Investigating Authority and Evaluating Texts

During your next few years in the university, you will need to know how to write (with authority) in your field. The final project is asking you to investigate how to conduct research and how to produce texts in your field. This assignment is a step in researching and writing for your final project. The goal is that you use parts of this essay in your final project. For instance, you can use whole paragraphs from this paper in different sections or turn paragraphs into bulleted points. This project has two parts: 1) Annotations: Summarize Content and Evaluate Meaning Making At some point in your academic career, you may have to produce an annotated bibliography. Very simply, these include the bibliographic information (citation) and a short summary/ evaluation of your texts. Annotations are great way to summarize sources you want to use in your own research and evaluate their worth to your project. In your annotations you will need to 1) Summarize the content and 2) Evaluate how these authors construct meaning. (We have seen some of this already in the Penrose & Geisler article and will be discussing it further next week.) You will write an annotation for each of the three sources you collected via the scavenger hunt homework. Each annotation should be at least 200 words in the MLA format. MLA formatting is available on the Purdue OWL. If you are familiar with the official citation method of your field, you can talk to me about completing your citations in that format. 2) Short Essay: Putting Texts in Dialogue In 2-3 pages, using the information from your annotation, you will discuss how the texts talk to each other and explain what these texts demonstrate about writing in your field. Consider the following questions to guide you: What are the rhetorical moves people make in your field? How do they incorporate sources/research? What are their citation practices? How do the texts talk to each other? Do they follow Swales CARS model? Do they have the characteristics of research articles that Hyland discusses? How do they suggest their work is important? How do they establish authority?
An A assignment, in addition to B and C requirements, will skillfully synthesize the texts and speak insightfully to the ways people in their field make meaning. A B assignment will, in addition to meeting the C requirements, draw conclusions about discursive conventions of the field and thoroughly synthesize their texts. A C assignment will have annotations of three texts (2 academic, 1 non-academic) that engage with a contemporary topic in their field. The annotations summarize the content of each text and generally evaluate the specific ways the authors make meaning. The short essay synthesizes their sources and explains how writers write texts in their field, answering the questions above. A D assignment is missing some requirement from above. The project may not evaluate the rhetorical conventions of the field or discuss the ways the texts engage with each other. An F assignment did not do it or is missing a significant portion of the requirements.