Peay-Pare to Write: An Introduction to Composition and Rhetoric for ENGL 1010
Overview
Peay-Pare to Write! is the textbook for ENGL 1010 at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, TN. The content aligns with the four major units of the course: Personal Narrative, Rhetorical Analysis, Annotated Bibliography, and Public Argument. In addition to introducing students to the major concepts of the course, this textbook includes links to videos that expand on the content and extensive Instructor Notes to help instructors and graduate lab assistants plan their lessons and assignments.
Chapter 1: Welcome to ENGL 1010!
Instructor Notes for Chapter 1
Welcome to Peay-Pare to Write!
This textbook was designed not only to help students achieve the learning outcomes of ENGL 1010, but also to provide ENGL 1010 instructors with material to plan their lessons. Each chapter in this textbook includes an “Instructors Notes” section with PPT lectures, links to supplementary videos, suggested activities, and handouts. You should feel free to adapt any of the provided materials to fit your teaching style and your students.
Video/Lecture: The Value of Gen Ed and ENGL 1010
Because ENGL 1010 is a required General Education course, it is important for instructors to explain to students early in the semester how they will use the skills practiced in this course. We have created a brief video that covers General Education at APSU and how ENGL 1010 fits into these requirements. You may share the video link with your students in D2L (Video Link: What is Gen Ed?) or use the accompanying PPT to present the information during your class (PPT Link: What is Gen Ed?).
Writing Activity: Writing and the Future
Set a timer for 10-15 minutes and ask students to write about the following question:
- How important do you think writing will be in your future classes in college, your career once you graduate, and your life as a member of your community? Explain your answers.
Get students to share their answers with each other in small groups and as a class. Encourage students to challenge their assumptions about the importance of writing.
Handout: Writer’s Inventory
Use the following handout to determine what writing tools students are already equipped with when they enter your classroom (Handout Link: Writer's Inventory)
By Keely Mohon-Doyle
Welcome to ENGL 1010: English Composition I at Austin Peay State University! ENGL 1010 is the first of two courses in the composition sequence required by the General Education Core. This textbook has been designed to introduce you to the important concepts covered in the course and guide you through the major writing projects you will be asked to complete.
You may notice that each chapter “sounds” a little different. The authors of this text each has their own voice that they have developed during their time as writers. Whether you are coming to us right out of high school, joining us early through Dual Enrollment, transferring in from another college, or returning to academia after time away, we are excited to support you as you develop your own writing voice and practice the skills that will help you succeed as you navigate college, establish your careers, and engage in your communities.
Students as Writers
Although you may not always recognize yourself as such, you are a writer. Every day you engage in acts of writing: texting friends, emailing professors, responding to social media posts, reviewing products, penning fanfiction, completing assignments, reaching out to politicians. The list goes on and on. These acts of writing are often so mundane that you may not think of them as writing. They are just how you communicate with others, but that’s all that writing is…communication. For this reason, you are, in one way or another, an expert.
The difference between your expertise and the expertise of your professors is that they have had more practice at the specific types of writing that are valued in formal, academic settings. This course will build on the skills you have already acquired as an experienced writer, teach you new ones that you may not have used before, and give you the opportunity to thoughtfully and purposefully practice those skills in a space where you can receive feedback and revise to improve.
What to Expect in ENGL 1010: The Basics
We know that it can sometimes be difficult to understand why professors teach the material that they do, particularly at the beginning of a class. We hope to offer some transparency by sharing with you the basic requirements of ENGL 1010 that have been established by the First-Year Writing Committee. While not all sections of the course will be exactly the same, they all share the same student learning outcomes and major writing assignments.
Student Learning Outcomes
Student learning outcomes are the specific goals that your instructor will help you achieve by the end of the semester. In ENGL 1010, the outcomes focus on growing your abilities as writers, readers, rhetors, and researchers.
- Engage in all elements of the writing process, including pre-writing, drafting, peer review, conferencing, and revision.
- Practice critical reading strategies, such as annotating, notetaking, re-reading, and responding.
- Reflect on and learn from past experiences with literacy.
- Practice various forms of expository writing, such as description, explanation, comparison, and process.
- Understand and analyze the importance of rhetorical situation and rhetorical appeals, including logos, ethos, pathos, and kairos.
- Construct and maintain a clear thesis.
- Logically organize and show connections between ideas through proper paragraphing and transitions.
- Begin finding and evaluating outside sources, both popular and scholarly.
- Begin using sources ethically and correctly through quotes, summaries, and paraphrases to support claims.
- Build an argument using sources and rhetorical devices.
- Adhere to the conventions of current MLA style, format, and citation guidelines.
- Develop knowledge of appropriate grammar, mechanics, and style.
Major Writing Assignments
The assignment sequence for ENGL 1010 has been standardized to ensure that all students who have taken the course will practice and attain a similar set of skills. These assignments are scaffolded, meaning they have been designed to slowly build on the skills taught in the course. For example, the Personal Narrative will introduce you to providing concrete descriptions, which you may use in the Rhetorical Analysis to explain the text you are analyzing. The Rhetorical Analysis teaches you how to critically analyze popular texts, but you may also use your analytical skills as you decide which sources are reliable enough to include in your Annotated Bibliography and Public Argument.
While this sequence is standardized, that does not mean that the assignments will be identical from one instructor to another. Instead, instructors are encouraged to create their own unique prompts for each assignment. Here, you can find a basic description of each major writing project in the sequence.
- Unit 1: Personal Narrative: Students should be given the opportunity to view their experience as a valid topic for discussion and a source of knowledge. In this assignment, you will practice narrative skills, such as description and dialogue, as well as reflect on how the experience you have chosen to write about affected you.
- Unit 2: Rhetorical Analysis: The more students become aware of how authors and advertisers and speakers use rhetoric—of how they make use of the rhetorical situation and rhetorical appeals—the better they will become at making informed decisions. In this assignment, you will practice identifying the use of logos, ethos, pathos, and kairos in various types of texts—advertisements, videos, speeches, songs, etc. You may be introduced to the MLA citation style in this assignment.
- Unit 3: Annotated Bibliography: An annotated bibliography is a good way to encourage students to begin research early and serves as a reference for both the content of their sources and their own thoughts about the topic once they begin working on the Public Argument assignment. In this assignment, you will learn to use search engines and databases to find sources, read sources for useful content, evaluate the reliability of sources, and plan for more extensive paper assignments.
- Unit 4: Public Argument: Once students have explored their topic and collected reliable sources, they will practice making their own rhetorically-driven arguments. In this assignment, you will learn how to incorporate sources and personal experience to defend a position. You will acknowledge and address potential counterarguments, and you will write for an audience beyond the classroom.
- Optional Unit: Reflection: Reflecting on the writing process and the skills acquired over the course of the semester can help students see how they have improved and how these skills can transfer to assignments beyond ENGL 1010. Your instructor may ask you to complete brief reflections after each major paper or a longer reflection at the end of the semester.
Understanding What the Instructor Wants and Seeking Support
Your instructor is there to support you through the major writing sequence. They want you to succeed, and they will provide you with feedback and check-in with you throughout the semester. However, you also have to be proactive when you need help on an assignment or have questions about the course. Here are a few places you can go if you have hit a block.
- The Instructor: The instructor is your best source of information about the course. While you can try to catch them at the beginning or end of class, there may not be enough time to provide you with the information you need. Most will offer dedicated office hours each week when you can drop by without an appointment to ask questions. If you have class or other obligations during their office hours, you can email them with your questions or schedule a meeting for another time. Sometimes students avoid these methods of seeking help because they are worried that they are bothering the instructor, but most instructors are happy to see their students taking the initiative to get support. The instructor’s office hours, office number, and email can be found on the course syllabus.
- The Syllabus: The syllabus is another good way to figure out what the professor wants. This document is handed out at the beginning of the class, and the first day is usually dedicated to going over it. It contains information about the course objectives, grading, and major assignments. It also outlines classroom policies about attendance and behavior. Many professors will include contact information for academic support services, as well as other students support services available on campus, such as Student Counseling Services and the SOS Food Pantry.
- The Assignment Sheets and Grading Rubrics: For every major assignment, you will be provided with an assignment sheet that explains the requirements of the assignment. In many cases, the instructor will also provide a grading rubric that tells you how many points are associated with each requirement. You can use these as a checklist as you plan and revise your work.
- D2L Brightspace: D2L is the learning management system (LMS) used at APSU. Each of your courses will have a D2L shell that contains the course documents, readings, lecture materials, assignment sheets, etc. You will likely submit your assignments for grading or engage in online discussions about course topics in this shell. It is also where your professor may provide you with feedback on your work and is where you can keep track of your grade throughout the semester.
- The Writing Center: The Writing Center is one of the free academic services available to students on campus. It is located on the first floor of the Felix G. Woodward Library and provides one-on-one tutoring with a trained writing consultant. You can make an appointment or submit a paper for online feedback by visiting apsu.mywconline.com. For more information about the Writing Center and its services, visit apsu.edu/writingcenter.
Questions for Your Consideration
- Do you consider yourself a good writer? Why or why not?
- What was the last thing you wrote for a class? For fun?
- Based on the information in this chapter, what are your expectations for ENGL 1010?
- What assignment are you the most concerned about and why?
- When you have difficulty working on an assignment, where do you normally seek help?
- How could the skills learned in ENGL 1010 prepare you for work you may be asked to do in your other courses?
Chapter 2: Reading Critically
Instructor Notes for Chapter 2
Video/Lecture: Reading Strategies
We have created a brief video that provides students with strategies for reading critically. You may share the video link with your students in D2L (Video Link: Reading Strategies) or use the accompanying PPT to present the information during your class (PPT Link: Reading Strategies).
Activity Links
The following links contain information and activities to accompany this chapter:
- Reading for Main Ideas and Details: https://www.uc.edu/campus-life/learning-commons/learning-resources/notetaking-resources/main-ideas-vs-details.html
- Detecting Bias: https://libguides.uwgb.edu/bias
- The Five Organizational Structures: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/waymaker-level1-english-gen/chapter/text-text-structures/#:~:text=Researchers%20have%20identified%20five%20basic,contrast%2C%20and%20problem%20and%20solution
- Links to Critical Reading and Writing Worksheets and Activities: https://sunyempire.edu/online-writing-support/resources/critical-reading-writing/
- Teaching Guide Ideas for Graduate Student Instructors: https://gsi.berkeley.edu/media/Teaching-Critical-Reading.pdf
- Critical Reading Exercises: https://www.antioch.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/VWC-Critical-Reading-Exercises.pdf
By Lori Burdette
Expectations for College Reading
All students have different expectations about reading and have had different relationships with texts. Not everyone enjoys reading, nor are they always able to have positive experiences from reading. Therefore, developing critical reading skills can help students’ reading become constructive and valuable. The expectations for college reading include reading specifically and purposefully to understand content, to enhance critical thinking, to prepare for an assignment or an exam, or even to take notes. Therefore, college reading takes more time. You may find yourself needing two or more hours to read the materials for each class. This might sound like a lot, but reading critically not only helps us understand the text, but also helps us develop ways to connect the information we read to other important areas and even other classes. This chapter will address ways to effectively move through a text first by reading to gain information and then by delving deeper to answer questions, analyze situations, argue positions, and evaluate sources, all of which are important parts of the critical reading process. In turn, we will be able to get to the root of issues and enhance critical thinking, analysis, problem-solving, and decision-making and apply those to real world scenarios. Let’s get started!
What is Critical Reading
To improve your writing skills, it is important to improve your reading skills, and the best way to do this is to become a critical reader. Critical readers approach the text with open and interested minds to unlock not only what the text says, but also what the text means. This is an interactive approach that involves communicating with the text in a purposeful and constructive manner so you can participate in and respond to the exchange of information.
Some interactive approaches include:
- Keeping a pen in your hand: As you read, annotate the text. Underline or highlight interesting passages. Write notes in the margins: questions, reactions, connections, etc. Circle new words, so you can look them up later. If you do not or cannot write on the text, keep a reading journal where you can collect your annotations.
- Knowing your speed: How long does it take you to read a page? Students often get in trouble when they attempt to read an assigned text at the last minute. If you know how long it takes you to read, you can ensure that you have plenty of time to read the text carefully and stress free.
- Taking breaks: Some texts may be longer than others, and you’ll want to avoid trying to read them all at once. When you notice your eyes skimming over words, give yourself a break. If you try to power through, you will likely miss out on important information, and it may actually take you longer because you have to read sections again.
- Re-reading for understanding: If you have time, consider reading through the text once quickly to get the main points. Then, read it again to help confirm your understanding of the content and to identify interesting details that you can discuss in class or include in a paper.
Critical reading does not mean to pick apart a text and look for errors or even to criticize a work. Critical reading does mean, however, to consider various features of a work and think about the effect they have on the reader.
How to Read Critically
Reading was one of the first skills we learned in our early education. We all know how to read, but do we know how to read critically? To read critically, we must know WHY we are reading. Before you can truly improve your reading skills, you need to understand what happens in good readers’ minds while they read. You may even do these things already. You just don’t know it…yet. Good readers have developed good habits when they read called strategies that help them understand how to use the basic components of a text to connect to and determine the importance of what they are reading. They also visualize, ask questions, and read between the lines of what they read.
Understand the basic components:
The first strategy is to understand the basic components of a text to connect to and determine the importance of what you are reading so that you can get the most from your reading experience. Basic components of a text include the structure or organizational pattern that is used, key features such as the table of contents, index, glossary, and figures which are the chapter headings, illustrations, and any tables or graphs used.
There are five recognized structures: description, sequence, cause and effect, problem and solution, comparison and contrast. These structures help unlock the purpose of the text and how the information will be presented.
The key features help readers navigate through the text. Components such as the table of contents help readers find the specific chapters, sections, and pages where the information is located within the text. Indexes list topics, names, places, and key terms alphabetically and provide the page numbers for easy access. Glossaries are like mini-dictionaries provided to define terms that were used in the text. Glossaries can be found at the end of the book or sometimes at the end of individual chapters.
Finally, using additional figures in the text such as chapter headings, illustrations, tables, charts, and graphs explain the important ideas, concepts, and theories that are presented.
Determine Importance by Identifying Main Ideas and Supporting Details
As you begin to read, it is important to identify both the main ideas and supporting details of the materials. To find the main idea, ask yourself, “what is the author trying to tell me?” Look for titles, section headings, bold print words, italicized print, or any other indicators that the information is important. Another way to determine the main idea is to look for repeated words or phrases that indicate a topic or common theme.
To find the supporting ideas, look for ways that the author builds upon or supports the main idea. What evidence, backing, or examples does the author provide? Again, look for indicators in the text such as section headings, bold print words, or repeated words or phrases.
Make Connections
Another way to read critically involves making connections. When you make connections, think about how the text connects to you or similar events in your life. Ask yourself how you might react in a similar situation. What life experiences have you had that are similar to the ones described in the text? How can you use this information to expand your learning? Next, consider how the text connects to other books, articles, or materials that you have read. Does the information from the new reading strengthen or weaken concepts from what you’ve previously read. How can you combine information from both texts to expand your knowledge? Finally, use what you have read to make connections to the real world or real-life events. Are the scenarios in the text realistic? Has anything like what you’ve read happened in real life? For example: when you make connections while reading, you might connect what you are reading now to an experience you had as a child or to something you have read for another class. Being able to make connections as you read creates a bond between you and the reading material and promotes critical thinking skills and enhances our learning about not only ourselves, but also the world around us.
Detect Bias
Reading critically helps us to detect any bias as well as recognize disinformation and misinformation present in a piece of writing. Bias refers to ways that authors add slant to their writing by including personal opinions or beliefs that may affect the relationship between the reader and the writer, alter facts, and damage credibility. Since we are bombarded with information daily, it is important to use critical reading strategies to recognize disinformation and misinformation in writing. Disinformation is the act of intentionally misleading the reader while misinformation is simply getting the facts wrong. To detect bias and recognize disinformation and misinformation, critical readers look to other sources to verify information and to seek different points of view. They also look for sarcasm, exaggeration, one-sided writing, unsupported claims, and missing information.
Ask Questions
As you read, ask questions along the way. This not only will help you to understand the material, but also will help you retain the information. Think of questions that will help you make the most out of your reading experience such as questions your instructor might ask on a test or a quiz or questions that will help you connect this reading material to other information you have learned or read.
Define Vocabulary
As you read and question, define and interpret any words or terms that you are not familiar with. Do this by using context clues or even looking up the terms in a dictionary, using the text’s glossary, or reading any footnotes or sub-text that might be in the chapter. To enhance these critical reading strategies, you might also want to take notes or create flashcards.
Use Reflective Thinking Strategies
Critical readers often use reflective thinking strategies to help make inferences and predictions by using what they know to help them learn what they do not know. By “reading between the lines,” good readers can discover meaning from what has not been explicitly stated in the writing. Inferences help readers reflect on their skills and capabilities to help them understand new thoughts and concepts. When you infer, you use what you have read coupled with what you already know to go beyond what is stated on the surface to create meanings. Prediction helps readers make educated guesses based on what they have read and uses that information to determine what will happen next. To infer and predict ask yourself the following questions: what is not stated that I have figured out? What do I predict will happen? Why do I think so? Unfortunately, both inferences and predictions can be wrong. These errors can occur when readers fail to use previous reading strategies such as connecting to the text or asking questions and defining vocabulary.
Visualize
Visualizing or seeing is one of the final critical reading strategies. This strategy can help you to put what you have read into perspective so that you can effectively use the information. This strategy is a checkpoint to see if you have fully read, grasped, and integrated what you have read and incorporated most or all of the previously discussed strategies. Visualizing is a process that allows you to translate what you have read into a mental image and may help improve your overall understanding of a text as well as how the pieces of a text, story, or novel work together. Being able to see the action as it occurs also helps with other reading strategies.
Synthesize
One more final critical reading strategy is synthesizing, and this occurs when you are able to blend your own ideas with the ideas from the text to create new ideas. When you synthesize, you search for distinct, unique, unrelated components and combine them to form new associations and connections. Surprisingly enough, you already do this. You just might not be aware of it.
Read Actively
Before, during, and after reading, be aware of the reading strategies that you might use, are using, or have used. Before reading, familiarize yourself with the text. What sort of information will you be reading? Why are you reading it? What do you expect to find? Are you familiar with this type of reading material? After answering these basic questions develop a reading plan. This includes identifying how much time you have to read the material and how you plan to approach the reading. A reading plan also helps you identify how you will complete other tasks such as asking questions, defining unfamiliar terms, or taking notes.
During reading, incorporate as many reading strategies as possible and read with a pencil or highlighter in hand. Note which reading strategies are helpful and which ones are not as helpful. You might even find yourself developing your own strategies based on your individual situation.
After reading, review your notes. What have you learned that you did not previously know? How have you expanded your knowledge of the topic? Which reading strategies helped and which ones did not? Being able to answer these questions will indicate how well you have read and understood the information as well as your ability to use the information.
Summary
Today, students need critical reading skills more than ever as they are bombarded with a constant stream of information from multiple outlets, and messages, intentions, and agendas can get lost in flowery prose. While it may take more time, critical reading is a necessary process, and it must be developed by using a variety of strategies. Learning to read critically boosts comprehension, critical thinking, attention, observation, and concentration.
Questions for Your Consideration
- What critical reading strategies do you use?
- After a reading assignment, attempt to write what you recall without looking at the text. Then go back and fill in what you might have missed and correct any information that might have been recalled incorrectly. How well did you remember what you had read? What reading strategies might have helped you recall the text in better detail?
- Create flashcards with terms and definitions for any words that you might not understand. On the back of the flashcard, include an original sentence using the word in context. Flashcards can be found at the following sites: Quizlet, Flashcards Machine, Brainscape, Anki, Cram, Genially, Chegg, Flashdecks, and StudyStack Flashcards
Chapter 3: The Writing Process
Instructor Notes for Chapter 3
Video/Lecture: Conducting an Effective Peer Review
Students in ENGL 1010 may not be familiar with peer review or what is expected of them during this activity. We have created a video that covers the purpose of conducting peer review and provides strategies for writing effective feedback. You may share the video link with your students in D2L (Video Link: Conducting an Effective Peer Review) or use the accompanying PPT to present the information during your class (PPT Link: Conducting an Effective Peer Review).
Activity: Peer Review Options
There are a lot of methods you can use to conduct peer review in your classroom. Here are a few examples:
- Open Peer Review: In an open peer review, students review the assignment sheet and the grading rubric to remind themselves of the requirements for the paper. However, they are not told to focus on any of them in particular. Usually, reviewers are asked to provide 3 workable suggestions for improvement and to point out at least 2 areas where the writer succeeded.
- Guided Peer Review: In a guided peer review, you provide the students with a list of questions that the reviewer must answer about their classmate’s paper. These are based on the requirements of the paper. Questions in a guided peer review should not be framed as yes/no questions. Instead, they should ask reviewers to identify specific elements and explain their responses.
- Small Group Peer Review: Peer review can be conducted in small groups (usually 3-4 students depending on the amount of time available). Give each student an appropriate amount of time to provide feedback on their groupmates’ drafts. At the end, make sure the students have enough time to discuss their feedback with each other and ask questions.
- Anonymous Peer Review: Another method of peer review involves collecting all of the drafts and handing them out to reviewers at random. The reviewer can then provide feedback anonymously. If you also code the names of the writers, reviewers will not know whose paper they are reading. This can help with students that are more self-conscious about their work.
- Online Peer Review: Online peer review can be tricky. It is usually best to have students submit their drafts to a shared folder, such as the D2L Discussion forum on an assigned day and require them to respond to 1-2 of their classmates within three days of the original post. If a paper already has two responses, they should review a different paper. Trying to pair students up in advance can be chaotic if one of their groupmates does not post their draft.
Activity: Writing Field Trip
If you are planning a writing day for students to work on drafts or revisions, consider taking them to a new location on campus. If it’s nice out, they may be able to work outside. If not, the library offers plenty of computers and nooks for working. Have students share their progress with you at the end of the class session.
Inform students in advance, so they have enough battery power in their devices or remember to bring pen and paper. Check out any outdoor locations for WIFI and environmental obstacles (like sprinklers).
By Keely Mohon-Doyle
Think about the last time you had to write something, whether that was a paper for a class, a text message to a friend, or a response to a social media post. Did you think about your topic before putting pen to paper, fingers to the keyboard? Did you ask someone to take a quick look at what you wrote to make sure you were on track? Did you tweak the wording or fix a comma? Did you read over it “one last time” before sending your ideas out into the world? If you did any of these, you were practicing the writing process.
The writing process is a way of naming the series of activities that we practice when we write. These activities include prewriting, writing, conferencing, revising, editing, proofreading, and publishing. You may have heard them called “steps”; however, that isn’t quite right. “Steps” implies that you follow one after the other in a specific order to reach the finished product, but the writing process can be messy. You may start by conferencing with your professor to brainstorm ideas before you begin. You may be halfway through a paper and realize that you need to slow down and freewrite to get through a difficult section. You may skip some of these activities entirely. Your process is likely to look different depending on the formality of the writing, the amount of time you have to complete it, what you know about the topic, and any number of other reasons. That’s ok!
In this chapter, we will explain the major activities that make up the writing process and offer suggestions for how to use them effectively.
Prewriting
Prewriting is the act of collecting and organizing your thoughts. This usually happens shortly after you are given an assignment to help you get past the blank page; however, you may need to return to prewriting if you get stuck or if you realize you need to say more about the topic.
While there are many formal methods of prewriting, some of which we will discuss below, not all methods require you to sit at a desk. Sometimes our best prewriting occurs when we are doing everyday things, like walking between classes, shopping for groceries, or hanging out with friends. For this reason, it is a good idea to have a dedicated place to record your thoughts. Some people use journals; others keep notes in their phones. Remember, if you don’t write it down, you will forget it.
Prewriting to Brainstorm
When you begin a project, basic brainstorming can help you figure out what you already know about your topic and what you need to know. Create a list of everything you can think of: ideas, topics, sources, questions. These can act as a springboard for more prewriting, paragraphs, and research.
Prewriting to Expand
Once you have a few ideas on paper, you can work on expanding them. Freewriting is a prewriting exercise where you choose one aspect of your topic and write everything you can think of within a specific timeframe, usually 3-5 minutes. Grammar and spelling aren’t important. Just keep writing. Once you are done, you can do a second freewrite that builds on ideas from the first. Journalistic questions—who, what, where, when, why, how—prompt you to look at your topic from all angles and can suggest areas where you may need to conduct research to fully understand it.
Prewriting to Organize
A good paper makes your ideas easy for a reader to follow, and some prewriting exercises can help you bring order to the chaos of your earlier brainstorming. Clustering is a visual form of prewriting where you place your main topic in the center of the page and draw lines out to related ideas. This method can help you make connections and indicate what paragraphs to include in the paper. Outlining is a formal method of organizing your ideas into paragraphs. Identify the major points you want to make in the paper and number each of these to indicate a paragraph. Under each point, write the corresponding ideas you collected during your earlier prewriting exercises. If one point has too many ideas under it, you will know to split it into two paragraphs. If a point has too few, you will know to combine it with a similar point or add more to create a paragraph. Outlining also gives you the opportunity to test the order of your points to see which one should be first and how they might flow together in the paper.
Writing
Writing is the act of taking your ideas and putting them into a formal structure—a 5-paragraph essay, narrative, research paper, etc.—depending on the requirements of the assignment or writing event. It is where you think about how to transition smoothly from one idea to another, from one point to another. When writing, you must ensure that you fully flesh-out the ideas you collected during prewriting with details, examples, and evidence.
Writing Purpose
It is important for you understand the purpose of your writing assignment before you turn your prewriting into a paper. Re-read the assignment sheet and rubric and make a checklist of the requirements. Review any examples your instructor has provided, looking for organization and specific genre conventions, characteristics specific to that type of writing. Decide who the audience is for your writing. It’s not always the professor. Knowing this information can affect what you decide to include in your paper.
Writing Habits
Even with prewriting to draw from, writing can be hard. Here are a few writing habits to make it easier. Start early. It can be tempting to wait until the last minute to write a paper, particularly if you think you know what you want to say. However, you may still suffer from writer’s block at some point, and it is important to make sure you have space to return to prewriting if needed. Take breaks. Another good reason to start early is so that you can take breaks when you get mentally and physically fatigued. Don’t push through if you feel your eyes glaze over or your stomach rumble. Skip the introduction. The introduction is usually the most difficult paragraph to write because you aren’t completely certain what you’re going to say in the rest of the paper. It’s easier to pick a relevant opening line or produce a thoughtful thesis statement if you know what points you actually make. Manage your resources. If you have notes or sources, make sure that you label them clearly and save them in places where you will have easy access. If you like physical materials, use a dedicated binder. If you like digital materials, save everything to a thumb drive and use descriptive titles for documents. Save often and in different locations. You never know when catastrophe will strike. Make sure you save your work every 10-15 minutes, so, if the power goes out, you don’t lose everything. Save to the cloud or an external thumb drive, so that you can access your work from different computers in case yours takes a tumble.
Writing Environment
The environment in which you work can be just as important to the success of your writing as the prewriting you did to collect ideas. Some people have no problem working in their dorm room with their roommate listening to music across from them. Some people need the complete silence of the library basement. If you are not comfortable and can’t be productive in your writing space, it will take you significantly longer to complete the work. Test out a few locations. Try writing at different times of day. Recognize that the environment you need to complete your writing may not be the same each time.
Conferencing
Conferencing is the act of collaborating with others to improve your writing. Writing is rarely a solitary endeavor. In the workforce, most major writing projects are done by an entire team of people. In college, even when you must complete a paper on your own, you can still ask your professor for help or read a section of your paper to your friend to see if it “sounds right.”
Your Instructor
Your instructor is probably one of the best sources of feedback for your assignment. After all, they assigned it. They will be able to explain the paper topic and structure, help you find sources, and offer suggestions for revisions. While some professors may schedule required conferences to discuss your work, others will leave it up to you to make an appointment when you need help. You can email them a request or just stop by during their office hours.
Peer Review
Peer review is the formal process of sharing your writing with your classmates and receiving feedback. This form of conferencing provides you with multiple perspectives and suggestions from people who are writing papers with the same requirements as your own. Because you are also providing your classmates with feedback on their papers, it also allows you to read examples of how others approached the assignment. Feedback during peer review should be specific. If the paper does not meet the requirements, offer suggestions for how to address the issue, pointing to places in the paper where they could make changes. If you don’t understand something, ask the writer questions that will help them expand their ideas. If you read something that you like, explain to the writer why you thought it was good, so they know to keep doing it.
The Writing Center
The Writing Center is a free resource on campus where you can take any paper at any stage of the writing process. The center is staffed by fellow students who have been trained to serve as writing tutors. If you visit, make sure to bring your assignment sheet, so they will know what your assignment is. You should also have a few questions prepared for the meeting to help the tutor focus their feedback.
Revising, Editing, and Proofreading
We often use revising, editing, and proofreading interchangeably to mean “making changes” to our writing. However, they are distinct acts and indicate macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of change. It is important to know where to start.
Revising (macro-level changes)
Revising is the act of making significant content and organizational changes to your writing with the help of feedback received during conferencing and based on your own perceptions of the effectiveness of your work. It can be one of the most difficult parts of the writing process because it requires you to look critically at the writing you invested so much time into completing and to acknowledge that it would be stronger if you just added a paragraph here, removed a paragraph there, gave a different example on page 2, and flipped paragraphs 4 and 5.
To complete a successful revision, start with the assignment sheet and the grading rubric (if available). Use these documents as a checklist to make sure you are meeting all the requirements. Then, review the feedback provided by your professor and peers. While it is tempting to go with whatever the professor suggested, it is important to note that the professor is just one person with one perspective. They may not have thought of things that your classmates did. It is up to you to decide who offers the better feedback. Additionally, you can decide that you don’t like any of their ideas and come up with an alternative revision on your own. It is your paper; you get to decide. Once you have made your revisions, check the assignment sheet and rubric again and continue revising as needed.
Editing (meso-level changes)
Editing is the act of checking the paper for flow and readability and making changes to sentence order and transitions. To complete a successful edit, read your paper aloud or have someone else read it to you. It may seem strange at first, but reading aloud allows you to hear where you or the reader “stumble” because you are forced to engage with each word. When you read silently, it is easy to slide over these problem areas, particularly if you have been working on the paper for a long time and know what it is supposed to mean. In addition to stumbling, listen for the rhythm of your sentences. Are they all short and choppy or long and elaborate? Do you need to add some variety? Finally, listen for transition words, phrases, and sentences that help make the connections between your ideas clear. If you notice sudden jumps in topic or purpose, insert a transition to smooth it out.
Proofreading (micro-level changes)
Proofreading is the act of checking the paper for grammar, spelling, word choice, and punctuation errors. This serves as the final polish before you submit your paper. To complete a successful proofreading, it is important to take a break between finishing the paper and beginning the proofreading. If you start too soon, you may miss errors due to familiarity. When you do start, know what errors you commonly make and look for them one at a time. If you try to find all of them at once, you are likely to miss some. Start with the last sentence and work your way backward to avoid falling into reading instead of proofreading. This strategy will help you focus on identifying errors rather than the main ideas of a paragraph.
Note: It is important to start with revision first. If you spend 15 minutes fixing all the commas in a paragraph and then realize that the paragraph no longer fits the point you are trying to make, you may be tempted to make it fit…somehow…which will only weaken your paper.
Publishing
Publishing is the act of submitting your writing for others to read. Eventually, you will either feel “done” with your writing or come up against a deadline. At that point, you have to let your writing go out into the world to serve the purpose for which it was created: to be enjoyed by others, to make money, to earn a grade. While that can be nerve-wracking, it is important to remember that writing is never really done, you can always continue the writing process and revisit a “final” draft. For example, the papers you write for this class may earn a grade, but you can continue to improve them for submission in the First-Year Writing Competition and publication in A Gov and Beyond: The First-Year Writing Journal at APSU.
While this long discussion of the writing process may seem like a lot of extra work, using some of the strategies mentioned here can actually help you address problem areas early and avoid writer’s block. Additionally, you are probably already doing many of these activities anyway. This chapter just makes your knowledge more explicit and encourages you to build up these skills.
Questions for Your Consideration
- What is your usual writing process? Do you find it effective? Does it change depending on the paper?
- Do you ever seek feedback from your professor, a tutor, your friends, etc. on your writing?
- How much time do you spend on revising? What types of changes do you tend to make before submitting the final draft?
Chapter 4: Genres of Writing
Instructor Notes for Chapter 4
Video/Lecture: Understanding Genre
We have created a brief video that introduces students to genre and walks them through an example analysis. You may share the video link with your students in D2L (Video Link: Understanding Genre) or use the accompanying PPT to present the information during your class (PPT Link: Understanding Genre).
Class Reading
Use the following link to point students to the reading “You Can Learn to Write in General,” which describes how writing expectations are new in each context:
http://richardcolby.net/writ2000/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/wardle-2017-writing-in-general.pdf
Handout: Genre Analysis Questions
Use the following handout for guiding questions regarding conducting a genre analysis on written texts: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/graduate_writing/documents/Questions-for-Genre-Analysis.pdf
Handout: Genre Analysis Checklist
Use the following handout to show students a checklist for identifying and analyzing genres: https://pressbooks.howardcc.edu/essentials/chapter/checklist-for-identifying-genres/
Handout: In-Class Activities
Use the following link to access a handout with various in-class activities to give students practice with genre analysis: https://www2.cortland.edu/offices/ict/files-to-share/2019%2011-%20Rodrigue,%20Teaching%20Genre%20Activities%20Booklet.pdf
Handbook for Activities
Use the link to the Dynamic Activities for First-Year Composition (2023) handbook which provides a number of activities and student learning outcomes for understanding genre: https://cdn.ncte.org/nctev2/product/7590/samples/a4c04c2f-c9d4-4def-b84d-af69ce2396ea.pdf
By Allie Johnston
As Chapter 3 highlights the stages of the writing process, this chapter will introduce the various genres of writing. Your writing process may vary depending on the writing project you are assigned. For example, if you’re working on a research paper, one part of your act of prewriting would include gathering evidence and seeking research to support your claims. If you are working on the genre of a literacy narrative (as discussed in Chapter 5), your process of prewriting may include some guiding prompts to help you consider your history of reading and writing.
You will be asked to write in several different genres throughout your college career, many of which you have not been asked to complete in high school. You will need to learn how to identify what these genre expectations include in order to succeed on your assignments. Knowing the genre of your writing project is crucial in ensuring your writing is effective for its intended purpose and audience.
Beyond your time at Austin Peay, you will encounter genres all around you. These include professional genres, like memos or reports you may see in your workplace, as well as those you may encounter in your own community.
In this course, English 1010, you will be asked to write different genres for each major assignment. The genres we will cover include:
- Personal Narrative
- Rhetorical Analysis
- Annotated Bibliography
- Public Argument Letter
- Reflection
Defining Genre
Think of your favorite movie genre. You may say romantic comedy, horror, thriller, the list goes on and on! Now, think of your favorite music genre. Maybe you like to listen to rap, country, hip hop, pop, or jazz. Genres are all around us. Genres act as categories that help us know what to expect. We wouldn’t go into a horror movie expecting a warm and fuzzy ending. Just like movies and music, writing has its own genres as well.
This chapter focuses on understanding some of the genres of writing you will encounter in your first-year writing classes here at Austin Peay and beyond.
Guidelines for Completing a Genre Analysis
When you come across a new assignment, you will want to consider what genres your audience would expect and the boundaries you should stay in to meet the expectations of a genre. Genre analysis means paying attention to the patterns of communicating in different situations. There are several steps when it comes to analyzing a genre, including: collecting samples of the genre, discovering the rhetorical situation, noticing recurring patterns, and finally, drawing your own conclusions about what those patterns tell you about expectations in that genre.
As mentioned above, there are four key steps (listed below) to follow for performing a genre analysis. Some genres you may have more familiarity with than others. No matter the genre, the following questions can help you analyze a text effectively. These questions can be a good starting place for conducting analyses. The more genres you analyze, the more confident you will become.
Collect Samples of the Genre
The more samples you can compare, the more accurately you can see the complexity of the genre and notice patterns. For example, if I plan to analyze a podcast, I may begin listening to multiple podcasts to begin understanding elements of that genre.
- What is expected?
- What is considered appropriate versus inappropriate?
Identify the Rhetorical Situation
- Where does the genre appear?
- What topics does the genre focus on?
- Who uses this genre (think about the creator of the genre as well as the readers of the genre)?
- What is this genre’s ultimate purpose (to inform, to entertain, to extend, etc.)?
Discover Patterns
- What information is typically included? What information is excluded?
- How does the genre consider the use of rhetorical appeals (ethos/pathos/logos)? Do the examples of the genre follow a similar tone? Would some tones/approaches be considered inappropriate?
- How is the information delivered? What format is used? Is the genre typically presented in a longer form or more concision?
Draw your Own Conclusions
- What values does the genre’s audience seem to hold?
For example, think about the syllabi you receive during the first week in your college courses. The syllabus itself is a genre. There are certain bits of information you can expect to find within a syllabus, including policies (like on attendance or turning in work late), grade percentages, your professor’s contact information, and more.
Genre and Writing
Now that you’ve conducted your own genre analysis, let’s consider why it’s important to do so. After all, as college students, you’re pressed for time. Why would you spend extra time analyzing a genre instead of jumping right into completing the assignment? Performing a genre analysis can actually save you time by ensuring you approach your assignment correctly and effectively. Understanding the genre in front of you gives you a goal to stay focused on as you complete your task. Completing an assignment is less about guessing what your instructor expects and more about following clear goals, allowing you to make stronger writing choices.
Understanding the genre being asked of you in your writing class allows you to better understand:
- Your purpose for writing
- Your audience and their values
- Your format and organization
- Your word choices
Questions for Your Consideration
You can mix it up and conduct genre analysis on a variety of materials around you! Think of a wedding invitation, a letter, or a consumer manual on how to put together something in your house. Below are two activities using an academic text (a syllabus) and a real-world example (a wedding invitation).
Take a few minutes to conduct your own genre analysis on syllabi you’ve received in college. Follow the typical steps in a genre analysis.
1. Collect samples of the genre: Compare one syllabus to others you have
2. Notice recurring patterns: What do your syllabi have in common? For example, perhaps they all include contact information of the instructor.
3. Draw your own conclusions about the patterns. What are expectations in the genre of syllabi? Are these samples effective when it comes to the genre of a syllabus?
Real-World Application for Your Consideration
Consider the genre of a wedding invitation.
- First, look online for samples of wedding invitations. You can find recommended templates on sites like Minted and Canva.
- Then, begin analyzing the rhetorical situation. Who is typically the creator of wedding invitations? Who is the intended audience? What is this genre’s ultimate purpose (to inform, entertain, persuade, etc.)?
- Next, notice recurring patterns. What information is typically included? What type of information do you expect to be included in the invitation?
- Finally, draw your own observations. What makes an effective wedding invitation? What makes a wedding invitation stand out? What makes it useful?
Chapter 5: Writing Narrative
Instructor Notes for Chapter 5
Video/Lecture: Understanding Narrative Plot Line and Story Arc
We have created a brief video that provides students with strategies for reading critically. You may share the video link with your students in D2L (Video Link: Understanding Narrative Plot Line) or use the accompanying PPT to present the information during your class (PPT Link: Understanding Narrative Plot Lines).
Resource Link for Narrative Writing
https://noredink.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360046927372-Resources-for-Narrative-Writing
Handout: Public Narrative: Self & Us & Now
http://marshallganz.usmblogs.com/files/2012/08/Public-Narrative-Worksheet-Fall-2013-.pdf
Handout: Writing Towards a Climax
https://www.ereadingworksheets.com/writing-worksheets/writing-toward-a-climax.pdf
Activity: Vertical Time
https://www.ereadingworksheets.com/writing-worksheets/using-vertical-time.pdf
Activity: Don’t Tell, Show
https://www.ereadingworksheets.com/writing-worksheets/showing-not-telling-narrative-worksheet.pdf
By Lori Burdette
Narration is one of the most frequently used rhetorical modes second only to the argument. Almost anything that anyone writes contains some type of a narrative. Therefore, it appears in some form in all other rhetorical modes. While the most simplistic definition is expository writing used to convey action and tell a story, it is so much more than that. Writers use narration to share experiences or to explain processes or occurrences throughout a specific time period or even to reflect on the past. By telling a story, whether factual or fiction, they use action, time ordered events, characterization, dialogue, and vivid details along with a convincing plot or story arc to engage readers.
Narrative Requirements
Narratives have only two requirements: they must have a purpose, and they must follow a plot line or story arc. Narratives serve many different purposes. They can instruct, inform, recount, support, and entertain. Narratives also must follow a plot line or story arc. In other words, they are time ordered and have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Plot Line or Story Arc
The plot line or story arc is a very important aspect of a narrative. In fact, without one, a story cannot exist. A plot line or story arc is the literary element that describes the structure of the story and shows the causal arrangement of events and actions within the story. In narration, story arcs follow a chronological pattern, which means stories must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The most basic and traditional plot structure is a triangle, which has been described in detail by Aristotle and later by Gustav Freytag.
Aristotle’s Unified Plot
Aristotle used a triangle as shown in diagram one below to describe a story that moved along a linear path, following a chain of cause-and-effect events as it worked toward the solution of a conflict or crisis.
Freytag’s Five-Part Plot Design
Later, Freytag modified Aristotle’s basic triangle pattern by adding a rising action (or complication) and a falling action to the structure. Freytag used the five-part design shown in diagram two on the next page to describe a story’s plot.
Freytag’s triangle is often modified so that it extends slightly before and after the primary rising and falling action. This is similar to a “warm up” and “cool down” of a story.
Components of the Story Arc
The components of the story arc, then, are the exposition, which introduces the story and the situation before the conflict begins. An inciting action is often added to kick off the conflict and help move the story along. The rising action is the series of conflicts and crises that lead to the story’s climax. Without conflict, there cannot be a plot. Conflicts describe the dramatic struggle between two or more competing forces. There are four types of conflict: man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. self, and man vs. society. The climax is the most intense point in the story’s plot line. This is the turning point at which the conflict must be resolved either mentally or in action. The falling action describes all of the events that follow the climax as the story line is wrapping up, and the conflicts are nearing resolution. After the conflicts have been resolved, the story can come to a close, which is the conclusion or the tying together of all of the threads and sub-plots, which are any minor stories that occur within the main story.
Point of View
Narratives can be told from different points of view, first-person, second-person, or third-person. Using the first-person point of view, the author tells the story and participates in the action. This point of view uses first-person pronouns such as I, me, we, us, and ours. A first-person point of view is subjective, biased, and often emotionally charged. A second-person “you” point of view is not used as frequently. This point of view requires the speaker to directly address the reader as if he or she were a character in the story and participating in the action. This is also subjective, biased, and emotionally charged. A third-person point of view, on the other hand, is written from the perspective of someone who is not directly involved in the action but rather has observed the action from an outside perspective. This point of view uses third person pronouns such as he, she, it, or they. A third-person point of view is objective, unbiased, and free from unnecessary emotions.
Sensory Descriptions
Narratives also use sensory descriptions to help bring the stories to life and to help the readers bond with the characters, setting, and events. By using the five senses along with emotions, sensory descriptions engage readers by establishing the mood and adding realism to the story. They should be carefully thought out and should be balanced, relevant, and specific. While sensory descriptions add emotional depth to writing, using too many descriptions, irrelevant details, or vague language can be distracting and take away from the overall impact of the story. Therefore, good writers decide whether to use scene or summary descriptions. Telling a story by scene allows readers to visualize each event as vividly and precisely as if they were there. Telling a story by summary allows the readers to relate events concisely, focusing on the most important details and essentials of the event.
No matter which type of narrative you choose to write, the story must cover all of the important details. Use the reporter’s questions to ensure if all of the details have been covered. By asking who, what, when, where, why, and how, the narrative will not leave readers uninformed.
Dialogue
Dialogue also helps bring narratives to life. Used primarily for first person narratives using scene descriptions, dialogue engages readers by moving a story along and revealing the character’s feelings. Similar to descriptions, the incorporation of dialogue must be carefully planned out and placed within a story where it will be most relevant and make the most impact. No one wants to read four pages of a conversation between two or more people. Such excessive use would result in boring and uneventful discourse that fails to realistically describe the action. Below are some helpful tips for creating dialogue:
- Use dialogue to emphasize the most climatic points of a story
- Avoid creating “ping-pong” dialogue that is nothing more than a continuous back and forth discourse between two speakers
- Use action beats to break up dialogue
- Show, don’t tell information in a conversation
- Eliminate excessive words
Reflection
Reflection in narration is a technique that explores a writer’s reaction to past events and helps the writer both learn from those experiences and share them with others. Reflections are typically first-person accounts that are often biased and emotionally charged. Through reflection, writers can analyze the ways in which they have grown and use that to reframe current situations.
Narratives in the Real World
Now that we have discussed what narratives are and how they are made, let us look at narratives in the real world. Earlier in the chapter, we mentioned that narration is one of the most frequently used rhetorical modes second only to the argument. Many careers rely heavily on the use of narratives every day. For instance, health care professionals use narratives to record patient progress. From the time a patient enters the health care facility, medical assistants, nurses, and other providers begin writing a time ordered sequence that details the patient’s condition from the beginning of their treatment to the end of their treatment. Such narratives provide permanent records that can help doctors track medical trends and help decide best alternatives for future care. 911 operators begin gathering information from callers by answering the “reporter’s questions” and by gathering pertinent details. Those details are then relayed to first responders, who will then use narratives of their own to record their actions and observations on the scene. Project managers write narratives that record the specific details of tasks to record productivity, costs, losses, and schedule interruptions. These narratives help businesses record all stages of a project so that the information can be used for similar endeavors in the future.
Questions for Your Consideration
- In what ways do you use narration?
- Can you identify the plot line or story arc in the books that you have read?
Chapter 6: Rhetorical Analysis
Instructor Notes for Chapter 6
Video/Lecture: Conducting a Rhetorical Analysis
We have created a brief video that introduces students to rhetoric and walks them through an example analysis. You may share the video link with your students in D2L (Video Link: Conducting a Rhetorical Analysis) or use the accompanying PPT to present the information during your class (PPT Link: Conducting a Rhetorical Analysis).
Handout: SPACECAT
The SPACECAT handout breaks down speaker, audience, and context. (Handout Link: SPACECAT)
Handout: SOAPS
Use the attached handout and PowerPoint to have students practice applying SOAPS (Subject, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, and Speaker). (Handout Link: SOAPS)
Student Samples:
Refer students to the following sample rhetorical analysis essay, paying close attention to the thesis statement, organization, and rhetorical appeals used:
By Allie Johnston
So far, the chapters have discussed how to approach reading a text and examining its genre. In this chapter, we will look at further tools for examining texts.
What is Rhetoric?
Rhetoric refers to the study and uses of written, spoken, and visual language. Rhetoric can be used in conversations, discussions, negotiations, presentations, and more to convey ideas, influence opinions, and engage with others. Rhetoric helps in crafting persuasive arguments and delivering impactful speeches or presentations. Rhetoric is used everywhere; we typically associate the use of rhetoric with politics when a candidate is persuading a group of people to believe or act upon a certain issue. But rhetoric is included in choices we encounter in our everyday life: the way a billboard was constructed to try and appeal to its viewers; the way a museum is designed to encourage the flow of visitors; the way a stop sign is designed with a recognizable red octagon to let drivers know to brake.
Now that we have a basic understanding of the term “rhetoric,” let’s move into this chapter’s focus: conducting a rhetorical analysis.
Conducting a Rhetorical Analysis
One important aspect of examining a text is called a rhetorical analysis. To understand this term, first let’s break down both words:
Rhetoric means “the art of persuasion.”
Analysis means “breaking down the whole piece for the purpose of examining.”
To perform a rhetorical analysis, we are analyzing the use of author’s strategies to persuade their audience to do or think something, and determining how effective the piece is for its rhetorical situation. The rhetorical situation looks at audience, purpose, medium, and the context.
Audience: the intended recipients of a piece of communication. This includes the key readers or viewers that the creator focused on when composing the message.
Purpose: the intended effect or goal a writer or speaker wants to achieve with their communication.
Medium: the specific method used to deliver the message. This may include a speech, a written essay, a social media post, a video, and more.
Context: the circumstances surrounding the writing, which include the time (when the text was written), location (blog, academic journal, etc.), and the culture surrounding the text.
Rhetorical Triangle
One way to think of analyzing your rhetorical situation is to consider the rhetorical triangle.
It’s important to understand the rhetorical situation in order to determine the author’s choices about content, structure, delivery, and style. For example, think about how you would compose a text message to a friend versus your boss. To your friend, you may use a funny tone, inside jokes only you understand, and even emojis. To your boss, you may prefer to send a more direct message, with a professional tone. You might decide that a text message isn’t the appropriate medium for communicating with your boss. By conducting a rhetorical analysis, you are choosing how to construct and deliver your message most effectively based on your intended audience.
The goal of a rhetorical analysis includes three key parts: to explain what is happening in the text, why the author might have chosen to deliver the message in that way, and how those choices could affect the audience.
Difference in Rhetorical Analysis and Genre Analysis
While a genre analysis examines the conventions of a particular genre (for example, podcasts or newspaper articles), a rhetorical analysis is more specific to one text. It examines an individual author’s strategies in that example and evaluates if they achieved their goal or not.
Dissecting a Text: Questions to Consider
- How effective is the author in supporting their claim?
- Is the evidence used effective for its intended audience? Would the audience value the information presented to support the claim?
- What rhetorical moves is the author making, and how do they support their purpose? Consider word choices and content choices that clearly connect to the author’s purpose for writing.
- What tone is used in the piece? Does the author come across as friendly? In charge? Mad? Point to specific places in the text that create the tone. Consider how they work or do not work.
- Does the author try to appeal to your emotions? In what ways? Are there controversial words used?
- Do you believe the author? Do you trust them as a reliable speaker on this topic? Why or why not?
Identifying Intended Audience
Audience plays a major role in informing an author’s choices. Audience can alter the tone, delivery, and words used to deliver a message. Audience can also determine the use of visuals. As you analyze a text, look for the use of the author’s language that implies what the author assumes their audience values.
Intended Audience
The intended audience refers to the specific group of people a writer or speaker is actively trying to reach with their message, essentially the group they have in mind while crafting their communication.
Actual Audience
The actual audience is the group of people who ultimately encounter and engage with the message, which may include people not originally anticipated by the author.
Rhetorical Appeals
As you examine a text’s content and persuasion strategies, it’s helpful to understand the classical rhetorical appeals: ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos. These are classical Greek terms that come from Aristotle. In order to be rhetorically effective, and author must try to reach their audience in a variety of ways through rhetorical appeals:
Ethos: the persuasive power of the author’s credibility or character
Pathos: the persuasive power of the author’s appeal to emotions and values of the audience
Logos: the persuasive power of the author’s appeal to logic and evidence
Kairos: the importance of timing in an argument
These appeals can overlap. However, recognizing their distinctions can be helpful in navigating an author’s purpose, as well as when constructing your own arguments effectively. In the following sections, we’ll break down each appeal and provide examples.
Appealing to Ethos
Appeals to ethos consider two areas: the values of the audience and the author’s credibility. Audience values can include ideologies the audience holds or things that they find important, for example larger beliefs such as tradition, justice, patriotism, or more specific social, religious, or philosophical values such as feminism, capitalism, socialism, etc.
Ethos can also be considered from the author. Constructed ethos is determined by how the author presents their argument. How do they build the argument?
Example: A young entrepreneur pitches an idea to investors might highlight their successful past projects and detailed market research to build credibility even if they lack extensive experience in the industry.
Situated ethos is determined by the author’s positionality themselves. Are they an expert in the field? Do they have credibility among certain audiences as a celebrity?
Example: A respected doctor gives medical advice on a news program, where their expertise is primarily derived from their professional background and reputation as a physician, not necessarily how they present themselves in that particular interview.
Ethos comes back to the trust the reader feels for the speaker.
Questions to consider when analyzing an author’s ethos:
- Does the writer seem knowledgeable on the subject matter?
- What are the writer’s biases?
- What is the writer’s mood? (Upset? Annoyed? Passionate? Questioning? Happy?)
- What would it be like to spend time with the writer?
Appealing to Pathos
When an author relies on pathos, they are trying to reach the audience through their emotions. Typically, there are four basic ways writers can engage readers at an emotional level. By influencing the reader to identify: 1. With the writer; 2. With the topic; 3. With a particular group of readers; 4. With particular interests, values, beliefs, and emotions.
For example, the company Chiptole is appealing heavily to a viewer’s pathos through the two videos below. As you watch, can you find examples of the creator (Chiptole) trying to engage with viewers through an emotional level?
Questions to consider when analyzing an author’s pathos:
- How does the writer spark your interest in the subject matter?
- How does the writer make you care?
- What language does the writer use?
Appealing to Logos
Logos refers to the logical appeals. The author is using objective evidence and facts. Logical appeals could include: comparison, cause/effect thinking, elaboration, and evidential support through statistics.
Questions to consider when analyzing an author’s logos:
- How is the author trying to persuade the reader through reason?
- How is the author utilizing numbers such as statistics?
When appealing to logos, the writer may support their claims through reasons and evidence. Claims refers to the key points a writer wants the reader to accept. For example, I may claim that Golly G’s has the best ice cream in Clarksville. To support a claim, a writer must use reasons. Typically, a reason follows the claim after the word “because.” Consider my earlier claim: Golly G’s has the best ice cream in Clarksville because it is homemade with a wide variety of flavors.
Appealing to Kairos
Kairos refers to the importance of timing in an argument. In addition to an appropriate tone and structure, the message must come at the right time. For example, you wouldn’t mention your plans of going swimming at the beach on the day of a predicted hurricane.
Once you identify an author’s reasons to support their claims, then you can begin examining how effective those reasons are. Do the provided reasons really support the claim? Do the reasons need additional support? Do the reasons connect to the intended audience’s values and beliefs?
Rhetorical Analysis Example
It can be easier to understand conducting a rhetorical analysis by reviewing a sample.
The advertisement linked above is a McDonald’s ad from 2013 created by the Miami Ad School in Berlin, Germany. We can first break down our rhetorical triangle by noting that the creator is McDonald’s, a fast food chain that specializes in burgers.
Now, we can notice what stands out in this ad. You may notice the color red, the large, centered burger, the white lettering in the middle, etc. What is the intention behind the arrangement of the ad? It brings your eye to the center, to the burger, and to the short message.
Ultimately, the ad seems to be playing into audience member’s emotions (pathos) through the use of hunger to want something filling and meat-focused instead of a salad. This ad implies that the audience is choosing a salad but not actually desiring the salad. The ad excludes vegetarians or those who do not consume meat. The purpose appears to be to sell more burgers/Big Macs to the audience. Now, we would conclude our rhetorical analysis by answering: Is this ad effective in its purpose?
Rhetorical Analysis Application
- First, click on the following link to watch a Superbowl commercial from the company New York Life: Video Sample Link: New York Life Super Bowl LIV Ad.
- Watch the one-minute ad, considering what stands out at you.
- Write out your rhetorical triangle answers
- Now rewatch the ad, paying attention to the rhetorical appeals (ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos). How is the creator of the ad trying to appeal to your emotions, logic, credibility, and overall timing of the message (delivered during the Superbowl after spending millions of dollars to book)?
Questions for Your Consideration
- Think about one of your favorite songs. See if there is a musical video. Watch the video and consider how the lyrics are paired with certain visuals. As you watch, consider the rhetorical situation: What is the purpose of the video? How is it delivered? Who is its intended audience? Remember, you are making educated guesses on these choices.
- Find an advertisement for a business or product. A visual (billboard, social media posting, or magazine ad) works best, but you could also choose a short video commercial. Study the ad for a few minutes. What jumps out at you? What colors are used? What wording is used? What images are used? Now, go a step further to perform a rhetorical analysis. Who is the intended audience? What is the message conveyed? How are rhetorical appeals used (ethos, pathos, logos) or not used?
Chapter 7: Conducting Research
Instructor Notes for Chapter 7
Video/Lecture: How to Evaluate Sources Using the CRAAP Test
We have created a brief video that goes over the elements of CRAAP and how to apply them to potential sources for a paper. You may share the video link with your students in D2L (Video Link: CRAAP Test) or use the accompanying PPT to present the information during your class (PPT Link: CRAAP Test).
Handouts: Evaluating Websites
By Lori Burdette
Introduction
Research is such a daunting word, especially when coupled with anything resembling an essay assignment. However, much of what we do throughout any day is research. Research, by definition, is any action used to answer a question, to solve a problem, to learn a new skill, or even to broaden our knowledge on the things that we already know fairly well. Research purposefully presents NEW information, ideas, and/or proposals in an attempt to SOLVE problems. Therefore, research is basically the process of seeking knowledge, and it’s a good thing for us that there are so many different ways of conducting research. The way that we conduct research depends on the type of answers we are seeking as well as what we intend to do with those answers once we find them.
Types of Research
There are different types of research depending on the types of answers we hope to obtain or the problems we hope to solve.
Basic Research
Basic research is a good starting point used to understand and explain. This type of research is driven by curiosity or an interest in a topic or a particular field of study. This type of research begins with what, how, and why questions. For example: What are shoe horns? How are donuts made? Why were changes made to the traffic pattern on Fourth Street? The goal of basic research is to expand the existing knowledge base rather than to create or invent something new.
Applied Research
Applied research is a bit more in depth and is used to help people understand the nature of human problems and is used to help people more effectively control their environment. This type of research focuses on how questions. For example: How can we solve the parking issue on campus? How can we design a classroom to improve student comfort while increasing student productivity? The goal of applied research is to improve the human condition.
Evaluation Research
Evaluation research is used to measure the worth, quality, value, or effectiveness of a program, policy, product, procedure, and even more. Evaluation research helps people make informed decisions and also helps them identify areas of improvement by assessing whether something is fulfilling its intended objectives. This type of research uses to what extent and what questions. For example: To what extent is the new sports center meeting the expectations of the community, fans, and athletes? What are the positive and negative effects of the changes made to the library’s hours? The goal of evaluation research is to uncover hidden issues, identify areas of improvement, and improve user experiences.
Action Research
Action research is used to solve problems within a program, organization, or community. This approach combines conducting research and taking action through repeated processes such as reflection, planning, implementation, and evaluation. This method is popular in the social sciences where researchers often look toward their own practices with the goal of making improvements. This type of research uses how and what questions. For example: How can students improve their test scores by engaging in group study sessions? What impact does peer tutoring have on student success rates? The goal of action research is to bring about constructive and encouraging transformation by addressing “real-world” concerns.
Steps in the Research Process
The research process is made up of many separate steps designed to make the process easier and to avoid becoming overwhelmed. To begin:
- Decide on a topic or carefully review the topic that has been assigned.
- Narrow the topic to fit the scope of the assignment. By scope we are referring to the page number or word count requirements as well as the time frame during which the assignment will be completed.
- Gather background information by conducting basic research to answer what, how, and why questions
- Create a research question that addresses the issues and concerns surrounding your topic.
- Develop a working thesis that narrows the topic to a single point the readers will understand, names and makes a significant assertion about the topic, conveys the purpose of the research, and provides a preview of how the project will be organized.
Where to Find Sources
There are many ways to find sources depending on the type of information you are looking for. Below, we will discuss a few of the most common methods.
When faced with a research project, most industrious students’ first thoughts are to jump on Google and grab the first thing that pops up. While this may seem like a good idea, it has its share of advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, internet search engines such as Google are often a good place to start for basic background research for non-academic topics, current events, and corporate or organization information, especially when you don’t know exactly what you are looking for. These preliminary searches often uncover a variety of sources and provide suggestions for more detailed and specific research later on. On the down side, basic internet searches may not produce credible sources, and some search engines like Google are now controlled by AI, which may yield content that is both one-dimensional and possibly even plagiarized.
Google Scholar
Instead of “googling” a subject and hoping for the best, there are some better alternatives such as Google Scholar. This web-based search engine offers an easy-to-use way to access scholarly literature on a variety of topics. The search parameters can be easily adjusted by selecting a specific date or article type. Google Scholar does have a few disadvantages, however. While their source offerings are expansive, they are certainly not comprehensive, and there may be a charge to access many full-text articles.
Library Searches
Today’s libraries are modern, tech-driven, and even fun to use. In fact, most of the materials in today’s libraries not only can be searched, but also can be used WITHOUT ever having to leave the comforts of your dorm, and the best thing is most sources are available to many users simultaneously, so you no longer have to wait days or weeks for that desired source that was “checked out” to another user to be returned.
Library Databases
Public and campus libraries provide a wide variety of sources including access to content specific databases that contain even more materials. All of these can be accessed online via the library’s website. Advanced database searches can be specialized by selecting specific research parameters such as subject, author, publication, date range, full-text, and peer reviewed sources. Databases such as Academic One File are easy to use and contain materials on all subjects.
Evaluating Sources: The CRAAP Test
Most of today’s research is conducted online, often making it difficult to evaluate sources. Therefore, it is necessary for us to scrutinize our results to determine the effectiveness of our online sources. The CRAAP method, below, is one way to evaluate online sources:
- C = Current (When was the information published, posted, revised, or updated? Is the information current or outdated? Are the links functional?)
- R = Relevant (Does the information relate to your topic or answer your research question? Who is the intended audience? Is the information too advanced or too elementary for your needs? Have you looked at a variety of sources before determining to use this one?)
- A = Authoritative (Who or what is the source of the information? Are the author’s or organizational affiliations provided? What are the author’s qualifications to write on the topic? Has contact information such as an author or publisher’s email address been provided? Do the TLDs reveal anything about a source - .com, .gov, .edu, .org, or .net?)
- A = Accurate (How reliable, correct, or truthful is the information? Where does it come from? Is the information supported by evidence? Has the information been peer-reviewed or refereed? Can the information be verified in other sources? Are there any spelling, mechanical, or grammatical errors?)
- P = Purposeful (Why does this information exist? What is the purpose of the information? To sell? To inform? To persuade? To entertain? Do the authors make their intentions clear? Is the information fact, opinion, propaganda? Is the point of view objective or impartial? Are there political, ideological, cultural, religious, institutional, or personal biases?)
Using Research to Aid in Topic Selection
Sometimes developing a topic for an essay can become quite challenging. Therefore, it is often necessary to conduct some basic research to help us choose the perfect topic. If given a topic for the project, conduct some pre-research or background research to find information about the topic that interests you or information that answers the question posed by the assignment. If you are free to choose your own topic, begin with what interests you and conduct basic research to help you brainstorm. For instance, if during your basic research you looked for information on how hurricanes are formed, you can use what you have found to lead to related topics such as disaster recovery, emergency management, emergency preparedness, or even climate change. Most online databases will even suggest related topics. Make a list of anything and everything that you find during those basic information searches including any links you may have used. You will be surprised to discover how one basic search activity can produce several possible topics. Keep in mind that research is an ever-changing process, so do not be afraid to adjust and change your topic as you discover new information and new ideas. The following image illustrates how to use the Academic One File database to search a topic:
Developing the Research Question
All research begins with a question based on the type of answer we hope to find. There are four main types of research questions: descriptive, comparative, relational, and explanatory, each one coinciding with the types of research:
- Descriptive questions are the most basic and ask when, where, why or how an event or occurrence happened.
- Comparative questions help identify the similarities and differences between two or more units or settings.
- Relational questions answer how, why, and to what extent two or more elements are related.
- Explanatory questions help identify cause and effect scenarios.
Well-written research questions give the research project focus; therefore, the research questions should be precise as well as reasonable yet complex enough to yield a thorough answer. For example, an explanatory research question might look something like this: What are the causes of burn-out in first year college students?
Using Research to Support Your Ideas
It is important to support your own ideas and assertions with fact-based evidence that can be found by conducting thorough research. When we research, we are actually looking for materials that agree with or support what we have to say. Again, we begin with what we already know and then fill in the gaps with basic research; we then conduct more specific research to answer any questions not covered by the basic preliminary research. By supporting your own ideas with information that is current, relevant, accurate, authoritative, and purposeful demonstrates your credibility as a researcher to your readers. Documenting the sources that you incorporate into your own writing will be addressed in another chapter.
Organizing Your Research
Conducting research is often challenging, and it is even more challenging keeping track of the resources you have found. Therefore, you will want an effective tool to help you keep track of and organize all of the sources that you have gathered for a project. One such tool is a bibliography, which can be helpful in many ways:
- By keeping track of the sources found about a specific topic
- By avoiding plagiarism by providing complete citations for all sources found
- By establishing depth of scholarship by showing a variety of sources
- By helping other researchers by having a shareable list of sources on a specific topic
There are different types of bibliographies depending on their purpose:
- Subject bibliographies help researchers find significant and applicable materials on a specific subject or field of study. Subject bibliographies are often created during pre-research or basic background research activities.
- Working bibliographies aid in organization during the early stages of a research project. This is a list of all of the sources that you have gathered “so far” as well as citation information and date of access. Working bibliographies are continuously updated throughout the research process.
- Annotated bibliographies are the most detailed and contain the complete citation for the sources along with annotations (two brief paragraphs) that discuss the content of the source as well as the source’s potential usefulness.
How to Create a Bibliography
Complete the following steps to create a bibliography:
- For any bibliography, follow MLA 9th edition formatting for the Works Cited page as the citation format is the same for both
- The words Annotated Bibliography will be centered at the top of the page in bold print (do not use bold print for the Works Cited page).
- All citations are in alphabetical order and formatted using hanging indentation
- Use bold print for the citations in bibliographies only. (Do not use bold print for any part of the Works Cited page).
- For an annotated bibliography, follow each citation with a two-paragraph annotation. Paragraph one is a brief summary of what the article contains (75 – 100 words). Paragraph two is a brief discussion of how the information may or may not be useful (75 – 100 words).
A sample annotated bibliography can be found in the supplementary materials for this chapter.
Summary
While conducting research may seem intimidating at first, knowing what you are looking for and why you are looking for it helps reduce stress and leads to more purposeful and productive research results. Give yourself plenty of time and do not be afraid to reach out to your professor, campus library staff, and even other students for suggestions.
Questions for Your Consideration
- What area of interest sparks your curiosity within your field of study?
- How relevant is this topic to your academic discipline or future career goals?
- What specific question are you trying to answer through your research?
- Explore Google, Google Scholar, and various library databases to help with topic selection.
- Create a research question for each of the four main types: descriptive, comparative, relational, and explanatory.
Chapter 8: Introduction to Argument
Instructor Notes for Chapter 8
Video/Lecture: Writing the Introduction and Thesis Statement
We have created a brief video that goes over how to write an effectiev introduction and thesis statement. You may share the video link with your students in D2L (Video Link: Writing an Introduction and Thesis Statement) or use the accompanying PPT to present the information during your class (PPT Link: Writing an Introduction).
Handout: Public Argument Paper Outline Worksheet
This worksheet provides students with a place to begin organizing their public argument paper and ensures that they will meet the assignment requirements for content. Handout Link: Public Argument Outline Worksheet
Handout: Logical Fallacies (courtesy of Dr. Olja Baker)
The following handout covers some common logical fallacies and can be used in class to help students practice writing examples of their own. Once students have made examples, ask them to share with the class and guess which fallacy is being used and why it is fallacious. (Handout Link: Logical Fallacies Sheet)
Activity: Think, Pair, Share
- Think: Assign students a non-persuasive text and ask them to add persuasion to it
- Pair: Ask students to share how they added persuasion with a partner and explain their strategies
- Share: Share with the class and discuss the most successful strategies
Additional Resources
- Video Link: "How to Write Strong Essay Body Paragraphs" by Scribbr
- Video Link: "Writing a Conclusion Paragraph" by APSU Writing Center
- Website Link: "Organizng Your Argument" by Purdue OWL
By Danielle Ladd-Suits and Lori Burdette
For many people, the word ‘argument’ brings to mind tense conversations and disagreements, maybe even insults. In this chapter, we’ll use ‘quarrel’ to describe a disagreement centered on insult, often rife with logical fallacies. We’ll use the term ‘argument’ to describe a statement or rhetorical question supported by verifiably true evidence. In this chapter, you will learn more about all the considerations that go into making a solid argument and avoiding simple quarrel as much as possible.
Argument vs. Persuasion
The terms argument and persuasion are often used interchangeably. However, there are slight differences between the two. An argument aims to win readers’ agreement with an assertion or claim by engaging their powers of reasoning. Persuasion, on the other hand, aims to influence readers’ actions, or their support for an action, by engaging their belief and feelings. Most effective points-of-view contain elements of both methods.
Components of an Argument
Academic arguments contain the following components:
- Introduction and Thesis Statement: Introduces the topic that is to be argued and provides your stance on the topic
- Evidence: Provides reasons, data, and support needed to defend your stance
- Opposing Views and Rebuttals: Acknowledges and addresses contrasting views on the topic
- Conclusion: Calls the audience to action and suggests how you would like them to respond to the argument
Choosing a Topic for Argument
Before you can write your argument, you must choose a topic. If you are not assigned a topic, read the assignment prompt and make a list of possible topics that would meet the requirements. Determine the assignment’s purpose and what you hope to achieve by writing it. If you have to write to a specific audience, consider what topics concern them. Finally, look for a topic that connects to your experiences, interests, and concerns. The more you care about the topic, the easier and more enjoyable it will be to write the paper.
Think about the required length of the assignment and make sure your topic is narrow enough to be interesting in that space. Argument topics that are too broad in scope often break down because there is not enough room to cover all the important information. If your topic is too narrow, you may have difficulty finding support for your arguments or you may not have enough to talk about.
Keep in mind not all topics are suitable for arguments. A suitable topic begins with a debatable question. Topics of fact cannot be debated. Consider the following:
How are animals used to test cosmetics? vs. Should animals be used to test cosmetics?
The first question will not produce a debatable topic since the answer will be based on known facts and the resulting paper would be a report on these facts rather than an argument. The second question will produce a debatable topic since there will be differing answers based on opinions and points-of-view. Some people may defend animal testing, and some people may protest against it.
Moving from Topic to Thesis Statement
Once you have a debatable topic, it’s time to create a powerful thesis statement. An effective argument thesis states both your stance on the topic and hints at the evidence you will use to support it.
To write a thesis statement for an argument based on your debatable topic question, take the following steps:
- Pinpoint different responses to the question
- Conduct preliminary research on the different views
- Choose your stance and answer the question you developed with a strong claim
- Briefly explain why you make this claim
Let’s look at the debatable topic question we developed in the previous section:
Should animals be used to test cosmetics?
As was mentioned in the previous section, there are at least two possible responses to this question: “yes, animals should be used for testing,” and “no, animals should not be used for testing.” After conducting some quick research, you have decided that your stance is against testing. You write your claim like this:
Animals should not be used to test cosmetics.
Now you need to explain why you hold this stance by hinting at the evidence you will discuss in the paper. The easiest way to do this is to add a “because” statement after the claim; however, your thesis statement could be several sentences long if you want.
Animals should not be used to test cosmetics because it causes harm to animals and current regulations are insufficient to mitigate this harm.
This thesis statement acts as a roadmap for the reader of your argument. They know that your paper will cover information about the harm caused to animals and explain why the regulations are not sufficient.
Common Thesis Statement Errors
When writing your thesis statement, remember to avoid the following:
- Announcing the topic: The thesis should never include phrases such as “this paper will discuss,” “this paper will be about,” or “this paper will focus on,” and so forth.
- Making a statement of fact: Statements of fact cannot be argued.
- Asking a question: The thesis should answer the question.
- Making a thesis that is too broad: The topic can easily stray from the focus.
- Making a thesis that is too narrow: The topic cannot be fully explored and will not be interesting.
- Writing a vague thesis statement: A vague thesis makes the argument unclear and loses reader’s interest from the start.
Writing the Introduction
Writing the introduction is one of the most difficult parts of writing any paper because you may not know what you want to say yet. However, if you have developed your thesis statement it can be a bit easier. Most introductions will be made up of three parts: an attention grabber, background information, and the thesis statement. Think of it as a funnel, going from a broad idea of the topic to your specific claim about it.
An attention grabber is a strategy to get your audience engaged with your topic and wanting to know more, so it should appear in the first few sentences of your paper. The attention grabber could be an interesting quote from one of your sources or a brief anecdote (or story) related to the topic. It could be a statistic or fact that you think will shock your reader. You could even ask a rhetorical question that will get your reader thinking about their stance on the issue. Whatever strategy you choose, make sure the connection to your topic is plain.
Background information serves as the middle section of the introduction. Its job is to provide some context for the attention grabber and make the topic clearer for the reader. It also serves as a transition connecting the attention grabber to the thesis statement.
Supporting Your Claim
In addition to finding a debatable topic, crafting a strong thesis, and writing an attention-grabbing introduction, you must also support your claim with distinctive evidence organized into logical body paragraphs that address one aspect of your claim at a time.
Evidence comes in several forms, including verifiable facts and statistics, credible examples, and expert opinions. It is best to have several pieces of corroborating evidence to support each claim in an argument because it can show that multiple studies have shown the same results or multiple people have held the same opinion. Evidence often includes using outside sources; therefore, you must make sure to use your supporting evidence responsibly by giving credit to the sources and authors that you used in your argument. In doing so, you are also providing your readers with the means to locate this information so that they may explore the topic in detail on their own. Be sure to follow your instructor’s guidelines for documentation. In this class, we use MLA; however, some instructors may also allow other documentation styles such as APA or the Chicago Style.
Between pieces of evidence, a good argument includes sentences that provide context for the evidence and any relevant explanations for clarity. Don’t rely on your sources to explain themselves. This might also include transitions that illustrate connections between pieces of evidence. Depending on how complex the argument is, there may be several claims to defend, and each claim needs its own paragraph and set of supporting evidence.
Logical Fallacies
Logical fallacies are common errors in reasoning that occur when arguments are structured in a way that appears to be logical but is actually flawed. These misleading tactics can be persuasive, but they do not provide a solid foundation for rational discourse. The flaw can appear in any part of the ethos, pathos, logos, or kairos aspects of a statement. Understanding logical fallacies is crucial for critical thinking and constructing well-reasoned arguments. To help you identify some of the most common logical fallacies, we have provided some definitions and examples below.
Ad Hominem: Attacking the person rather than their claims
- Example: Why should we trust George’s opinion on the budget? Just look at how he’s dressed.
Anecdotal Evidence: Making a generalization about a topic based on one story
- Example: It’s ok to go out in the sun without sunscreen. My sister was outside without sunscreen for hours and didn’t get burned.
Appeal to False Authority: Using an authority who is not an expert on the topic to support a claim
- Example: My favorite musician said that eating broccoli causes cancer, so you should stop eating it.
Bandwagon: Supporting a claim by stating that “everyone else” believes it
- Example: Jaywalking is fine because everyone else on campus does it.
False Cause: Claiming that an event caused an effect just because the effect occurred after the event
- Example: A black cat crossed my path, and then I stubbed my toe on the table. The black cat made me stub my toe.
False Dilemma: Offering only a few options when many more nuanced options exist
- Example: Either we spend this money on building a new school or on nothing at all.
Slippery Slope: Claiming that a minor first step will lead to other steps that will end in disaster
- Example: If I forget my wallet, then I won’t be able to get gas. If I can’t get gas, I will be stranded in the middle of nowhere. If I’m stranded in the middle of nowhere, I’ll be attacked by a stranger. So, if I forget my wallet, I will be attacked by a stranger.
Straw Man: Claiming that your opponent holds an easily opposed view that they do not, so you can defeat that view and claim to have defeated your opponent
- Example: (Argument about removing some trees to build a playground) My opponent wants to cut down all the trees in the park for a project that only benefits some people. Clearly we should leave the trees as they are for everyone to enjoy.
Check out “Fallacies” on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy for more examples: Link to IEP.
Addressing the Opposition
As we mentioned earlier, an argument isn’t an argument if no one disagrees with your claim. At first, it may seem self-defeating to call attention to opposing points-of-view; however, acknowledging counterarguments and opposing viewpoints not only signals that you are well-aware of every side of the argument and of others’ feelings, but it also signals that you are ready establish your credibility as an author and researcher and establish common ground with the opposition. While there is no designated area in the essay for the counterargument, it is best to address the opposition early in the essay or whenever you expect to encounter a disagreement.
Addressing the opposition must be done respectfully, accurately, honestly, and objectively. Think about how you might react if you are reading an argument, and the writer tries to make you look like an idiot by misrepresenting your stance. Are you likely to be swayed by their arguments? Probably not.
It is not enough just to state the opposing point of view. You must then pose your own argument that states why you disagree with the opposing statement and present facts and evidence to support your rebuttal.
Writing the Conclusion
At the end of any argument there should be a final statement that concludes the defense of your claim. The conclusion paragraph should restate the thesis, summarize your overall argument, remind the audience of the importance of the topic, and tell them what to do with the information. This may be a call to specific action, a suggestion for further study, or a connection to a broader universal truth.
Real World Arguments
Argumentation is the most frequently used rhetorical mode and has many practical uses outside the classroom. In fact, argumentation is all around us. For instance, if the office copier breaks down, employees might need to present a case to purchase a new copier over repairing the old one. In doing so, they must provide evidence supporting the cost of the new copier over the cost of repairing the old one in addition to the benefits of replacing the old copier while avoiding any logical fallacies such as appealing to common sense or ignoring the issue fallacies. Not everyone will be on board with the situation, so the employees must also be prepared to face opposition and provide an adequate rebuttal. Scenarios such as this happen every day. Knowing how to create a claim, present valid and factual supporting evidence, address the opposition, and avoid logical fallacies will help ensure successful results.
Questions for Your Consideration
- In what ways do you use argument?
- Think of a recent argument that you have participated in. Can you identify the argument components?
- Can you identify any logical fallacies present in the arguments you have encountered?
- What do you think are the most common strategies people use to support their arguments? Why do they use these strategies?
Chapter 9: Writing for Specific Audiences
Instructor Notes for Chapter 9
Video/Lecture: Writing a Public Argument Letter
We have created a brief video that walks students through how to write a public argument letter. You may share the video link with your students in D2L (Video Link: Writing a Public Argument Letter) or use the accompanying PPT to present the information during your class (PPT Link:Writing a Public Argument Letter).
Activity: Practice Audience Analysis
Ask students to consider a time they made a request to theirfamily members or friends about something they really wanted. For example, having their parents agree to them going on a trip, purchasing something they/ve wanted, or letting them make a certain choice. How did they approach reaching them?
Practice with the chart from the chapter, adding any additional questions they find applicable from the starting list of questions.
| Who is the audience: experts, peers, laypersons? | |
| Does my audience fit into a single demographic or am I addressing a varied group? | |
| How does the specific occasion affect tone? | |
| What order do they need the information in? |
Activity: Writing for Different Audiences
Ask students to describe how they might rewrite the following text to appeal to a preschool class or for a presentation to city council members:
Rain is a natural and essential part of the Earth's water cycle, which is vital for sustaining life on our planet. The process of rain formation begins in the atmosphere with the evaporation of water from the Earth's surface, primarily from the oceans, lakes, rivers, and other bodies of water. This water vapor rises into the sky and cools down, forming clouds. Within clouds, these small water droplets or ice crystals continue to collide and stick together. As more droplets merge, they grow larger and larger until they become too heavy to be supported by the updrafts of air that keep clouds afloat. When the droplets are large enough and the air temperature is above freezing, they fall to the Earth as rain.
Handout: Audience Analysis Worksheets
Additional Resources: Audience Analysis
By Danielle Ladd-Suits and Allie Johnston
Arguments are meant to be read by an audience with the goal of convincing them to see the topic from your point of view. For this reason, you must consider who your audience is from the beginning and tailor your writing to address them. As you may recall from the chapter on rhetorical analysis, there are a variety of components to consider when crafting the statements of an argument. These same rhetorical considerations of ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos can apply to choosing pieces of evidence that accurately convey the crux of your argument to your audience.
Conducting an Audience Analysis
You should conduct an audience analysis at some point during the writing process. An audience analysis helps you understand a crucial element of the rhetorical situation so that you can tailor information to fulfill the specific needs and expectations of the audience you are addressing. It can also help you focus your argument on the issues that will matter to that audience.
As you begin to plan your argument, identify specifics about your audience. Determine the demographics, values, beliefs, and knowledge level of your readers. Are they experts, peers, or laypersons? Are they friendly, neutral, or hostile towards your topic? What power dynamics exist between you and the audience? This analysis will guide your approach to the argument, informing everything from word choice to graphics.
The following questions can be helpful as a starting place for your analysis:
- How many audiences do you have? (list them)
- What do they need? want?
- What is most important to them?
- What are they least likely to care about?
- What order do they need the information in?
- What do you have to say or what are you doing in your research that might surprise them?
- What do you want them to think, learn, or assume about you? What impression do you want your writing or your research to convey?
- Who is the audience: experts, peers, laypersons?
- What is the average age of the audience?
- What education level has my audience achieved?
- What types of jobs does the audience hold?
- Does my audience fit into a single demographic or am I addressing a varied group?
- How does the specific occasion affect tone?
Using a combination of these questions can allow you time to consider your audience from various perspectives. While it may seem time-consuming, answering the questions can help you create a more effective audience analysis earlier on without having to redo your work. The chart below breaks down a sample audience analysis together.
Example Audience Analysis
Let’s walk through conducting an example audience analysis together.
Let’s say I want to write a letter to my neighbors encouraging them to clean up after their pets. Using the guiding questions, I may begin by considering my own ethos/credibility with my neighbors and the dynamics we have. I consider myself to be on friendly terms with my neighbors and as a dog owner myself, to have credibility on the subject matter. There may be some hostility towards the subject since some people may feel targeted, but overall, the subject matter is not threatening. Since I plan to post this on our neighborhood Facebook group, I want the message to be direct and concise with a clear message of encouraging others to clean up after their pets.
Sample Analysis: Encouraging Neighbors to Clean Up After Their Pets
| Who is the audience: experts, peers, laypersons? | Laypersons; fellow neighbors |
|---|---|
| Does my audience fit into a single demographic or am I addressing a varied group? | Varied group |
| How does the specific occasion affect tone? | This situation is not overly serious, and I want to be concise and direct |
| What order do they need the information in? | I should lead with our goal of keeping a clean and enjoyable neighborhood for all and then move into the problem and solutions (using the pet waste stations, bringing own dog bags, picking up after your dog). |
As I draft my post to my audience, I will consider building off my own ethos with them knowing me as a neighbor, quickly address our common goal, and move into solutions for the problem.
Choosing Tone and Language
Striking the right tone builds rapport and makes your argument more persuasive. A formal tone is typically used for academic audiences, while a more casual tone can be appropriate for a blog or opinion piece aimed at a general audience. To check your tone, read your work aloud. If the words don't sound right—too angry, too humble, too excited, etc.—they might not convey the right tone to a reader.
Choose vocabulary and sentence structure that your audience will comprehend easily. Strong words can be powerful in conveying a serious or persuasive tone, while mild words are more suitable for a calm or empathetic tone. Adjectives and adverbs can enhance tone but be mindful of overuse. Choose them strategically to emphasize key points or feelings. Consider the examples in the chart below. What other words have mild and strong versions? When might you use each?
| Base Word | Mild | Strong |
|---|---|---|
| angry | upset | fuming |
| fight | argument | assault |
| walk | stroll | trek |
| meeting | gathering | celebration |
Choosing Rhetorical Appeals and Devices
The rhetorical appeals and devices you choose to include are highly dependent on what you know about your audience. For example, the anticipated age of your audience is important. Younger audiences might respond better to humor and modern references, while older audiences may appreciate more traditional or formal language. Understanding cultural nuances is also essential; certain metaphors or analogies may resonate deeply with one group but be misunderstood by another. Using complex metaphors or technical jargon may be suitable for an academic audience but could alienate a lay audience. When addressing a group of experts, the use of specialized terminology and advanced rhetorical strategies can demonstrate credibility and engagement. In contrast, an uninformed audience may benefit from analogies, repetition, and clear explanations to grasp complex concepts. Additionally, aligning rhetorical devices with the audience's interests can make the content more relatable and engaging.
Choosing Types of Evidence
Depending on your audience and purpose, certain pieces of evidence may be more persuasive or appropriate than others. Different styles of presenting evidence can affect the overall tone and ultimate success. Use examples, statistics, and studies that your readers can relate to and that support your claims. For example, a personal anecdote can be powerful for engaging an emotional response, while empirical evidence is often more convincing in academic or scientific contexts. Use a mix of types to provide a well-rounded argument.
Present all evidence in a clear and accessible manner. This means avoiding jargon, explaining complex concepts, and providing context when necessary. Use visual aids such as charts or graphs to help illustrate data and provide summaries of key points for those who may not have the time or ability to read extensive texts. In addition, include descriptive text and format information for screen readers and other adaptive technologies. Make sure any statistics or studies you reference are current and accurately represented.
Questions for Your Consideration
- What types of audiences do you think you will have to write for once you are out of college?
- How can you find out more information about an audience if you do not know them personally?
- How would your tone, language, use of rhetoric, and evidence change when trying to make the following arguments with your parents vs. with your boss?
- I need a new laptop
- I need a vacation
- I am overworked
Chapter 10: Citing Sources Using MLA 9
Instructor Notes for Chapter 10
Video/Lecture: Citing Sources in Your Paper
Citing sources in-text as they are used can be confusing. We have created a video that covers the basics of citing quotations, paraphrases, and summaries correctly in text. You may share the video link with your students in D2L (Video Link: Citing Sources in Your Paper) or use the accompanying PPT to present the information during your class (PPT Link: Citing Sources in Your Paper).
Activity: Works Cited Citation Practice (courtesy of Jessica White)
The following handout provides students with the publication information for several sources. Ask your students to use the information in this chapter to write the correct Works Cited citation for each. (Handout Link: Works Cited Citation Practice)
By Keely Mohon-Doyle
Throughout your college career, you will be asked to use sources—books, articles, websites, even videos—in your writing to support your claims. It is important that you do so ethically by giving the creators of those sources credit for their words and ideas. Several academic and professional organizations have created standardized styles for giving this credit: journalists use the Associated Press (AP) style; scientists use the American Psychological Association (APA) or the Council of Science Editors (CSE) styles; historians use Chicago style. It is important to ask your professors what style they prefer in their courses.
In the humanities, where ENGL 1010 lives, we use the style created by the Modern Language Association (MLA). This style requires you to cite your sources in-text as you use them and in a Works Cited page at the end of your paper. This chapter will provide you with basic information about how to incorporate material from your sources and provide publication information for your readers.
Please be aware that we do not expect you to read this like a regular chapter. That would be awfully boring, and you likely would not retain much information. Rather, our hope is that you will use it as a reference that you can return to throughout the semester and as you need it in the future.
If you do not see your specific citation situation in this chapter, you can make an appointment with the APSU Writing Center for support or visit the MLA section of the Purdue OWL: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/index.html.
In-Text Citations
Every time you use a source, you must cite it in-text.
Citing a Short Direct Quotation
A direct quotation is the author’s own words. A short quotation may range from a single word to several sentences, but should be as short as possible. To cite a direct quotation, follow these steps:
- Introduction
- Identify where the information comes from by stating the author or authors’ full name the first time you use the source and their last name(s) every time after. Never use just a first name because this can cause confusion if several authors in your Works Cited have the same name.
- Include some of your own words to help transition to the quotation. This is usually done with a dialogue tag.
- Example: Li states,
- Example: According to Smith and Jones,
- Example: In the article by Sarah Stein,
- Quotation
- Place the author’s words in quotation marks (“…”) and copy the exact language used in the source, including emphases found in the original, such as italics, bold, and underline.
- Citation
- Include the first word(s) that appear in the Works Cited page entry for the source, making it easy for your reader to look up. In most cases this is the author’s last name.
- The most basic in-text citation includes the author’s last name and the page number(s) where the quotation can be found.
- Example (known author with page number): (Smith 3)
- If there are two authors, include all authors’ last names. If there are more than two, only use the first author’s name and add “et al.”
- Example (two known authors with page number): (Smith and James 5)
- Example (three or more known authors with page numbers): (Li, et al. 5)
- If no page number is given, but there are clear paragraphs, you can use the author’s last name and paragraph number.
- Example (known author with no page number, paragraphs available): (Stein par. 2)
- If no page numbers are available, just use the author’s last name.
- Example (known author with no page number): (Smith)
- If the author is unknown, use a shortened version of the title and punctuate it using italics (if a book or longer work) or quotation marks (if an article or shorter work).
- Example (unknown author of book with page number): (The Jungle 74-75)
- Example (unknown author of article with page number): (“A Modest Proposal” 1)
- If you are citing a song or a video, you can provide the timestamp for where the information begins.
- Example (timestamp for song or video): (Nelson 1:32)
- Punctuation
- Place the period after the citation. If the quotation ends in an exclamation point or question mark these go inside the quotation marks, but there should still be a period after the citation.
- Explanation
- Tell the reader what the quotation means, how it fits with other elements you have discussed, and/or its importance to your claims. A good rule is to include at least 2-3 lines of your own ideas alongside every quotation. This shows your audience that you have thought through the information.
Example (quoted sentence as focus): In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, the author states, “Hart’s Brow had never been a home for anyone. It was a place designed for temporary use, somewhere you went to, soaked up, and left behind” (Chambers 142). The description of the monastery emphasizes the fact that it was designed to be a retreat where monks and travelers could find comfort before returning to the chaos of their daily lives.
Example (quoted sentence incorporated into writer’s ideas): The robot’s assertion that “It’s a remnant I have” reveals that current robots are not only made out of parts from past robots, but they also hold some of their memories (Chambers 91).
Example (quoted phrases incorporated into writer’s ideas): Chambers uses phrases like “endless stacks of humanity” and “intense feeling of containment” to illustrate the character’s growing unrest in their current position (7). (Note: Here you do not have to include the author’s name in the citation because the author is clear; however, if you feel safer using it every time, that is ok.)
Citing a Long Direct Quotation (Block Quotation)
A long quotation, or block quotation, is a quotation that is more than four lines. To cite a block quotation, use a complete sentence in your own words leading into it followed by a colon (:). Skip to the next line and write the quotation. Do not use quotation marks. Instead, indent the entire quotation half an inch (.5”). Put the citation after the final punctuation. Then, continue your paragraph on the next line.
Example:
In his book Identity in the COVID Years, Rob Cover discusses how hospital policies designed to protect patients had unintended negative consequences for their loved ones:
Across much of the world, risk-averse hospitals participating in practices to reduce the likelihood of in-and-out transmission of COVID-19 prevented visitors, which included preventing families from being with those who were seriously unwell and those who were dying (whether COVID-19 or other causes). The desire to be with the dying other in the shock of the pandemic was for many a palpable force, and the denial through regulatory practices was seen as an injury because it prevented the fulfilment of the deeply felt obligation towards the dying. (Cover 101)
Writing policies that balanced the need to keep people safe and gave people comfort was particularly difficult at the beginning of the pandemic when knowledge of the disease and treatment options were limited.
Citing a Paraphrase or Summary
Sometimes you may need to provide a general overview of all the main points in a source (summary) or you may have to rephrase a section of a source (paraphrase) because there is no perfect quotation that you can incorporate easily into your paper. In these situations, even though you are using your words, the ideas still belong to the author(s) and must be cited. To cite a paraphrase or summary, create a framework that marks the beginning and end of the ideas from the source.
- Introduction
- Introduce the source as you begin to use it using a tag that mentions the author(s).
- Paraphrase or Summary
- Use your own words. Do not use words from the original or just replace them with synonyms. Your paraphrase/summary may be several sentences long.
- Citation
- Place the citation at the end of the last sentence of paraphrase/summary.
- Explanation
- Include your own ideas and interpretations to provide context for the source material in your paper. You should avoid paragraphs that only consist of paraphrased/summarized material.
Example Paraphrase:
Not everyone agrees that Metropolitan Englishes (ME), such as Standard American English, should be the only forms of English students are allowed to use in the classroom. In “The Place for World Englishes in Composition,” Canagarajah argues that, while ME should be taught, students should also be allowed to use the forms of English prevalent in their home countries through the use of code meshing (598). This approach to English may be more relevant to students’ everyday lives, and the conscious act of code meshing may actually help students learn both forms better.
Works Cited Citations
In addition to citing sources as you use them, you must also include a Works Cited page at the end of your paper that provides more detailed publication information about each of your sources. Below you will find citation formats for some of the most common sources.
Book (Basic)
Last Name, First Name. Book Title. Publisher, Year.
Example: Chambers, Becky. A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Tor, 2021.
Book (Work in an edited collection)
Last Name, First Name, and First Name Last Name. “Chapter/Section Title.” Book Title, edited by First Name Last Name of all editors, # edition, Publisher, Year. First and final page numbers.
Example: Aoki, Eric, et al. “The Master Naturalist Imagined: Directed Movement and Simulations at the Draper Museum of Natural History.” Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, edited by Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott, U of Alabama P, 2010, pp. 238-265.
Academic Journal Article
Last Name, First Name. “Article Title.” Journal Title, vol.#, no. #, Year, First and final page numbers. Database, DOI URL. Accessed date.
Example: Canagarajah, Suresh. “The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued.” CCC, vol. 57, no.4, 2006, pp. 586-619. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.58680/ccc20065061. Accessed 5 Nov. 2024.
Online News Article
Last Name, First Name. “Article Title.” Newspaper Title, Website, Date Published, URL. Date Accessed.
Note: If the newspaper title and website are the same, just use the newspaper title.)
Example: Zewe, Adam. “Despite Its Impressive Output, Generative AI Doesn’t Have a Coherent Understanding of the World.” MIT News, 5 Nov. 2024, https://news.mit.edu/2024/generative-ai-lacks-coherent-world-understanding-1105. Accessed 5 Nov. 2024.
Page on a Website
Last Name, First Name. “Page Title.” Website, Date Published, URL. Date Accessed.
Note: If no date is available, you may substitute “n.d.” as a placeholder.
Example: “Writing Center.” APSU, n.d., https://www.apsu.edu/writingcenter/index.php. Accessed 5 Nov. 2024.
Online Video
Creator’s username. “Video Title.” Website, uploaded by, Date Posted, Web Address. Date Accessed.
Example: Rhimes, Shonda. “My Year of Saying Yes to Everything.” YouTube, uploaded by TED, 9 Mar. 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmj-azFbpkA. Accessed 5 Nov. 2024.
Formatting the Works Cited Page
Follow these guidelines for creating the Works Cited Page:
- The WC page should be its own page at the end of the essay. Use the “Page Break” feature in Word to make sure it is on its own page.
- Title the page “Works Cited.”
- Put all sources in alphabetical order based on the first word in the citation.
- Double-space the lines.
- If the citation is more than one line long, use a hanging indent. This will indent the second (and third) lines of the citation.
Example Works Cited Page:
Works Cited
Aoki, Eric, et al. “The Master Naturalist Imagined: Directed Movement and Simulations at the Draper Museum of Natural History.” Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, edited by Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott, U of Alabama P, 2010, pp. 238-265.
Canagarajah, Suresh. “The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued.” CCC, vol. 57, no.4, 2006, pp. 586-619. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.58680/ccc20065061. Accessed 5 Nov. 2024.
Chambers, Becky. A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Tor, 2021.
Rhimes, Shonda. “My Year of Saying Yes to Everything.” YouTube, uploaded by TED, 9 Mar. 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmj-azFbpkA. Accessed 5 Nov. 2024.
“Writing Center.” APSU, n.d., https://www.apsu.edu/writingcenter/index.php. Accessed 5 Nov. 2024.
Zewe, Adam. “Despite Its Impressive Output, Generative AI Doesn’t Have a Coherent Understanding of the World.” MIT News, 5 Nov. 2024, https://news.mit.edu/2024/generative-ai-lacks-coherent-world-understanding-1105. Accessed 5 Nov. 2024.
Questions for Your Consideration
- What citation style do you think you will use in your major?
- Why is it important to include citations in your paper?
- What is the most confusing part of citing sources in MLA 9?
- Do you see a pattern in how Works Cited citations are formatted?
Chapter 11: Academic Integrity in Writing
Instructor Notes for Chapter 11
Video/Lecture: Avoiding Academic Integrity Violations
We have created a brief video that goes over how to write an effectiev introduction and thesis statement. You may share the video link with your students in D2L (Video Link: Avoiding Academic Integrity Violations) or use the accompanying PPT to present the information during your class (PPT Link: Avoiding Academic Integrity Violations).
Lecture: How Does Turnitin Work?
Many students do not know how instructors use Turnitin to check their papers. Take time in class to explain the tools—similarity report, AI detector, grammar marking, feedback—and how you use them to assess student work. If you allow students to view their reports, particularly on drafts, explain how they can use these to improve their work.
Activity: Indentifying Plagiarism
Provide the students with 5 excerpts from student samples or altered articles that contain intentional plagiarism, accidental plagiarism, and patchwriting. Discuss the following questions:
Which excerpts likely have intentional/accidental plagiarism?
How did you identify information that might be plagiarized?
How could the plagiarism be addressed?
Activity: Generative AI
Ask your students to open ChatGPT or Perplexity on their computers (this could also be done just on the instructor’s computer as a full class discussion). Have them type in a prompt such as “Write a 500-word rhetorical analysis of X advertisement” and analyze the results:
- Does the response meet your expectations and/or the assignment requirements?Is the response accurate? Are there any “hallucinations”?
- Does the response “sound” like me?
- How could you change the prompt to get a better response? How much work does it take to get what you want?
Discuss your findings as a class.
By Keely Mohon-Doyle
Academic integrity is a policy that all members of the university community agree to in order to ensure an environment of ethical research and learning. Academic integrity requires honesty, trust, respect, and an acknowledgement of our academic responsibilities. This chapter will provide an overview of the most common academic integrity violations that occur in writing classrooms, explain why they are problematic, and offer suggestions for how to avoid them.
For information on how Austin Peay addresses academic integrity violations, see the “Code of Student Conduct” in your Student Handbook.
Plagiarism
Most students are familiar with the basic definition of plagiarism: using someone else’s work without giving credit. Here, “work” refers to both the exact words that a person wrote and the unique ideas they developed. The type of source does not matter. Plagiarism is still plagiarism whether a student fails to credit an academic source, a website, a music video, or even a fellow student.
Plagiarism can occur explicitly, such as when a student directly claims the words or ideas are their own, or implicitly, such as when a student neglects giving credit to the source. Plagiarism can be intentional. For example, when a student doesn’t credit sources they used in an assignment where sources weren’t allowed or when they want to appear to have written more than they did. It can also be accidental. A student may forget to label their notes from a source and include information without realizing that they needed to give credit. Unfortunately, it is not always clear to instructors if an act of plagiarism is intentional or accidental.
If you use a source, give credit using the appropriate citation style required by the instructor.
Self-Plagiarism
One form of plagiarism that students may not be familiar with is self-plagiarism. Self-plagiarism is when a student submits an assignment for a grade in one class and then submits it again to a different class for another grade. For example, maybe you wrote a paper on the Renaissance for your history class, and your literature instructor asks for a paper on the historical context for a Renaissance author. You can’t just turn in the history paper to your literature instructor.
You may be wondering, “If I did the work and it seems to fit the assignment, why can’t I use it again?” Well, this gets to the heart of education. If you keep turning in the same paper over and over, you aren’t learning anything new. You aren’t practicing the skills that the assignment was designed to help you practice. Moreover, that Renaissance history paper may seem relevant, but it doesn’t connect the history to the author, which is the main point of the literature assignment. The paper also may not conform to the type of research or organization that is required for a literature paper, so what may have been “A” work for one class is “D” work for another.
Limited exceptions to the self-plagiarism rule do exist. If you notice similarities between assignments, you can speak with your instructors about what you may be allowed to use for both. They may let you use some of the same research or offer some of the same insights. However, it is more likely that they will expect you to approach the assignment from a different angle to help expand your view and knowledge of the topic and to better align with the norms of academic writing in the field. You may also have a class where your instructor expects you to pull from work you did on earlier assignments. In this case, the instructor will make it clear in the prompt.
Patchwriting
Patchwriting is when a student uses sources back-to-back throughout their paper, kind of like piecing together a quilt. These patches may be made up of direct quotes or summaries/paraphrases from sources. Patchwriting is a plagiarism gray area because students who practice it often give credit to their sources. The problem is that patchwriting does not leave much space for the student to include their own ideas and interpretations of the information they are sharing, which is what most instructors are interested in reading. Remember, if your instructor wants to know what X author said about the topic, they would just go read it. They want to see what you think.
The best way to avoid patchwriting is to practice a 1:4 rule: for every line of quote/summary/paraphrase from a source, you should include four lines of you explaining or expanding on the ideas, adding your own interpretations, providing examples, responding to the ideas, or connecting them to other sources you have covered. This will ensure that your “voice” is the most prominent one in your paper.
Collaboration
Collaboration is an important part of the academic experience. Your instructors may collaborate with each other to develop classes and write academic articles. You will likely be asked to work with your classmates to complete assignments. However, some forms of collaboration may be a violation of academic integrity.
Appropriate Collaboration
Collaborative projects and group work are excellent ways for students to practice academic and interpersonal skills and to learn from each other. Small group discussions, group writing assignments, and peer review are some of the strategies that instructors may implement in the classroom to help you practice these skills. Peer review, in particular, allows students to provide each other with feedback they may not otherwise receive and to see how other people with the same assignment have approached the topic in different ways.
Additionally, seeking help from the student support services on campus, such as the Writing Center and Center for Academic Support and Enrichment (CASE), for free tutoring or forming a student study group are forms of collaboration that are encouraged by instructors.
Inappropriate Collaboration
Collaboration becomes inappropriate when it provides some students with an unfair advantage not available to other students or not approved of by the instructor. For example, assignments that are meant to be completed individually should not be done with a group. In this case, visiting student support services is still ok because the trained tutors will offer advice, but they will not complete the work for the student. Similarly, students cannot submit work completed by another student or purchased from an online papermill. Submitting work completed by another student can lead to both students getting reported to the university for an academic integrity violation. Finally, students should not share copies of assignment sheets or tests with students from different sections of a class.
Generative AI
Over the last few years, there have been significant developments in the area of AI, specifically generative AI. Programs like ChatGPT, Grammarly, Research Rabbit, and others seem to promise a way to lighten the academic load and make life a little easier. Type in a prompt and receive answers in seconds; submit a paper and watch your grammar errors disappear. What’s not to love? However, it is important for us to be critical of generative AI (as we should be with any new technology) and learn how to use it ethically as a tool, not a smokescreen hiding academic needs.
Concerns
Generative AI doesn’t “know” things. Instead, it is an advanced algorithm developed by companies and organizations and trained on information from the internet to identify patterns to produce content. This definition, while not complete, raises several concerns about its use as an academic tool. As the product of various companies, the algorithm may produce content that is inherently biased by its designers. This bias may be exasperated by the internet materials used to train it—everything from academic articles to chat forums that peddle in misinformation. Additionally, generative AI is prone to “hallucinations,” or incidents where it makes up information based on patterns it has identified. This is particularly true when it is asked to use sources to support its points. AI has been known to include real article titles and then fabricate the information contained in the article it referenced.
Students may not see the use of generative AI as a form of plagiarism because AI is not a person; however, like sites such as Wikipedia, the information does not come from nothing. It comes from the human-created sources the AI was trained on. Unlike Wikipedia, it does not give credit or provide citations that can be double-checked for accuracy. Instructors will still want to know where your information came from, particularly if it is not considered “common knowledge.”
The most concerning use of generative AI by university students is to complete whole assignments. As was mentioned earlier, the purpose of education is to learn and practice skills that will help you as a student, in your career, and in your community. Assignments for writing classes are not just about creating grammatically correct sentences. Rather, writing assignments require you to practice different forms, think critically about your stance on a topic, conduct research and evaluate sources for accuracy and usefulness, organize your thoughts in a way that is easily understood by others, and add to the conversations that are going on around you. If you do not begin to master these skills in a class like ENGL 1010, when will you?
Ethical Use
Given all of these concerns, it is still possible to use generative AI ethically as a tool to help you grow as a writer. Grammar can be difficult to learn on your own, and programs like Grammarly can help you identify your common grammar errors and provide instruction on how to improve them. To use it as a tool, you should not accept every change blindly. AI has a very specific “voice” that can be overly precise and is not right for every writing situation. Don’t let it overtake your own.
Programs like ChatGPT can be useful if you are working on a paper and get stuck. They can help you brainstorm ideas or arrange them into a working outline that you can adjust to fit your needs and the point you want to make. You could also ask it to “read” over your paper and check it for clarity and the strength of your arguments, but remember that you have other human resources that can also do this. Other programs, like Research Rabbit, have been designed specifically to aid with academic research and can help you collect sources, check them for relevance, and write citations in the appropriate style.
Some instructors may allow you to use generative AI more extensively. In these cases, they will likely require you to provide step-by-step explanations of how you used the AI, including what prompts you used, what information came from the AI, and why you chose to include it. Before using AI, you should review your instructor’s AI policy in their syllabus or ask them what is appropriate use.
Questions for Your Consideration
- How would you define academic integrity?
- What steps can you take to avoid accidental plagiarism?
- Do you find collaboration on assignments useful? Why/why not? How do you ensure that everyone working on a collaborative assignment contributes equally?
- Have you ever used a generative AI to help you with a writing assignment? How did you use it? Was it helpful? Did you notice any “hallucinations”?
Chapter 12: Reflecting on Writing and Transfer for the Future
Instructor Notes for Chapter 12
Video/Lecture: The Importance of Reflecting
We have created a brief video that explains the importance of reflecting on past work. You may share the video link with your students in D2L (Video Link: The Importance of Reflecting) or use the accompanying PPT to present the information during your class (PPT Link: The Importance of Reflecting).
Handout: Reflection Essay
Use the following handout to show students guiding prompts to reflective essay questions: https://www.apsu.edu/writingcenter/writing-resources/Reflective-Essay-Handout-2024.pdf
Handout: Metacognitive Activities
Use the following link to provide students with metacognitive activities to complete in or outside of class: https://resources.depaul.edu/teaching-commons/teaching-guides/learning-activities/Pages/activities-for-metacognition.aspx
Handout: Guiding Reflective Questions
Use this link to give students guiding readings/questions on metacognition and writing: https://pressbooks.howardcc.edu/engl087/chapter/metacognition/
Activity: Glow and Grow
Glow and Grow Activity: Use the following questions on the day major essay are due to promote critical thinking and reflection:
- GROW: If you had more time to work on this essay, what would you focus on? What was most challenging about completing this essay?
- GLOW: What are you most proud of in your essay?
- LEARN: What did you learn from completing this assignment?
Activity: Metacognitive Activities
Opportunities to engage students with metacognitive activities:
- At the end of the day (exit ticket)
- Throughout a unit or assignment sequence
- Activities may be anticipatory, as in a pre-writing assignment or design plan, or they may accompany drafts or stages as a self-assessment or reflective notes on difficulties, successes, or aspirations for revisions.
- At the end of an assignment (cover sheet/ quiz or exam wrapper)
- At the end of a semester (reflective survey / letter to a future student)
- Throughout a semester, in an ongoing reflective journal or portfolio
- This could be handed in at the end of the semester as an assignment in itself or be used to facilitate a cumulative reflective activity
By Allie Johnston
Mindful Reflection
Have you ever needed a minute to just be still? Maybe you find that time to recharge and reflect in your car as you listen to your music; maybe you find a moment of quiet outside in the sunshine. Maybe you find it by sharing a good conversation with friends. Reflection is an important part of life to allow us to pause and recharge before we move forward to the next task on our to-do list. College life, and writing in particular, also require moments of purposeful reflection. It’s easy to quickly move on to the next assignment or essay, but it’s important to pause and consider what you learned.
In writing, reflection involves analyzing and critically examining a personal experience, event, or piece of information, expressing your thoughts, feelings, and insights about it, often with the goal of learning and understanding something new about yourself or the situation at hand.
As you wrap-up your time in English 1010, it’s important to pause and consider all that you have written, learned, and experienced. Many of the skills we’ve addressed can be thought of as tools in your writing toolbox. Some you may use consistently, such as creating drafts. Other tools you may use less frequently or choose to avoid altogether. It’s important to keep checking in on your own writing process and what works for you in certain rhetorical situations.
Metacognition in writing is helpful in recognizing your own strengths and challenges as a writer, understanding the differences in genres and writing assignments, and considering the skills you used and can apply to future situations. Metacognition describes an awareness of this process: the ways we absorb, assimilate, and convey information and participate in knowledge production. In other words, metacognition is thinking about thinking.
When we reflect, it’s helpful to consider what worked for us and what we would adjust for improvement. For example, perhaps in English 1010 you participated in multiple stages of the writing process, creating an outline, rough draft, and final draft. You may reflect on how that experience altered your writing overall. How can you continue building stages of the writing process into your future writing assignments instead of tackling the assignment the night before its due? Are there any stages you would leave out or emphasize more heavily? How can you involve peer review into your writing process when it is not an explicit activity in class?
Formal vs Informal Reflection
Sometimes, your instructor may assign you a formal reflective essay. This may involve specific guiding prompts or questions about an assignment you completed for the class. Informal reflections occur on your own time and involve your own questions. The goal of informal reflections is to brainstorm and decide what steps worked for your own writing process or what you would change moving forward.
Transfer
As you look beyond your time at Austin Peay’s first-year writing, many of the skills you’ve learned will be applied to future situations you encounter. Writing scholars call this idea transfer, the ability to take writing knowledge and practices from one context, like your first-year writing course, and repurpose it in a new and different writing context, such as future courses you take for your major, your career, or in your civic life.
The specific skills you learn in English 1010 can transfer to writing for your future courses and careers. As you encounter new situations, you will continue to draw on skills we’ve covered in your first-year writing course. Consider the rhetorical situation of each new context: who is your audience? What do they value?
For example, perhaps in a science course, you are asked to complete a lab report. Using the skills you’ve gained from first-year writing, you are able to analyze your rhetorical situation and understand the genre expectations of a lab report. Instead of writing how you would for an English class, a lab report involves a different writing style. You will want to prioritize direct, concise writing with a passive voice to put more emphasis on the reactions occurring instead of the person conducting the experiments.
Let’s say you work for a company and are asked to write a memo. At first, you may try to write your memo like you would an academic essay. As you take a step back to consider the purpose of a memo genre and look at examples, you can condense your writing to be brief and include key information necessary for the reader.
These moments of positive transfer allow you to effective transfer knowledge from one context into another. But there can also be two less-positive types of transfer: negative transfer and resistance transfer.
Negative Transfer
Negative transfer occurs when you try and apply a skill or lesson learned in one context to another unsuccessfully. For example, you write a catchy social media caption that generates many likes. It is successful for its context. However, if you were to copy and paste that caption into an academic essay, your work may not be as well-received. This is due to your difference in audience, their values, and the overall genre expectations of the platform of social media versus an academic essay. This does not indicate anything about your own intelligence or writing ability. Instead, it showcases an example of negative transfer, where a skill valued in one context does not always translate to another.
Negative transfer can be avoided by putting into play many of the lessons we’ve discussed in these chapters: analyzing your rhetorical situation (understanding your audience and their values as well as your overall message and context), analyzing the genre conventions of the text you are writing with, and finally, gathering samples to better understand expectations. Negative transfer can still happen, of course, but it’s important to incorporate our reflective writing practices by learning and growing from those mistakes in order to improve for future opportunities.
Negative transfer can be avoided by considering the skills we focused on in Chapter 4 by considering your audience and the appropriateness of your situation. When negative transfer occurs, you can learn from it through your own reflection process. What worked? What did not work?
Resistance Transfer
Resistance transfer occurs when the writer’s past experiences with writing lead to a resistance to new learning, often creating a roadblock. This roadblock can show up through general resistance to completing the task at hand to fear of failure to writer’s block.
If you find yourself in a negative or resistance transfer moment, it’s important to acknowledge your feeling towards that assignment or writing in general. When you acknowledge something—whether by writing about it in a reflective or speaking it aloud to someone else—you can move forward.
Writing Truths
It’s important to keep in mind the following “truths” about writing:
- Writing is a process.
- Purpose, genre, and audience inform the writing situation.
- There’s always something new to learn about writing.
You will continue to evolve as a writer the more you learn and the more you write. You will also learn how to hone your writing process(es), which in turn will help you be able to figure out what’s being asked of you in the writing situation and more effectively transfer writing knowledge and practices.
Reflecting on Your Writing Process
- What habits are you relying on or developing? Are they good or bad habits? What do these do for your writing process? Why? How?
- How are you able to apply class lessons to work when you’re outside of class?
- What kinds of similarities or differences can you recognize among writing assignments?
- How have you improved since the last assignment? How are you growing as a writer?
- Are you fully understanding the texts that you read? How do you know? How are you able to apply them to your writing?
- What is your writing process? How does that process affect your writing overall?
- Where and when do you feel “stuck” as a writer?
Questions for Your Consideration
Consider one of the more challenging essays you completed for this semester. How did you navigate the challenges? What worked for you? What are you most proud of in your completed assignment? If you had more time, what would you continue working on?