English 101
Paper 2: Experience and Other Evidence
Length: 4 full pages, double-spaced
Rough Draft Due: October 22
Final Draft Due: October 25
Introduction
For this paper, you will build on your first paper, Experience as Evidence, and further develop your
inquiry by engaging what others have said about the topic. In this paper, you’ll construct an
argument about an issue you can relate to in some specific way by including both your own
experience and evidence from research. These two kinds of evidence should mutually inform each
other; that is, you should be able to analyze and reflect on your experience through the lens of the
research you do, and you should read the research with a critical eye, informed by your own
experience. The idea here is that the research should not just be tacked on to a narrative of your
experience, but you should use the research to critically consider your experience and develop your
argument.
Experience
For your first paper, you began with your own experiences. Now, you’ll move that to a next step.
Reflecting on the theme of civic engagement that we have been discussing in class, consider how some
element of your experience relates to a broader situation, issue, or controversy. We read many examples
of such connections between personal experience and public issues in readings that we have done in the
course so far. Many of the authors we read related their experiences as a kind of lesson, using their
experiences as rhetorical tools to persuade their readers.
. . . And Other Evidence (a.k.a, research)
When academics write and investigate, they bring research to bear on their thinking and writing,
informing their experiences with observation, reading, discussion, and conversation. Thus we have the
name of this paper, Experience and Other Evidence: in addition to talking about your own experience of
an issue, you will also research the issue, ideally building toward a broad research paper. You will apply
your own ideas as evidence in making a claim and you’ll expand those ideas with research on the topic.
You must have a bibliography of at least five sources, and you must specifically engage at least three
of these in the body of the paper.
The research requirement here is meant to expand your thinking on an issue. Think of your research as a
conversation with others on the topic, a conversation that allows you to expand your understanding and
critical perspective. No doubt you often make sense of your experiences by talking about them with
others and reflecting on them ourselves; if you think of research in the same way, your research and
therefore your writing will be richer, more meaningful, and part of your critical development rather than
an onerous task. The research conversation will help you to learn something you don’t know about a topic
of interest to you. Consider the term research. There’s an implication there that you are not searching for
the first time, but looking again or anew into a topic.
Weaving together Experience and Other Evidence
How will you use these two kinds of evidence in your paper? That’s for you to decide. You might start
with the personal experience and then move on to research, or you might start in a broader way and use
your own experience as specific supporting evidence. In drafting the paper, you may even decide to write
two papers, one all about your experience and another entirely based on research, and then revise them by
weaving them together. How you decide to do this will be based on the context of your writing, that is,
on who you decide constitutes your audience, what constitutes your purpose and how you will develop
your exigence.
The point of this paper, though, is not just to talk about two kinds of evidence but to synthesize those two
kinds of evidence, using each to inform the other. That’s the way research works: each new piece of
evidence builds on the evidence that you already have, expanding your understanding and perspective of a
given issue.
One rhetorical tactic you may want to use in preparing the paper, while both reflecting on the points you
want to make and considering your research, is stasis theory. It might serve as a guide to help you
categorize and articulate your ideas. Is the question that you are focusing on one of fact, cause, value, or
action? What kinds of claims are the authors of your research making, or what kinds of questions are they
asking?
What to turn in
A folder containing the following items:
1. The Final draft of the paper
2. A bibliography of at least five sources, in MLA format
3. The rough draft of the paper read by a classmate, with the peer editing remarks they wrote AND a
reflection from you on their comments
4. Final draft of paper #1 with grade and comments