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Requirements
Assignment: You will compose an 8-page position paper plus a Works
Requirements
Assignment: You will compose an 8-page position paper plus a Works Cited page featuring at least 12-15 sources.
Purpose: You have been working towards this essay all semester, gathering research throughout the term and considering (and re-considering) your position as well as others’ in order to determine the strongest argument or best course of action. Your work in this essay is to take a position within the debate that you’ve investigated and meditated on for a good deal of this semester. Your position should thus build on your work in the Annotated Bibliography and the Digital Forum.
Keeping in mind this course’s central interest in academic writing as a skill that enables civic engagement and communal participation, the goal of the position paper is to build on what you’ve learned so that you can now (finally!) take a position within the conversation and make a new claim within your issue. This argumentative essay 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, keeping in mind what is at stake and for whom.
Audience: You will identify an audience for this project. When you do, remember the genre of the essay: 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 found 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.
Writing the Position Paper
You may feel as if you’ve said all there is to say on your topic, but our work during these last weeks of the semester turns your attention to rhetorical strategies that take up concerns of definition, cause and consequence, evaluation, 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 with maximum benefit to the community.
For this project, you are required to have a bibliography of at least fifteen sources. At least 6 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. All sources must be reputable, credible, and useful for your case. Of course, you should draw on your Annotated Bibliography assignment and your “Further Reading” list from the Digital Forum. 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.
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 are the arrangement strategies found in Fearless Writing. These strategies offer guidelines about how to begin and offer background and how to lay out a map for the paper.
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