Academic Summary
First Draft Due:
Final Draft Due:
Length: 300 words
A primary concern for us throughout the semester will be to consider what it means to enter an
academic conversation. Throughout your education, you’ve been learning how to enter these
conversations, but English 101 will focus a great deal of attention on the specific strategies that
enable you first to listen to a conversation and then to make your voice heard.
When I think of an intelligent conversation and the ideal way to participate in that conversation, I
always come back to the oft-quoted concept of a “Burkean parlor,” named for the 20th century
American rhetorician Kenneth Burke, who wrote about this parlor analogy in The Philosophy of
Literary Form:
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long
preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for
them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already
begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for
you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you
have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you
answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to
either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality
of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late,
you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.
(110-111)
Burke’s passage captures the idea of academic conversation—and its pitfalls—quite
well. Among the biggest problems for students wishing to “dip an oar” into an academic debate
are identifying the terms of the debate, knowing what to say about issues, and understanding
that their own contributions won’t be the final word.
Successful academic writing and research depends upon the ability of a writer to summarize,
analyze, synthesize, and respond to the ongoing conversation about a particular issue. What
Burke describes in the middle of the passage—“You listen for a while, until you decide that you
have caught the tenor of the argument”—we may compare to learning to summarize effectively.
Summarizing therefore involves listening in on the conversation that other academics are having
about a research topic and demonstrating an understanding of the claims, evidence, and
controversies surrounding the topic. We will practice writing summaries for such academic
purposes in this assignment.
The ability to write an effective summary might be the most important writing skill a college
student can possess. You need to be able to summarize before you can be successful at most
of the other kinds of writing that will be demanded of you in college. For Burke, listening and
understanding has to occur before you “dip your oar” into the conversation, and in this class,
we’ll be taking Burke’s advice. Later, you’ll move on to analysis, synthesis, and response, but in
this first assignment, you’ll summarize.
Assignment
Write a summary of Joseph Harris’s “Revising.” Your summary will be about 300 words long.
Audience
Imagine your audience for this summary to be other students at UMD who are entering into the
conversation about this book. You might think of your summary as being posted on a course
website or some similar social media, though your summary should be academic in its tone (that
is, it should be written in a tone like that of the chapter it summarizes rather than the tone you’d
use in a personal blog).
Writing the Summary
This summary will demonstrate that you have closely read Harris’s essay. Remember, you are
summarizing, not analyzing, synthesizing, or responding. You should report objectively (and,
since you have just 300 words, concisely) Harris’s argument, his support, and a sense of how
he constructs that argument.
To achieve your purpose with your audience, use the following strategies in your summary:
 Introduce the text in the beginning of your summary so your readers know which text you
are summarizing. Include the author’s name, the date of publication, and the publication
title within the first few sentences.
 Use stasis theory to help you classify and characterize the kinds of arguments the author
is making.
 Focus on the writer’s arguments by reporting the text’s thesis and supporting
ideas. Show that you understand the “big picture”—the writer’s purpose and how he
supports it.
 Maintain the focus on the overall argument of the article. Avoid giving too many specific
examples. You can generalize about the types of evidence or methods of arguing he
employs to support his argument. You may want to include some of the key phrases that
are central to his argument and an explanation of what those mean and how they are
employed.
 Use “author tags” so that your reader understands that you are reporting the author’s
ideas rather than suggesting they are your ideas.
 Use an objective tone and a mix of paraphrased and quoted source material.
 Save comments on the author’s form, style, or structure for the end of the summary.
Argument of Inquiry
Draft Due:
Final Draft Due:
Length: 4-5 pages, double-spaced
We believe the best way to reinvigorate argument is to approach the reading and writing
of arguments as an exploratory process. To do so means to position ourselves as
inquirers as well as persuaders, engaging thoughtfully with alternative points of view,
truly listening to other perspectives, examining our own values and assumptions, and
perhaps even changing our views.
-John Ramage, John Bean, and June Johnson
Over the course of the semester, you will complete an assignment sequence that asks you to
identify an issue of interest to you and pursue it by asking questions, conducting research,
analyzing arguments, and taking a position of your own. The Argument of Inquiry assignment
initiates this process of thinking and rethinking, reflecting and indeed arguing. As the epigraph
above explains, a critical way to “reinvigorate argument” is not to rush to take a side or argue
your case just so that you win, but to think of argument as an exploration, as an inquiry in which
you engage an issue thoughtfully, open to learn about the issue itself and the positions of
others. The Argument of Inquiry assignment asks you to identify the issue you’d like to pursue
for the semester and begin your exploration. Key to this project, though, is the idea that you are
not just inquiring for your own sake. Rather, you are using this assignment to encourage an
audience of your choice to invest themselves in this issue.
To complete this assignment, you will engage in two types of intellectual work. First, you will
craft a research question that will propel your learning and investigation. You should generate
this question from your life experiences, the questions you’ve encountered, or the issues you’ve
wanted to pursue. Of course, scholars often initiate research because of their personal
investments in an issue or problem. Their experiences many times instigate their work, and this
personal investment is often a good thing: it makes sense to spend time on issues and
problems that have personal importance. However, the researcher’s work does not begin and
end with experiential evidence. Rather, she quickly turns to other sources of knowledge to learn
more about the subject by complimenting and complicating her thinking. This personalacademic project is an inquiry: the researcher brings into conversation personal investment and
outside research with the goal of asking new questions and reflecting on answers.
This first stage of the assignment is one of research and personal reflection—it is the inquiry,
the questioning and the research. You’re doing a lot of thinking, library research, reading, and
note taking, but you’re not quite crafting the essay yet. The second stage of the assignment
moves you to the writing stage, as it prepares you to compose the argument of inquiry. Here,
you will build from your personal reflections and library research to speak to an interested
audience about the importance of the issue, the worthiness of the question you raise, and the
multiple avenues you and your readers might pursue in responding to this question. In other
words, you are arguing for the project of attending to this issue, persuading your audience to
care about it, and identifying numerous ways you and your audience might attend to and think
through this issue.
You will craft your essay with these goals in mind:



Clarify for your audience the issue itself, the exigence of the topic, and the
importance of the research question you raise;
Persuade your audience to attend to the many approaches stakeholders and
scholars take in regards to this issue.
Use your research to help your audience see how other stakeholders are
addressing and thinking through this research, drawing out the multiple
perspectives and concerns these stakeholders hold and raise.
In sum, successful essays will (1) do the work that the title of the assignment conveys: they will
argue for the inquiry, they will persuade audiences that this issue and the question is important,
timely, and consequential, and (2) they will offer multiple responses to the questions and/or
perspectives on the issue. The end result then is not to complete the investigation or take a
position within the issue but to assert the importance of the issue and to display for your readers
the array of perspectives and responses people have within the issue.
Research
As discussed above, I encourage you to initiate your work in this essay by reflecting on your
personal experiences and identifying the issues that are most important to you. You will
complement this personal reflection, though, with scholarly research—research that will enable
and support your work throughout the course assignment sequence. For this assignment, you
will identify at least five academic sources that spur your thinking on your topic and add
perspective to your experience. To help you start thinking about these sources you will create
an annotated bibliography in which you cite each source, summarize it, evaluate it, and connect
it to your experience and to the overarching objective of this essay (see the Annotated
Bibliography assignment description). When you submit your final draft of the Argument of
Inquiry essay, you will include a bibliography of the five sources cited in MLA style, and you
must specifically integrate and engage at least two of these sources of these in the body of the
paper.
The scholarly research requirement is meant to expand your thinking on the issue of your
choice. Think of your research as a conversation with others who are credible authorities on the
topic. No doubt you often make sense of your experiences by talking about them with others
and reflecting on them yourself. If you think of research in the same way, your research and
therefore your writing will become more meaningful because you will see it as a way for you to
gain a sense of the academic conversation you’re interested in entering.
Audience
Like all of the essays for this course, your choice of audience will significantly shape your writing
process. You may choose to write to readers who have never encountered the issue you’re
engaging, or you may write to readers who have preconceived ideas about the issue under
discussion. Whatever audience you choose, you want to think about how your inquiry addresses
their understandings and concerns.
Past Topics
It might be helpful to see topics that other students have done in the past. Here are a few:
 The role of censorship in Baltimore public schools
 Racism in Spanish soccer
 The effects of cross-cultural adoption on Cambodian children
 The contradictory roles and expectations for women in the fire service
 The effects of livestock farming practices on the Chesapeake Bay

Whether autistic children should be mainstreamed in school
Annotated Bibliography
Final Draft Due:
Length: 5 annotations (approx.150 words per annotation)
This research assignment asks you to identify five scholarly sources that will help you propel
your thinking for the Argument of Inquiry essay and for your work throughout the semester.
You’ll be introduced to research strategies and the UMD library system on Library Day, and this
introduction should help you to choose wisely the sources that will speak to, enrich, extend, and
complicate your understanding of the issue under consideration. For the annotated bibliography
assignment, you’ll annotate five sources you see as most significant to your investigation.
Your annotated bibliography should follow the example below. In each annotation you should
(1) cite the text of your choice in perfect MLA format; (2) summarize the text; (3) evaluate the
credibility, fairness, and/or bias of the source, and (4) discuss how the text will help you gain a
deeper sense of the issue and how you might use the source in the Argument of Inquiry essay.
You may use stasis theory to help you characterize the source’s main argument and how it fits
with your developing thesis.
Example:
hooks, bell. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics. Cambridge: South End P,
2000. Print.
hooks’s text works to define what feminism is to an uninformed and possibly resistant audience.
Her goal is to dispel negative perceptions of feminists as “men haters” and instead to offer a
new, more positive explanation of this political position. Feminism, for hooks, is a “movement to
end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression,” and she notes that anyone can be a feminist if
he or she works towards this end (viii). Her chapters—“Our Bodies, Ourselves,” “Feminist Class
Struggle,” and “Global Feminism” (just to name a few)—reinforce her overall aims, as hooks
attempts at every turn to explain feminist issues to readers in a generous and welcoming tone. I
find her book to be an informed and levelheaded assessment of feminism, and her definition of
feminism coincides with that of other authors I’ve consulted (see Bordo). For my Argument of
Inquiry paper, I plan to talk about my experiences with feminism and to help my audience see
the various ways stakeholders are re-defining feminism. hooks’s definitions of what feminism is
will be particularly important for my purposes.
Rhetorical Analysis
First Draft Due:
Final Draft Due:
Length: 4-5 pages
The Rhetorical Analysis assignment achieves two goals: first, you will learn more about the
issue you’re exploring this semester, and, second you will learn about effective writing by
examining how other writers create successful (and possibly not-so-successful) compositions.
Here, you will choose a persuasive piece of writing that engages the topic you are exploring
throughout this term. Then you will analyze this persuasive piece, examining it for the ways the
writer deploys the rhetorical strategies discussed in our class meetings and course readings.
Thus, you will compose a rhetorical analysis that investigates a writer’s use of appeals,
arrangement of ideas, emphasis or de-emphasis of information, mode of delivery, response to
exigence, and so on.
The first (and possibly most important) part of this project is for you to choose a persuasive
piece of writing. The document you choose to analyze is completely up to you; it just must
engage the topic you’re investigating this term. Whatever piece of writing you choose, it is
critical that you identify one in which a writer speaks to a particular audience about a specific
issue. The writer should take a stand on this issue and attempt to move his or her audience. In
addition, the piece of writing you choose must be worthwhile: do not choose something that is
poorly written or that you merely plan to criticize. Your Discussion Board post for this
assignment is specifically geared to help you with this critical task of choosing the essay for
analysis.
When you analyze this piece of writing, you will need to explain to your readers how the writer
persuades his or her audience and whether or not the writer’s strategies are effective. To
provide a thorough analysis for your readers, you’ll need to research the writer, the topic the
writer wrote about, the audience the writer addressed, and the historical context during which
the writer wrote. In other words, you will need to understand and inform your readers about the
rhetorical situation in which the writer composed this document. If you’re unsure about the
rhetorical situation that your writer engages, you may need to do a bit of research.
Once you choose your persuasive document and research its rhetorical situation, you will be
ready to analyze the piece by describing its strengths and weaknesses. You will examine the
writer’s use of rhetorical appeals and discuss how those appeals meet the needs and
expectations of the audience. You will explain the (in)effectiveness of the writer’s choice of
rhetorical strategies and make inferences about what that writer has attempted to do, why s/he
makes certain rhetorical choices, and how s/he wants his/her audience to respond. Thus, to
compose your analysis, you’ll establish your own thesis statement—your own argument about
the writer’s rhetorical strategies. You will then support this thesis statement with evidence from
the text to demonstrate to your audience that your argument about this persuasive piece of
writing is a reasonable one.
It is important to note that when you compose your analysis, you should avoid simply pointing to
a writer’s use of appeals, her use of ethos, pathos, or logos. Instead, you’ll want to compose
your analysis by discussing both the purpose and effect of each appeal, asking: (1) Why did the
writer choose this appeal? (2) What effect does this appeal have on the audience? By
considering these questions, you will effectively evaluate the choices the writer makes when
attempting to reach his/her audience.
The following questions should help you generate the material you need for planning, inventing,
and drafting your rhetorical analysis:
1. What is the rhetorical situation of the essay? What is the essay’s exigence? Why is the
writer writing at that moment?
2. Who is the writer’s audience? How do you know? What is this group’s investment in this
issue? What is this group’s relationship to the writer?
3. What’s the writer’s purpose? What issue is at stake? What are the writer’s constraints?
How do the constraints affect the writer’s use of the artistic appeals? Of specific
evidence, support, or details?
4. What stasis point is the writer engaging? Is she making a definitional or a procedural
claim?
5. How does the writer establish her ethos (good will, good sense, good moral character)?
How does she establish common ground with her readers? Consider two kinds of
evidence for your answers: overt statements concerning the writer’s relationship to her
audience and the attitudes implied through tone, style, and choice of evidence.
6. How does the writer employ logos (claims, supporting ideas and evidence, implicit
assumptions) to (appear to) deliver a rational argument?
7. How does the writer employ pathos (emotions and values) in order to identify her cause
with the interests of her reader? How does she connect emotionally with her readers?
8. How does the writer address other positions or ideas? How does the writer respond to,
show awareness of, or resolutely ignore other positions on the issue?
9. How is the essay organized? What is the thesis statement? How do the supporting
paragraphs follow from that thesis? How are the supporting paragraphs themselves
arranged: chronologically, spatially, or emphatically? Does the writer use transition
words to enhance the movement of the argument?
10. How well does the writer support her thesis statement? The (implicit or explicit) topic
sentence of each paragraph?
11. How does the writer use specific words, phrases, sentence structures, or paragraph
lengths to establish a tone? What is that tone? Is it appropriate?
Remember that these questions should help you to generate ideas for your analysis. Your
essay should not run through each of these questions one by one. Instead, you want to create a
thesis about the essay that focuses on one, two, or maybe even three of these questions and
then elaborate on and develop your ideas on these subjects.
Digital Forum
First Draft Due:
Final Draft Due:
Length: approx. 2000 words
The fourth assignment of the semester, the Digital Forum, asks you to continue to explore,
research, and write about the issue you’ve engaged throughout the semester. Here, though, you
will shift gears by writing something that could be read beyond the academic community. For
this assignment, you will craft a website that presents the positions of various stakeholders
within your issue. Modeled after the New York Times’ “Room for Debate”
(http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate), your website will showcase three specific ways that
stakeholders engage this conversation. Your goal is to offer three discrete lines of argument
within your debate, showing how stakeholders engage, refute, or elaborate on each other’s
claims. Remember, though, this is a forum. Thus, the arguments you provide should be in
conversation with one another. They should be debating similar topics, engaging the same
stasis points, elaborating on one another’s ideas, or raising concerns about the other
interlocutors’ positions. In sum, you should think of the stakeholders within your forum as talking
with one another.
Through this project, you will fine-tune your writing skills, as you will practice new rhetorical
strategies within your forum. The forum, though, is not the only feature of your website. In order
to make this website useful for interested readers, you will also create an “About” page and a
“Required Reading List.” In your “About” page, you will define and explain your issue to your
audience, and in your “Required Reading List,” you will offer your readers scholarly resources
for further information (see below). Your “Required Reading List” will not only provide your
audience with important research, but it will also show me the new research you’ve conducted.
By composing the entire website you will explore what it means to translate your ideas and your
writing into a new rhetorical situation, from academic contexts in which you compose in linear,
analog form to popular contexts within digital environments.
As you work on your forum, you can and should draw from the work you’ve accomplished this
semester. Your Argument of Inquiry essay, your Annotated Bibliography, as well as your
Rhetorical Analysis should all be resources at your disposal for this project. It is important,
however, that you explore new and different arguments than those you have already discussed,
adding depth and breadth to your understanding of the issue. You’ll also want to make sure that
the viewpoints you write about are not just your own. An important element of this assignment
is that you explore and write from vantage points that you might not initially agree with.
The components of your forum will be the following:
 An “About” page that introduces your audience to the issue (approx. 300 words). This
page should identify the exigence of the issue, explaining to readers the reason why
they should care about this topic and what the stakes of the issue are. It should also
provide enough background information to prepare your audience for the forum
conversation.

Three “stakeholder position” pages (approx. 300 words each) that engage your issue
from different perspectives. When composing each of these pages, you should present a
specific approach to or position on this issue, showing your audience how certain
stakeholders or stakeholder groups engage this debate. Here, you want to think not only
about the arguments these stakeholders might leverage, but also why they would be
motivated to pursue these arguments. How does their unique perspective influence the
way they see and interpret the issue? It is important to note, here, that you do not need
to pretend to be one of these people or part of these stakeholder groups; rather, you will
identify the position this individual/group might take and defend the position by drawing
on research that demonstrates their perspective. Toward this aim, you should find and
hyperlink to and/or footnote at least two sources to support each of the three
perspectives you present. These sources can be popular sources but should be credible.

A “Required Reading” page that offers five annotations (approx. 100 words) of new
scholarly sources pertaining to your issue that would be of interest to your audience. You
may have noticed that many websites and blogs have reading lists such as these that
introduce their audiences to key texts. Your list will do the same. The page you create
may include the sources that you link to or use in your stakeholder pages. However,
keep in mind the goal here is to annotate and inform your audience about key texts.
These sources should not be the ones you used for your Annotated Bibliography.
Technological Expertise and Affordances: My main concern for this project is that you identify
and articulate different stakeholder positions, you continue to pursue your research and
thinking, and you experiment with reframing your writing and argument to suit your audience
and this new digital environment that is the website. Thus, I am not focused on how you are
manipulating the website in technical ways. You will use Weebly as your web platform. I have
chosen Weebly because it is user-friendly and does not require a lot of technological expertise.
That said, I do hope that you are attentive to and make use of the affordances of the website.
Affordances are options available to you in different mediums that enable you to craft, shape,
and present your message. A written essay has different affordances than a website or video.
Thus you will want to be sure you are aware and take advantage of the specific affordances that
digital platforms and technology allow. You will want to consider the following questions in
thinking about how you will create your website and forum:
 How do my choices of font, color, images, and graphics reflect the message and
overarching project of the website?
 How can I purposefully and thoughtfully make use of these features so that they add
depth to my message and reach my audience?
Audience: As you have likely inferred, audience should be a central concern for you as you
create this digital forum. While of course the digital environment and the facility of web surfing
would allow anyone to visit your site, your goal is to shape your forum so that you speak to a
specific audience and thus use language, research, examples, and visuals that would be of
interest to them. The affordances of your site design should also address your audience in
specific and purposeful ways. Note too that the audience for your site might be different from the
audience you’ve been writing to thus far in the semester, so you want to cast your writing
accordingly.
Web Platform: As noted above, you will be using the Weebly.com platform to build your blog.
This resource is free and user friendly. Please set up your account by visiting
http://www.weebly.com.
Laptops: Since we will be doing a lot of online work in class, please bring a laptop to our
meetings. If you do not have immediate access to one, the UMD offers a “Laptop Lending
Program.” See this website for details:
http://thestamp.umd.edu/about_us/information_desk/laptop_lending_program.
Preparing for the Revision Assignment and Reflective Memo: In the case that you decide to
revise the Digital Forum later this semester, please make a copy of your Digital Forum website
once you have completed and submitted it to me. Once you begin revising this project, I will use
this copy to see how you’ve revised your website, comparing the original to the new one you
submit. Also, if you decide to revise the Digital Forum, please set the original site to “private.”
You should then publish, if you so choose, the revised version. This way, you will not have two
versions of your website on the web.
Position Paper
First Draft Due:
Final Draft Due:
Length: 8-10 pages
In your academic career, you will often have to write extensive persuasive research papers.
These will be argumentative papers in which you’ll be expected to have a thesis that is
supported with research and with insights you develop from your familiarity with the subject.
Such papers will require you to understand a topic in depth, be able to offer background on what
is at issue in the topic, put the topic and issues in context, and both support your own position
and take other positions into account, by refuting, conceding, and/or bridging those arguments.
This paper will be the place where you can share the fruits of your research and argue for the
ideas you have developed through your writing and research process.
Position
You have been working toward this paper all semester, gathering research throughout the term
and considering (and re-considering) your position as well as others. Your work in this essay is
to take a position within the debate that you’ve developed as you’ve worked through each major
assignment (the Argument of Inquiry, the Rhetorical Analysis, and the Digital Resource). The
goal is to build on what you’ve learned and what you’ve argued to take a position within the
conversation and make a new claim within your issue. Indeed, you may feel as if you’ve said all
there is to say on this topic, but our work during this section of the course turns your attention to
rhetorical strategies that take up concerns of cause and consequence and proposals for new
action. Thus, you might work in this final paper to pinpoint the cause and the consequences of
the problem you have been exploring and then propose a solution. Such a focus on proposals
and solutions is indeed welcome, for we can all identify problems. The challenge is to create
solutions.
Research
For this final paper, you are required to have a bibliography of at least twenty sources. At least
10 of these sources need to be academic (books, articles, government and scholarly reports,
etc.); the others might include blogs, interviews, magazine or newspaper articles, YouTube
videos, or graphs from government or think tank websites. Of course, you should draw on your
annotated bibliography and your required reading list. You’ll also, though, need to conduct more
research. A great part of your success in this assignment will be determined by how well you
employ your research.
Audience
As with all your other papers, you will identify an audience for this paper. When you do,
remember the genre of the paper: you are making an academic argument. However, this genre
should not be seen as limiting. Academics are not the only people who read academic
arguments, and academic arguments are often published in widely read publications. Thus, you
should think of your audience as an interested group who expects to encounter a thoughtful,
informed, and persuasive essay. Beyond identifying who your audience is and in what contexts
they might encounter your argument, you should also consider how they might feel about the
issue already. Do they need convincing? How much convincing? Do they completely disagree
with your premise, or are they undecided or neutral on the issue? While arguing with people
who disagree with you may seem to be the most challenging rhetorical situation, persuading
neutral or apathetic readers to care at all about a topic is often a difficult rhetorical task. Use
stasis theory to help you determine your relationship to your audience vis-a-vis your topic.
Arrangement
One of the trickiest parts of a long argument is organization. You need to give an overview,
stake your claim, offer evidence, refute evidence—how will you put it all together? There are two
rhetorical tools to help you here. The first is the stases. You can use the hierarchy of the stases,
the way that an issue in one stasis depends on or interacts with an issue in another stasis, to
help shape the paper. If you are making an argument about action, for example, you might
introduce your thesis, but then bring in issues from fact/definition to establish background,
issues from cause/effect to show exigence, issues from value to further develop a sense of
importance and urgency, and then come to more extensive support for your claim about action.
The second piece of rhetorical theory is the parts of a full argument found in chapter 3 of
Inventing Arguments. The parts of a full argument offer guidelines about
 how to begin and offer background,
 how to lay out a map for the paper,
 how to help your reader anticipate your arguments,
 how to proceed with the support of your premise and the refutation of other arguments
before you conclude effectively.
One of the central questions about organization will be how to distribute the confirmation
(support of your point) and the refutation (where you confront arguments that disagree with your
own). We’ll review the parts of a full argument in class.
Revision Assignment and Reflective Memo
First Draft Due:
Final Draft Due:
Reflective Memo: 2 single-spaced pages
Revision: 4-5 pages
As we’ve discussed throughout the semester, revision and reflection are key components to
growing as a writer and thinker. This final assignment for the course asks you to look back on
the writing you’ve composed throughout the semester, both your peers’ and my responses to
your writing, as well as all of your reflective assignments to identify moments of writing success
and struggle. One goal of this assignment is for you to leverage this knowledge to revise an
assignment of your choosing. In addition to this revision, you will also compose a reflective
memo that (1) discusses what you’ve learned about academic writing and yourself as an
academic writer over the course of the semester and (2) details the changes you’ve made in the
revision project and the reasoning behind these changes.
Your Revision
You have the choice to revise your Argument of Inquiry essay, Rhetorical Analysis, or Digital
Forum. To guide your revision, you will consider the rhetorical concepts and strategies you’ve
learned throughout the semester, review the comments I have made on your documents,
reconsider the suggestions students have made on your drafts, and reflect on your own ideas
and concerns that you articulated in your reflection assignments. The idea here is that you
demonstrate how you’ve continued to fine-tune your rhetorical skills over the course of the
semester and that you can now use these new understandings to revise your work. Your
revised essay should reflect your end-of-the-semester knowledge and rhetorical expertise.
Substantive Revision: The revisions you make to the project of your choice must be substantive.
While you will be expected to bring our style and grammar work to bear on this revision, these
are not the only changes you should be making. Rather, your work in this revision is to rethink
major parts or aspects of the essay such as appeals, arrangement, introductions and
conclusions, integration of research and so on. You will not succeed at this assignment if you
focus only on grammatical changes to your sentences. As we work on the revision and the
reflective memo, we will continue to discuss what substantive means.
Your Reflective Memo
As you revise these documents, you will also compose a two-page, single-spaced memo
directed to me that reflects on (1) what you’ve learned about academic writing and yourself as a
writer over the course of the semester (2) your goals for your revision essay and the ways
you’ve attempted to reach these goals.
(1) Explain to me your progress as a writer over the course of the semester and discuss how
you’ve learned the nuances of academic writing. Reflect on all the writing you’ve done this
semester and provide evidence for your claims, using examples from your writing by
responding to the following questions:
 What have been your challenges?
 How have you addressed these challenges?
 What adjustments have you made over the course of the semester to improve your
writing? What are you particularly proud of?
 What do you still need to work on?

Where do you see improvement?
Your reflection assignments should be particularly important for this part of the memo, as they
have asked you to reflect on your writing consistently throughout the semester.
In addition to the questions above, you may also use on the following prompts to generate
thinking about your perspective on academic writing more generally:
 How was did your prior knowledge of writing expanded, confirmed, complicated,
and/or altered? Please give specific examples of where, why, and how.
 How was the writing you did for ENGL101 similar to or different from the writing
you’ve done (a) in the past and (b) for other situations?
 What did you learn in this class that you think you may draw on in the future? What
questions about writing do you still have?
 What approaches to writing (if any) do you think you will continue to use as you write
for and beyond school?
(2) Explain to me your goals for the revision and discuss the specific changes you’ve made and
the reasoning behind these changes. For example, you may find that your arrangement in
your Rhetorical Analysis lacked cohesiveness and purpose, and after working on
arrangement during the Position Paper unit, you can now devise a better arrangement
strategy. In your reflective memo, you would discuss how you re-evaluated your
arrangement and created a new organizational strategy with a greater sense of purpose.
Use of Detail: Detailed discussions in your memo are vital because they highlight for me the
thinking and decision-making that directed your revisions. Here is where I gain a sense that you
are making conscious, careful, and rhetorically effective decisions. Furthermore, the idea behind
the reflective memo is that you offer me a guide to reading your revision. In essence you’re
saying, “Here’s why I did what I did.” By only making general statements about your revision,
you won’t offer your reader (me!) a roadmap for reading your work and understanding your
decisions.
Detailed discussion means that you take up two major concerns:
 First, you point to specific instances of revision: “I created an emotional appeal in my
Argument of Inquiry essay by offering a detailed description of how mice are treated in
research laboratories (see page 3, paragraph 2).
 Second, and crucially, you explain why you made the choice that you made. You want to
think in “because” statements. “I created an emotional appeal by offering a detailed
description of how mice are treated in research laboratories.” Why? the reader asks.
“Because,” you respond, “the appeal depicts mice in horrid conditions and offers insight
into the gravity of the situation of animal testing. Without understanding the physical
condition of animals such as these mice, readers would not know how extreme the
situation is.”
Audience
I am the audience for the reflective memo, so you should direct your comments to me. Because
I am the audience, you can also draw from class discussions, meetings with me, and smaller
course writing activities as well as our textbooks. Drawing on these materials offers you a way
of showing how your work in the revision builds on the work we did in class. You might even
refer to comments I’ve made on your papers throughout the semester. Here’s an example:
Throughout the semester, I’ve had difficulty conceptualizing a specific audience for my
essays. You note this concern in your response to my Argument of Inquiry essay where
you state, “I’m having a hard time seeing who your audience is here: who are you
speaking to? What values does this audience have and how are you addressing them?”
In my revision to the Argument of Inquiry essay, I address this concern by . . .