key skill for being a good reader and writer and forms one of the core goals of this course. It involves a number of processes that we do all the time intuitively but which you may never have thought of or which you may not be able to name. Such naming (and learning new ways to name) may be the most valuable part of education, and is certainly vital to being able to maneuver within various discourse communities.

How it relates to the rest of the course:

This portion of the class asks you to analyze a text or texts and interpret them, crafting a thesis about what you see, using quotes or examples from the text as the grounds or evidence to support that thesis. You also can and should use information about the context of the text, such as historical and cultural information as well as the audience, purpose, genre, and medium of the text, to support your thesis.

It relates particularly to the third of five course goals:

• Read and analyze texts critically: Analyze and interpret key ideas in various discursive genres (e.g. essays, news articles, speeches, documentaries, plays, poems, short stories), with careful attention to the role of rhetorical conventions such as style, tropes, genre, audience, and purpose.

Major Project 3: Research-Based Argument

(see pages xx-xx for more information and essays on “Researching and Making Claims”)

How it relates to the rest of the course:

Your final project of the term asks you to learn more about a topic related to the course theme or that arises for you from your literacy narrative and/or the course readings. You’ll investigate the topic, form a guiding question for your research, and attempt to answer the question, using course texts and sources outside the course. You’ll integrate these sources into your own writing, ultimately forming a thesis from your research and learning. The grounds or evidence for your thesis in this case can come from a variety of sources—your own experience and/or research (primary sources), the texts you’ve read in the course and beyond, and knowledge you’ve gained from the research of others in secondary/outside sources.

It relates particularly to the fourth of five course goals:

• Identify and engage with credible sources and multiple perspectives in your writing: Identify sources of information and evidence credible to your audience; incorporate multiple perspectives in your writing by summarizing, interpreting, critiquing, and synthesizing the arguments of others; and avoid plagiarism by ethically acknowledging the work of others when used in your own writing, using a citation style appropriate to your audience and purpose.

Weekly Reading/Writing

In addition to the major projects above, you’ll also have “low-stakes” writing assignments that ask you to respond to course readings and that will scaffold into (and maybe even become part of) your major projects.