Paper #1: Experience as Evidence
Length: 3 full pages, double-spaced
Rough Draft Due: September 22
Final Draft Due: September 24
Introduction
Our experiences often shape the work we choose to do with our lives. Think of the politician who builds a career advocating for worker’s rights because her parents were poorly paid factory workers, the doctor who chooses to specialize in sports medicine because of his passion for football and basketball, the lawyer who represents immigrants because she herself is an immigrant, or the restaurant owner who grew up surrounded by home cooking. Academics, too, are often inspired in their intellectual work by their personal experiences. When academics build on their personal experience, they analyze and research the situation or concept to understand it and its impact beyond themselves.
This paper will be the first part of a two-paper sequence. For this first paper, you will consider a personal experience (we’ll define experience rather broadly) and how that experience relates to the idea of civic engagement that we have been discussing in class. Ideally, this paper will be the first step in a larger research process that will carry you through the whole semester. But with this first paper, you’ll do what academics do: begin with an argument of inquiry, formulating a set of questions to pursue.
What is an argument of inquiry? It may well be inquiry that sets your college research papers apart from those you did in high school. In high school, you researched primarily to uncover information, to obtain it and repeat it. But in college, repeating what you have read isn’t enough. You need to look into it, to consider it analytically, to think about it and report what you think about it. And while we are accustomed to think of arguments as quarrels or disputes where there are two opposed sides, that’s only one kind of argument. An argument involves offering an audience assertions and support for those assertions, asking the audience to agree with your assertions. In an argument of inquiry , then, you are asking your audience think about the questions you are posing, and trying to persuade them that the inquiry and the way you are pursuing it is worthwhile, that they should, in other words, agree with you that the questions you are asking are worth considering, and to be persuaded to wonder with you how to interpret or understand an issue. This paper, then, won’t just be a narrative of your experience, though it will include a narrative. It will also offer an argument.
Your audience for this paper is the academic community of other inquirers; to be more specific, it might be your classmates in this class, or in another class or other academic situation, others who are also trying to determine what an engaging argument might be. As you write, you should think about this audience, how to engage them, how to create exigence for your ideas. You should also remember to write with readers in mind rather than just writing for yourself; this is an idea we’ll explore with the draft workshop for this paper.
What to turn in
1.
The final (revised) draft of the paper
2.
A prose description of the rhetorical situation of your paper, including whom you consider to be your audience, what your context is, etc.
3.
The rough draft of the paper read by a classmate, with the peer editing remarks they wrote AND a one-paragraph reflection from you on their comments
Choosing a Topic for the “Experience as Evidence” Paper

Remember, “true confession” topics and deep, dark secrets are not appropriate for this assignment. You should choose an experience that relates to a larger issue and that you feel comfortable writing about.
In choosing a topic, make sure you can answer these questions affirmatively:
1.
Do I have a personal experience to use for this topic? Or does someone that I am close to (such as a family member or a close friend) have personal experience that I know enough about in order to write about it?
2.
Can I make an argument of inquiry about the topic that questions assumptions that some group of people (a group that may even include myself) has about the topic?
3.
Is it conceivable that scholars have done research on this topic? Is it part of a broader issue that affects, or could affect, many people?
4.
Am I comfortable writing about this experience? Would I be willing to talk about it one-on-one with a classmate, or share my thoughts about it as an example in class discussion?
If you cannot answer yes to these questions for your topic, you should choose another topic.
Here are some topics that students in past classes have used for this paper; some of them later narrowed down the topic to use it as their research topic for the rest of the semester:

Stereotypes about Africa perpetuated by US educational system

School uniforms


The differences in the ecological mindset of Germans and Americans as represented by their cars
Same sex vs. coed education

Multiculturalism in the American educational system

Stereotypes of Asian students as geniuses

Sexism in the workplace in Latin America (later narrowed down to relationship of sexism to underdevelopment)

Racial profiling in airports

Opportunities for amateur sports in Europe and America

School tracking

Religion and orthodoxy, or how religion affects our personal choices

Images of beauty in the media and African American women (later narrowed down to the issue of skin bleaching)

SATs

Growing in a single-parent household

Stereotypes due to accents


Drug testing of low-wage workers or high school students
Sexual harassment in certain professions

Teaching evolution vs. creation science or intelligent design

The effects of advertising on childhood obesity
 Hiring practices based on appearance (such as Abercrombie and Fitch’s policy)

Racial self-segregation in high school lunchrooms
 Culture of “whiteness”

Addiction to computer games

Immigration and its effect on labor-intensive industry

The challenges faced by first-generation college students

Metal detectors and other security measures in high schools

The deterioration of the coastal environment


Religion in schools

Asian Americans and Affirmative Action

Teen driving regulations
This list is not meant to provide you with a list of topics to choose from; rather, use this list to think about the kinds of topics that students write about that relate to larger issues. The more successful papers came out of topics that were more original to the student.
All topics must be approved by the instructor. Papers on topics that are not approved will not be accepted.
Once you have a topic, think about how you will narrow your approach. This paper will only be three pages, so you don't want to discuss every issue related to the topic. Try to use the stases to narrow down your approach to the argument: Do you want to question whether something exists or what the right way to define it is? Do you want to question a cause/effect argument about your topic? Do you want to argue about whether something is beneficial or harmful? Moral or immoral? See pages 9-10 of Engagements with Rhetoric for help. The stases can then help you come up with your thesis statement. Remember that for this argument of inquiry, your thesis statement should be a question, or if not a question, a claim that is qualified by a word like “perhaps” or “maybe.” The thesis statement should be open-ended, and the rest of the paper should maintain this sense of open-endedness. Even if your personal experience tends to support one side of the debate about your topic rather than another, focus on using your experience to question assumptions rather than trying to make unqualified, one-sided claims.
What to turn in: Memo on Three Potential Topics
A week after we begin discussing this assignment in class (refer to the syllabus), you should turn in a typewritten, double-spaced description (3 paragraphs) that gives an overview of THREE potential topics.
You are far more likely to pick a good topic in the end if you have a range of topics to choose from; therefore, you must write about three different topics or you will not get credit for this assignment. For each of the three topics, write a separate paragraph explaining what topic you have chosen. First, describe your personal experience that relates to the topic. Then come up with at least one question that is debated; think of some assumption that your personal experience might be able to challenge. Finally, think of at least one academic audience that might be interested in this question. For example, would students taking a particular course have a reason to be interested in the question that relates to your topic?