Look at an example provided below
You’ve had the opportunity to test your initial ideas and cultivate source literacy techniques for your final Hybrid Argument pa.per. You’ve cultivated strong research skills and practiced identifying reliable and credible source materials. You practiced MLA citation style and this week we will combine rhetorical analysis techniques, summary writing, and MLA citation style into annotated bibliographies.
An Annotated bibliography is a tool that many scholars use as they write hybrid and extended argument pa.pers; particularly, when you have multiple sources, it’s important that you keep information and research highly organized so to attribute accurately. To strengthen our writerly ethos, this week has been carved out so you can do the majority of the research required for the final pa.per. While integrating 10 different sources may be overwhelming or exist as the longest pa.per you’ve ever drafted, the exercises, source map, and source annotation assignments this week will pars the research and planning process into digestible bits.
- Select 10 high quality sources for the hybrid argument portfolio
- Model high quality academic research practice
- Create an annotated bibliography adhering to MLA citation standards
- Provide peers’ suggestions on strengthening MLA formatting and Annotations
Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing 2e, Issue 7 “Rethinking Revision” p. 259 – 288
Follow the prompts in the following documents:
- Annotated Bibliography Assignment Sheet and Rubric
- Annotated Bibliography Student Example
- See the assignment sheet for the rubric
- Upload your document in .doc(x) format
Center in New York, and the Department of Justice Building in Washington D.C., among
many others; while these other curations are not the focus of this inquiry, these examples
will be useful in establishing Alexander’s commitment to mediated memory and art
practices regarding Native American life in North America
Moore, Tami J. and Barbara Clark. “The Impact of ‘Message Senders’ on What Is True: Native
Americans in Nebraska History Books” Multicultural Perspectives, vol. 6 no. 2, 2009, pp.
17-23, DOI: 10.1207/s15327892mcp0602_4. This journal article was authored by two
University of Nebraska-Kearney professors and through a comparative Nebraska social
studies textbook study, they found five emerging themes as it relates to how contemporary
textbooks portray Native Americans. These characteristic Native American themes and
“images included thievery, brutality, lazy men, alcoholism, and magic” (Moore & Clark
19). Moore and Clark’s study details the damaging effects this kind of portrayal has upon
students in shaping their conceptions of Native lived experiences and presence in both
historic and contemporary contexts. This source offers a contemporary example of how
current educational traditions relating to Native American cultural education falters
tremendously from a space of commemoration and honoring the First Peoples of the Great
Plains. This source will be another supporting artifact which attempts to combine fragments
of both the current ways Nebraska treats Native American history and education against the
commemorative intentions of Alexander’s Nebraska State Capitol Building.
Style Conventional and accepted rules of good writing are followed including the following: 1) Summaries remain impartial, brief, abbreviations and direct quotes are avoided 2) Student does not rely on “fluff” to meet annotation length i.e. do not report information in the title 3) Remain objective and avoid introducing personal prejudices.
Did student draft an objective and evaluate the rhetorical usefulness of the source meeting a minimum 250-word count for each entry? Did student stay focused on the key ideas but provided enough information to be useful for outside evaluators or researchers?
Summaries are composed in third person perspective and the student remains objective during evaluation.
Student makes reasonable attempts to use the vocabulary of the author, as far as possible, to convey the ideas and conclusions of the author. Student avoids excessive paraphrasing and introducing annotations with superfluous and/or redundant phrases like “The author states,” “This article concerns,” “This new contribution to,” etc. Student avoids the monotonous starting of sentences with “It was suggested that,” “It was found that,” “It was reported that,” etc. Annotations in which most sentences end with “are discussed” and “are given” are similarly ineffective.
Are all source entries cited without erroneous mistakes according to MLA 8 standard guidelines? Did student meticulously follow document formatting requirements of an Annotated Bibliography?
Micciche, Laura R. “Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar.” College Composition and Communication. 55.4 (2004):
716-37. JSTOR. Web. 18 Nov. 2010. Micciche focuses on the rhetoric of grammar—what we say and how we
say it. She acknowledges that grammar instruction out of context may not produce better writing and she
admits that the “drill-and-kill” exercises may not be beneficial at all. She offers a more succinct definition of
rhetorical grammar, which she defines as “teaching the effective communication through language use.”
Micciche argues that rhetorical grammar instruction is central to composition’s commitment to teaching critical
thinking and cultural criticism. She suggests that the ability to develop sentences to serve a purpose require a
conceptual ability to envision relationships between ideas. In order to link grammar and conceptual thinking,
she encourages writers to stray away from the error-correction goals of formal grammar and assess the
meaning provided by the manipulation of syntactic structure. She maintains that even rhetorical grammar
should be reserved for the end stages of drafting as she concedes that it may reduce time spent on higher-
order concerns if not appropriately applied during the correct stage. Rhetorical grammar instruction will then
move the students toward conscious decision making in order to shape meaning effectively. By creating an
awareness of the power of grammar, instructors encourage students to identify the functions of grammar in
culture as, for instance, a form of resistance. Micciche presents an assignment which she titles “commonplace
books,” which are simply journals kept by all students in which they write daily. Micciche then asks the students
to write a paragraph on the effectiveness of the writing itself or to imitate a writer’s style (not content) in an
attempt to assess the power in the syntax. These assignments open the students’ eyes to more than just the
traditional grammar error-correction and turn them into cultural critics capable of analyzing the manipulation of
grammar. Micciche offers many different examples of student responses to grammatical choices and how
those choices may or may not have been effective in order to illustrate the effectiveness of her commonplace
book assignments. Micciche suggests that rather than abandon grammar instruction, teachers should seek
avenues from which to revitalize the practice in order to promote composition’s goals “to equip students to be
active citizens of the world they inhabit.” This resource will be useful for my overview of grammar instruction
and some of the critiques waged by rhetoric and composition scholars.
1 Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. People tend to look at successful writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)
2 Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the snow. One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, “It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do — you can either type, or kill yourself.” We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time. Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning — sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.
3 For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.
4 The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, “Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go — but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.
5 I used to write food reviews for California magazine before it folded. (My writing food reviews had nothing to do with the magazine folding, although every single review did cause a couple of canceled subscriptions. Some readers took umbrage at my comparing mounds of vegetable puree with various ex-presidents’ brains.) These reviews always took two days to write. First I’d go to a restaurant several times with a few opinionated, articulate friends in tow. I’d sit there writing down everything anyone said that was at all interesting or funny. Then on the following Monday I’d sit down at my desk with my notes and try to write the review. Even after I’d been doing this for years, panic would set in. I’d try to write a lead, but instead I’d write a couple of dreadful sentences, XX them out, try again, XX everything out, and then feel despair and worry settle on my chest like an x-ray apron. It’s over, I’d think calmly. I’m not going to be able to get the magic to work this time. I’m ruined. I’m through. I’m toast. Maybe, I’d think, I can get my old job back as a clerk-typist. But probably not. I’d get up and study my teeth in the mirror for a while. Then I’d stop, remember to breathe, make a few phone calls, hit the kitchen and chow down. Eventually I’d go back and sit down at my desk, and sigh for the next ten minutes. Finally I would pick up my one-inch picture frame, stare into it as if for the answer, and every time the answer would come: all I had to do was to write a really shitty first draft of, say, the opening paragraph. And no one was going to see it.
6 So I’d start writing without reining myself in. It was almost just typing, just making my fingers move. And the writing would be terrible. I’d write a lead paragraph that was a whole page, even though the entire review could only be three pages long, and then I’d start writing up descriptions of the food, one dish at a time, bird by bird, and the critics would be sitting on my shoulders, commenting like cartoon characters. They’d be pretending to snore, or rolling their eyes at my overwrought descriptions, no matter how hard I tried to tone those descriptions down, no matter how conscious I was of what a friend said to me gently in my early days of restaurant reviewing. “Annie,” she said, “it is just a piece of chicken. It is just a bit of cake.”
7 But because by then I had been writing for so long, I would eventually let myself trust the process — sort of, more or less. I’d write a first draft that was maybe twice as long as it should be, with a self-indulgent and boring beginning, stupefying descriptions of the meal, lots of quotes from my black-humored friends that made them sound more like the Manson girls than food lovers, and no ending to speak of.
The whole thing would be so long and incoherent and hideous that for the rest of the day I’d obsess about getting creamed by a car before I could write a decent second draft. I’d worry that people would read what I’d written and believe that the accident had really been a suicide, that I had panicked because my talent was waning and my mind was shot.
8 The next day, I’d sit down, go through it all with a colored pen, take out everything I possibly could, find a new lead somewhere on the second page, figure out a kicky place to end it, and then write a second draft. It always turned out fine, sometimes even funny and weird and helpful. I’d go over it one more time and mail it in.
9 Then, a month later, when it was time for another review, the whole process would start again, complete with the fears that people would find my first draft before I could rewrite it.
10 Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something — anything — down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft — you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft — you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.
1. Lamott says that the perceptions most people have of how writers work is different from the reality of the work itself. She refers to this in paragraph 1 as “the fantasy of the uninitiated.” What does she mean?
2. In paragraph 7 Lamott refers to a time when, through experience, she “eventually let [herself] trust the process – sort of, more or less.” She is referring to the writing process, of course, but why “more or less”? Do you think that her wariness is personal, or is she speaking for all writers in this regard? Explain.
3. From what Lamott has to say, is writing a first draft more about the product or the process? Do you agree in regard to your own first drafts? Explain.
graphs. As I struggled to read in this environment, I began to realize that the way I was reading—one word at a time—was exactly the same way that the author had written the text. I realized writing is a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence process. The intense concentra- tion required to read in the theater helped me recognize some of the interesting ways that authors string words into phrases into paragraphs into entire books.
I came to realize that all writing consists of a series of choices. I was an English major in college, but I don’t think I ever thought
much about reading. I read all the time. I read for my classes and on the computer and sometimes for fun, but I never really thought about the important connections between reading and writing, and how reading in a particular way could also make me a better writer.
What Does It Mean to Read Like a Writer?
When you Read Like a Writer (RLW) you work to identify some of the choices the author made so that you can better understand how such choices might arise in your own writing. The idea is to carefully examine the things you read, looking at the writerly techniques in the text in order to decide if you might want to adopt similar (or the same) techniques in your writing.
You are reading to learn about writing. Instead of reading for content or to better understand the ideas in
the writing (which you will automatically do to some degree anyway), you are trying to understand how the piece of writing was put together by the author and what you can learn about writing by reading a par- ticular text. As you read in this way, you think about how the choices the author made and the techniques that he/she used are influencing your own responses as a reader. What is it about the way this text is written that makes you feel and respond the way you do?
The goal as you read like a writer is to locate what you believe are the most important writerly choices represented in the text—choices as large as the overall structure or as small as a single word used only once—to consider the effect of those choices on potential readers (in- cluding yourself ). Then you can go one step further and imagine what different choices the author might have made instead, and what effect those different choices would have on readers.