Activity: Brainstorming / Preliminary Research

Within your groups, form yourselves into smaller groups of two or three. Begin by summarizing for your group members what you did in the class's previous activity. Try to be brief (1 or 2 minutes at most), but do your best to get across the gist of the author's argument, the main evidence s/he relies on, and where you think your research might take you from here. Let each person explain his or her work before you move on to the next step.

1. Based on your reading so far, come up with a list of three key words or concepts that are central to your project. Write these three words in the middle of a sheet of paper and circle each one.

2. Working with your partner, for each term create a web around it by identifying as many related topics, concerns, or ideas as you can. Try to do this quickly and constantly… your pen should always be moving.

3. Once you have completed the initial brainstorming session for each member of your group, work on "deepening" your web by performing some preliminary research on the ideas that you brainstormed. For instance, if you are researching how the proposed highway through the Serengeti desert will affect the wildebeest, you might read more about wildebeests and their habitat or you might look for information about existing desert highways and their environmental impacts. As you skim these sources add new terms and concepts to your web to make it comprehensive. If you find a source that it might be helpful to return to later, be sure to bookmark it or make a note of how to find it again.

4. Hopefully by now you have an extremely messy sheet of paper in front of you. Working with your partner(s), compose a list of topics or ideas from your web that you want to research further. Order this list by priority, beginning with the ideas you think are most promising. At this point feel free to discard ideas that you're relatively sure are dead ends.

5. If you finish this task before class time is over, feel free to get started on your homework for Thursday.

Homework:

Find at least three sources (they can be from any kind of publication, including scholarly journals, blogs, or newspapers) in which authors make an argument relating either to your main topic or one of the related ones that you brainstormed in your web. For each of these three sources, identify the author's thesis statement or central claim and quickly compose a retrospective outline of the article. Add this information to the Google Document you created in class on Tuesday.

Link to PowerPoint on Organization

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B11JiXOw1yx0MjhiY2NlMmUtZWM4Zi00MjE1LTg1NjUtNDc0ZWJmMDU3YmU3&hl=en&authkey=CI2G79EB

Activity: Reading Sources Critically

Begin by composing a retrospective outline of your article from Nature. Follow the procedures we talked about in class last week, beginning by identifying the author's thesis statement or central claim and identifying the central claim or idea in each paragraph. Put your reverse outline on Google Docs, share it with me and your group members, and in the same document complete the following tasks:

1. Describe, in a few words, the article's organizational scheme. Is there an order or a logic to the way the article unfolds? Why do you think the author chose to present the information in the order s/he did? 

2. Identify at least three or four SPECIFIC places in which the author makes an appeal to his or her audience. For each appeal, note whether the author relies on ethos, pathos, or logos, and briefly explain why this appeal would be convincing for Nature's audience. 

3. Note any places in which the author addresses a counter-argument to his or her thesis. Summarize both the counter-argument and how your author responds to it. Does this counter-argument prompt your author to limit his or her claim in any way? If so, how?

4. In order to write authoritatively about the subject you have chosen you will probably have to do more research on the topic. Jot down some notes about where you think this research might take you. Are there any specific references in the article that you should track down? Will you be looking for scholarly sources or popular ones? What kinds of search terms might you use? How will the research you find help to shape your argument and make it convincing? 

5. Finally (and this is a tough one!) ask yourself, "what is missing from the article?" Are their any ideas, opinions, arguments, or references that seem to be missing, left out, avoided, or not addressed? Is there any aspect of the topic that the author just doesn't want to deal with, at least not in depth? Speculate as to why the author made these omissions, and how exploring these areas might be useful to you as you develop your own counter-arguments.

Feeder 1.2 Workshop 2

Begin by composing a retrospective outline of your partner's paper, using the outline we composed of the Huckleberry Finn paper as a model. Once you have completed the outline, examine it for coherence, repetition, orderly logic and transitions, and whether it fulfills the demands of the prompt. Suggest any changes that you believe would improve the paper's sense of organization.

After you're finished, answer the following questions at the bottom of the draft:

1. Briefly describe the current draft's organizing principle. Could the information be organized in another way? Suggest a different organizing principle that would change the draft radically while still making sense, and revise the thesis statement to reflect this new organizing principle.

2. The prompt asks you to make the argument that the information summarized is relevant or interesting to your blog's audience. What kinds of appeals--ethos, pathos, or logos--does the author use to convince his or her audience of this? Are these appeals effective? Suggest a way that the author might employ a different kind of appeal.

3. Describe the draft's introduction, concentrating on the first sentence. How does the author attempt to "hook" the reader? Does s/he begin by telling the reader something she doesn't know? If not, scan the body of the draft and/or the original article for an interesting fact that the author could place at the beginning of the essay.

Activity: Identifying Appeals

Read the following article from slate.com:

http://www.slate.com/id/2267094/pagenum/all/#p2

This article contains appeals of all three types: ethos, pathos, and logos. Work in your groups to identity at least one of each type of appeal in the article. Which of these appeals is most persuasive to you? Why do you think that is the case? In which order does the author present these appeals? Why do you think he chose that order?

Posting to Your Blog

Work together with your group members to post your Feeder 1.1 assignment to your blog. If you need help posting pictures, links, or any other hypertext ask me or one of your group members for their help.

Once everyone has posted their assignment, check the blog to make sure that the formatting (font style, size, spacing, image placement, etc.) is consistent from post to post. If there are discrepancies in formatting, discuss them with your groupmates. From now on all of the posts on your group's blog should follow the same clean, consistent, and readable visual style.

Activity: Determining Your Blog's Citation Style

Using the blogs we just examined as well as the formal APA, MLA, and Chicago styles (refer to the relevant sections on the Library's Citation Tutorial (http://www.lib.unc.edu/instruct/citations/) for details), work with your group members to draft a rationale for how and why you will cite your sources on your blog. Compose a short, 2-3 paragraph essay that explains:

1. Why your group thinks that citing sources is important.

2. How citations will be implemented on your blog. This should take the form of a rough style guide like this one for MLA format: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/06/. You need only explain the format for the types of references you anticipate using most on your blog.

3. A short rationale for how and why you chose the citation style you agreed upon.

Post this essay to your blog by class time on Thursday, September 16.