Manuscript Formats

All major writing assignments are submitted as hardcopies, following the formatting requirements outlined below. Major writing assignments are also to be submitted by e-mail, as an attachment, due at the same time as the hardcopy (or just after). Minor assignments, when they are submitted, will be submitted sometimes as hardcopy, sometimes electronically, and sometimes both. Speaking assignments should be accompanied by a submitted written version of the speech, or a copy of the notes that accompany the speech if it is extemporaneous.

Essay manuscripts should be typewritten, double-spaced, etc. Single-space your name, the course title, my name, and the number of the essay (or draft, e.g., “A2D”) in the upper right-hand corner of the first page. Center your title about a third of the way down your first page, and begin your opening paragraph two double spaces beneath your title. Please do not underline your title or place it in quotation marks (except in special cases, such as a title that is a quotation). Number your pages, beginning on page two. You should use a twelve-point font, and margins of about an inch all the way around.

Electronic manuscripts should be duplicates of the hardcopy. Please submit electronic manuscripts as an attachment with the assignment number (“Draft 2” or “Revision 2”) and your name in the subject line. (This last stipulation may seem unnecessary, since your name will also be in the “From” field of the e-mail, but it helps immensely with clerical issues at my end.)

All drafts and revisions must be word-processed and thoroughly proofread for typographical, grammatical, and punctuation errors. If you consistently make these kinds of errors, your grade will drop.

You are required to keep a copy, electronic or otherwise, of every assignment. You are strongly encouraged to save your document frequently, back-up regularly, and print your work-in-progress periodically. Computer errors are inevitable and do not excuse shoddy, incomplete, or late work.

 

Conferences

Conferences are one-on-one meetings with the instructor, usually to discuss the revision process subsequent to a draft of an essay. The key fact about the conference is that it is your opportunity to take advantage of the instructor’s undivided attention. I will not have an agenda for the conference, although I may have a few questions or remarks relating to your performance over the semester. But I have already provided my thoughts on your draft in my commentary. As such, you should come to conference prepared to ask questions or make comments that will help you to develop a better revision. I will do my best to respond in ways that are helpful, but I will not produce ideas for you, or tell you what you should be writing. At conference, and in general, please feel free to bring up any concerns you have about this class. Though it is primarily a forum in which to discuss your essay, no topics are off limits, and I would be pleased to hear your thoughts regarding any aspect of your experience at MIT.

Except for conferences scheduled during class time (which will meet in the class room), all conferences will take place in my office, 14N-316. Please arrive at your conference on time, as they are stacked one after the other, and your peers seem to operate on schedules that require split second precision.

 

 

Written Work

Drafts

Your essays must have two versions, as described above. The most successful essays will likely undergo dramatic revisions or even a complete re-write after the initial draft. In most cases, to submit a revision that is substantially similar to your draft will earn a poor grade.

Your Ethos

Your Ethos and your credibility are affected by such things as clarity, reliability of your sources, your openness about who your sources are (their credentials as well as their location), your essay’s organization, format, grammar and usage, tone, style, and so on. Your essays should reveal you as a thoughtful, intelligent person who has carefully and critically read the appropriate texts and thoughtfully composed your own text. They should also reveal your awareness of alternate interpretations and solutions and your belief that opponents to your position are intelligent, well-informed people of goodwill.

Controversial Issues

An issue is controversial if it is one about which intelligent and educated people of good will can disagree. Often the various positions on the issue start from different assumptions and it is one of your tasks to identify those assumptions.

Join the Conversation

In college and beyond, we conduct research in order to join the conversation about a controversy and to make our own contribution to that conversation. In other words, research is not simply reporting on the ideas you discovered doing research. Research is a way of bringing you “up to speed” on where the conversation is now. To achieve this goal, you need to consult sophisticated sources. Avoid magazines such as Time and Newsweek. (You might use such magazines if the intent of your analysis is to explore a popular perception; but you would then explicitly distance your argument from the views expressed in these magazines, taking a cynical attitude toward their claims. You would not be using them as expert testimony, but rather as symptoms of our culture’s conceptions, ideologies, or habits.) For instance, if you are writing about abortion, read articles in the Journal of Bioethics or the Journal of Medical Humanities. You want to answer the best and most sophisticated arguments against your position, and you want to find the most sophisticated and subtle arguments for your position. Well before you write your full-fledged Argument Essay, you need to spend an hour or so in the Hayden Library (second floor) examining all the various print journals that are available.

Research

Much that is written about controversial issues summarizes the various positions on those issues. Although such pieces might be a good starting place in order to orient yourself, they do not count as part of the minimum number of sources required for your Argument Essay because they do not provide what you will need for this course—namely, the voices of those who support and oppose your positions on various issues. You need to find writers who take a position and defend it. Their voices will either support your position or they will give you specific points against which to argue. The more people you find who disagree with your position, the more points you have available to attack. Research has four primary purposes in writing:

 

Essays

Note: Unless otherwise stated explicitly in the assignments below, your essays are all addressed to intelligent, thoughtful, educated readers of good will who are at least somewhat informed about your topic (i.e., your classmates and me). For each essay, you will be writing to a mixed audience that includes some readers who will be skeptical about your position before they read your essay, others who will be undecided or indifferent to it, others who will disagree with your position, and a few others who already agree with your position. Your goal is to move your readers closer to believing your position:

·       You want to convince indifferent readers that this is a topic they need to care about now, i.e., establish why these readers should care about this topic at this particular time (a sense of urgency and a sense of kairos—a window of opportunity to accomplish X)

·       In addition, you want to convince undecided and skeptical readers that your position is thoughtful and more valid than the opposition’s.

·       You want to convince hostile readers that your position is logical and motivated by good will so that they won’t dismiss your position out-of-hand.

Also, all your written work should follow the advice (about organization, style, content, research, audience, etc.) found at the end of  this syllabus. Always give each essay a meaningful title, and always assume that readers have not seen the title when you start your Introduction (e.g., if your title is “Washington’s ‘Farewell Address,” don’t make your 1st sentence “In this speech, he …”.  Instead, start your 1st sentence saying “In his ‘Farewell Address, President George Washington …”). Always type your name in the upper left-hand corner of the first page and have your last name and a page number on each of the other pages.

 

 

 

Peer Editing

Peer editing is an awesome resonsibility. Just as you are counting on your fellow students to provide incisive and constructive criticism of your draft so that you might turn it into a successful revision, so are they counting on you. You are already familiar with the criteria on which to judge the strengths and weaknesses of a draft, as we have applied these criteria in workshops and you have seen them applied to your own work. The list of recommendations below will thus serve as a reminder and a checklist, to ensure that you have done a thorough job of evaluating your peers’ drafts. Please print out a copy of each draft that you review and mark it up as appropriate with your edits and comments. It will likely also be helpful for you to type a few paragraphs of overall commentary, summarizing the outstanding strengths and weaknesses of the draft, and providing directive advice about how to turn the draft into the most successful revision. Make sure that you have thought about and addressed these key factors in your analysis.

One of the most difficult things about peer editing is to take seriously your peers’ work as intellectual accomplishment. It is not enough just to apply the criteria of good writing in your review. You must also ask yourself in earnest whether the paper before you is worth reading: does it make a serious intellectual contribution, or is it “merely” a response to the assignment prompt, however well written and competent it might be? If the essay falls short of this ultimate goal, then you must look again at your criteria and attempt to articulate how the essay could be improved.

 

Oral Presentations/Speeches

Overview

We will practice a variety of oral presentation formats. For all of them, the following apply:

Features of a successful speech include

 Features of an unsuccessful speech include

 

Performance Aspects of Oral Presentation

Starting your speech

Ending your speech

Dealing with the Q-and-A Period

A Question-and-Answer period (often called a “Q-and-A”) is simply another form of impromptu speaking, albeit one that allows no exact preparation. If you know that there will be a Q-and-A session after your speech, though, you can prepare for it.

 

 

Debate with cross examinations

Everyone will participate in debate (these are essentially impromptu debates).  In the class before the debate, I will announce the topic and randomly select the debate teams. The team members must meet outside of class to determine their approach and their rhetorical strategies.

The Players

Two teams of three each:

o      1st affirmative constructive speaker; 2nd affirmative constructive speaker, rebuttal speaker,

o      1st negative constructive speaker, 2nd negative constructive speaker, rebuttal speaker,

o      (and the audience).

Note: In case the debate has only four participants instead of six, the format remains the same as with six debaters. With only four debaters, the 1st speaker for each team assumes the additional responsibilities of the rebuttal speaker, except that the cross-examination following the first affirmative speech can be conducted by either negative speaker.

The Debate Itself

The 1st Round—20 minutes

o      1st Affirmative speaker—5 minutes.

o      Cross-examination of the 1st Affirmative speaker by the Negative Rebuttal speaker—3 minutes

2-minute regrouping time for both teams

o      1st Negative speaker—5 minutes

o      Cross-examination by the Affirmative Rebuttal speaker—3 minutes

2-minute regrouping time for both teams

The 2nd Round—15 minutes

o      2nd Affirmative speaker—5 minutes

o      Cross-examination by the 1st Negative speaker—3 minutes

2-minute regrouping time for both teams

o      2nd Negative speaker—5 minutes

o      Cross-examination of 2nd Negative speaker by the 1st Affirmative speaker—3 minutes

Intermission—15 minutes

o      Cross examination of Affirmative team members by audience—5 minutes

o      Cross examination of Negative team members by audience—5 minutes

o      Regrouping time for final team preparations—5 minutes

Final Round—8 minutes

o      Negative rebuttal speaker—4 minutes

2-minute regrouping time for both teams

o      Affirmative rebuttal speaker—4 minutes

 

Criteria

Successful speakers will address the specific questions and points, stay on topic, respond thoughtfully and well to their opponents’ points, show flexibility in adapting their points to answer their opponents, display poise and knowledge, and be effective presenters (e.g., good eye contact, gestures for emphasis, good voice projection).

Bear in mind that your job is not simply to advance the most compelling argument if it means winning the debate on a technicality. In court that may be the aim, but in the academy we aim to advance understanding and achieve original insight. As such, you will be rewarded for creative thinking, candor, conviction, and most of all, deep thinking, in addition to your powers of persuasion.

Unsuccessful speakers will simply give their points as though they were stand-alone speeches instead of part of a dialogue with the other team and will not be effective presenters.

 


Workshops

From time to time, we will devote all or part of a class meeting to a full draft workshop. Prior to class I will distribute via email a draft written by one of your classmates. Please read it carefully and either print it out or bring it on a computer to class. Class will be spent discussing the draft, discovering its merits, and working on ways to improve it.

Full draft workshops are usually most helpful to that student whose draft is being analyzed. But as I choose for workshop drafts that tend to typify the drafts I receive, it is very likely that everyone can benefit from the group discussion. As such, you should edit your comments as you make them, attempting to direct the discussion toward the most generally helpful topics. It is, for example, less helpful to point out a particular misspelled word. But critiques of both style and content are fair game, as they likely will apply to the drafts of many of your classmates.

Whenever we have such a workshop, you should come to class prepared. Not only should you read the essay in advance, and bring a copy to class, but you should also identify a few things about the draft, to help stimulate discussion if necessary. That is, come prepared to respond to these questions.

Finally, on workshop days, I will play only a very small role in class discussion. In addition to the burden of having her draft examined, the student whose draft it is will be responsible for directing the class discourse. For the most part, this job takes care of itself. But it is helpful sometimes to guide the discussion more forcefully. Hint: the discussion leader should begin by asking about the thesis and pursuing this question with some intensity. She may also wish to draw on the above questions to keep the discussion moving forward in helpful ways. I have seen some students do a fantastic job of directing this discussion, much to their own benefit and to that of their peers.

 

Documentation

For this course, you must use MLA Format.  MLA uses the author-page method of citation, i.e., the author's last name and the page number from which the quotation is taken must appear in the text; a complete reference should appear in your Works Cited.

Examples of in-text citation (MLA)

Ex.: According to the naturalist Annie Dillard, the weasel “was ten inches long, thin as a curve” (219)—a breathtaking description.

 

Ex.: The British writer E.M. Forster begins his essay “What I Believe” with a startling statement: “I do not believe in Belief” (286).

 

Ex.: Although not all of us can agree that “an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky” is possible (Forster 292), most of us can all agree that such an aristocracy would be an improvement.

 

Ex.: “Modern clothing,” essayist Guy Davenport declares, “begins with the buttonhole” (293). Such a claim seems ridiculous until we look at the evidence he offers.

·     Note—in this sentence, the author’s name interrupts the quotation (this structure adds a touch of variety to our sentence structure).

·     Note—the comma after “clothing” that indicates the beginning of an interrupter in our sentence (the interrupter is “essayist Guy Davenport declares”), the comma after “declares” that indicates the end of the interrupter.

·     Note—the quotation marks before “begins” to signal the resumption of the quotation.

 

Ex.: In his essay “Rhetoric—Old and New,” Kenneth Burke, one of the most influential rhetoricians of the twentieth century, developed the idea of identification:

If I were to sum up in one word the difference between the “old rhetoric and a “new” (a rhetoric reinvigorated by fresh insights which the “new sciences” contributed to the subject), I would reduce it to this: The key term for the “old” rhetoric was “persuasion” and its stress was upon deliberate design. The key term for the “new” rhetoric would be “identification,” which can include a partially “unconscious” factor in appeal. (483)

 

Works Cited

As the title suggests, list only works that you actually quote or refer to in your manuscript.

The MLA Works Cited entry has 3 elements: (1) author(s); (2) title of the work; (3) publication information. Note—separate the elements with a period and a single space.

Here’s an example for a book title:

Lightman, Alan. Ancient Lights: Our Changing View of the Universe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991.

Online sources require more information because they are less permanent and have fewer standards in place. Here’s an example for a journal or magazine article:

Holbrook, Sue Ellen. “Women’s Work: The Feminizing of Composition.” Rhetoric Review 9 (1991): 201-19.

 

Electronic sources may have 5 divisions:

Author’s name. “Title of the document.” Information about print publication. Information about electronic publication. Access information.

Here’s an example for a professional electronic source:

Dye, Sylvania. Victoriana On-Line. 15 Apr. 1997.  5 Jan. 1998. <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/9613>.

 

Here’s an example for an article in an online periodical:

Dedman, Bill. “Racial Bias Seen in U.S. Housing Loan Program.” New York Times on the Web. 13 May 1998.  14 May 1998. <http://www.nytimes.com/archives>.

 

Here’s an example of an article from a print magazine that you located on the Web:

Zeki, Semir. “Artistic Creativity and the Brain.” Science 6 July 2001: 51-52. Science Magazine. 2002 Amer. Assn. for the Advancement of Science. 24 Sept. 2002 <http://sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/293/>

 

To get complete information on MLA citation and Works Cited formatting, consult:

 

Annotated Bibliographical Entries

A Works Cited page with annotated bibliographical entries is a list of citations to books, articles, and documents in the correct format (for this course, MLA). Each citation is followed by a brief (usually 100-150 words) descriptive and evaluative paragraph (i.e., the annotation). The purpose of the annotation is to inform readers of the relevance, accuracy, and quality of the sources cited. Creating an annotated bibliography calls for the application of a variety of intellectual skills: concise exposition, succinct analysis, and informed library/web research. First, locate and record citations to the articles that provide a variety of perspectives on your topic. Create the citation. Write a concise annotation that summarizes the central theme and scope of the article. There should be sentences that (a) evaluate the authority or background of the author, (b) comment on the intended audience, (c) compare or contrast this work with another you have cited, and (d) explain how this work illuminates your research topic. The following example uses the MLA format for the journal citation:

Waite, Linda J., Frances Kobrin Goldscheider, and Christina Witsberger. “Nonfamily Living and the Erosion of Traditional Family Orientations Among Young Adults.” American Sociological Review 51 (1986): 541-554.

The authors, researchers at the Rand Corporation and Brown University, use data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women and Young Men to test their hypothesis that nonfamily living by young adults alters their attitudes, values, plans, and expectations, moving them away from their belief in traditional sex roles. They find their hypothesis strongly supported in young females, while the effects were fewer in studies of young males. Increasing the time away from parents before marrying increased individualism, self-sufficiency, and changes in attitudes about families. In contrast, an earlier study by Williams cited below shows no significant gender differences in sex role attitudes as a result of nonfamily living.

[The above is quoted from “How to Prepare an Annotated Bibliography,” Cornell University, http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/skill28.htm#sample 14 June 2004.]

If the source were from the Web, the annotation itself would look the same, but the bibliographical entry would have the following information:

Brooks, David. “The Culture of Martyrdom.” Atlantic Online June 2002. 24 Sept. 2002 http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/06/brooks.htm.

            Then the annotation here.

 [Note—“24 Sept. 2002” above is the date that the website was accessed.]