Category Archives: Assignment

E-Portfolio Assignment

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End-of-Semester ePortfolio

For your graded ePortfolio assignment, please do the following:

  1. Make sure that each of your units is uploaded to a separate page within the Rhetoric section. Do include relevant images or video.
  2. On the main Rhetoric page, add a Module that showcases what you’ve learned this term. There are many ways to approach this assignment. Here are a few possibilities (choose one, or come up with your own):
    • Talk directly about what you’ve learned. You might include a passage from one of your essays as an example of a crucial skill that you’ve mastered.
    • Demonstrate your mastery of a writing skill in a short 2-3 ¶ piece on any topic in any style.
    • Talk about the influence of skills you learned in Rhetoric in your writing for another class this term.
    • Present a favorite passage by a professional writer and talk about what that writer does that you would like to imitate in your own writing.

Trial Run: due Saturday, December 12 at midnight.

Final Draft: due Saturday, December 19 at midnight.

Unit One

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The first unit this semester will focus on building writing skills crucial for college. Whereas later units will each culminate in an essay, this first unit will present shorter passages in a graded portfolio. By centering attention on short assignments, we can work on the relationship between paragraphs, putting off for later the challenge of generating a larger essay structure.

Our topical focus will be YouTube videos that teach: What makes YouTube a good medium for instruction and education? What makes some videos more effective than others? What, if anything, does this suggest about how best to reach readers in a written essay?

Key skills covered:

  • vivid description that takes the place of viewing a video
  • narrowed focus on a key quality/aspect of a source
  • comparison of two sources with an eye to learning something about one of them
  • the three Aristotelian appeals: logos, ethos, pathos.
  • introducing an unfamiliar to the reader
  • introducing an essay’s project to the reader

Extra HW

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Practicing Cross-Tabulation

I’m adding this extra HW assignment to give you practice using Qualtrics’ cross-tabulation tool for data analysis. As we discussed in class, you need to correct for unbalanced survey data—and cross-tabulation is a LOT easier than working with the raw data file.

Assignment Log into Qualtrics, then click on “results” next to your section’s survey. Look for the “cross-tabulation” option, and then choose 2 questions to cross-tabulate. Typically, you’ll want to select one of the demographic measures as your column (banner) head, and one of the library questions as the row (stub). But feel free to play around!

Once you have a cross tabulation that you think is significant, you should probably convert raw numbers into percentiles: if 4 of 20 Freshmen and 1 of 5 Sophomores chew gum, it’s more meaningful to report that as 20% of both Freshmen and Sophomores, rather than 4 Freshmen and 1 Sophomore.

Use the comment space on this page to report your results, using words to express whether this data surprised you or confirmed your predictions. If you make a graph, upload the graph as a picture (.jpg or .png).

Lecture 4

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The Vocabulary of Advertising

Advertisers over the years have developed a host of different approaches for engaging our interest. To get us started thinking about the different tactics used by advertisers, we will be discussing the following five commercials during lecture.

In preparation for class, watch the following commercials. In writing, boil each ad down to its essence by answering:

  • What does this ad want the viewer to do? (Do X)
  • What reason does the ad provide, implicit or explicit, for doing that? (Do X because Y)
  • What moment or detail is most crucial to this ad’s appeal to viewers?

Dyson Vacuum Cleaner narrated by the inventor, James Dyson.

Dyson Vacuum Cleaner narrated by the inventor, James Dyson.

GEICO insurance featuring a little piggy.

Slim Jim “Intensive Care.”

Jeep 2011 “Manifesto”

Samsung Galaxy S2 “The Next Big Thing”

Class 4.2

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A Preliminary Focus for the Unit 2 Essay

Read: Essay Two Assignment

Then, watching TV and touring YouTube for ads that you find particularly

  • compelling,
  • repellent,
    OR
  • otherwise intriguing,

Paste one or two possibilities into the comments section below. (Don’t worry if your comment is held for moderation—the anti-spam system is suspicious when people post links. I’ll approve your comment manually in time for class.)

Bring to class Two-Column notes on ONE of the ads you send me, using the left column to list details and the right column to record your thoughts about why those details matter. Then, at the bottom of the page, you get just ONE sentence to sum up how this ad works its magic on viewers. Ideally, a reader will be able to sense from your sentence why you think this ad is worth writing about.

We may view some of these ads during class, but I also want to continue our discussion of the four ads we viewed for the last Lecture class.

Class 4.1

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Portfolio Due: by midnight before after class

Go back over the work you’ve done for this unit, five assignments in all (you can access old assignments via the Calendar link, above):

  1. Two independent ¶s on an educational YouTube video, from Class 1.2. Choose one to revise and publish in your portfolio.
  2. 2-¶ deepening analysis of an educational video, from Class 2.1
  3. 3-¶ comparative analysis, introducing a second video as a point of comparison, from Class 2.2
  4. 2-¶ sequence quoting a source as a point of reference in your own analysis, from Class 3.1
  5. 1-¶ essay introduction, from Class 3.2

Portfolio Format

Revise and polish the 5 HW assignments, treating each as a separate piece of writing. Revise—or even rewrite from scratch—with the aim of making each assignment really shine. Head up your portfolio with a clear, boldface label (“Paragraph Portfolio”) and head up each of the 5 assignments with an appropriate label (“2-¶ description,” etc.) Continue reading →

Lecture 3

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Quotation as Call-and-Response

Read “Online Learning, Personalized,” a 2011 NYTimes article by Somini Sengupta discussing the impact that Khan Academy videos are making on the way math is taught both in and out of school.

As you read, I’d like you to focus on the mechanics of quotation in this article. Highlight passages where Sengupta quotes or otherwise cites the views of other people. What (if anything) does she do when quoting someone for the first time? How does she change her phrasing when a person has been mentioned already?

How do these interview subjects help Sengupta to structure her article? (You may find this question easier to answer if you use different colors of highlighter to mark passages where Sengupta quotes and paraphrases each of her different sources.)

Paste answers in the comment section below. For this exercise, probably best that you wait to read what others have written until after you’ve posted your own ideas.

Class 3.2

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Essay Introduction

For the very first HW assignment, I asked you to introduce your video by describing what it does and how. But that’s not the same as introducing an essay. An essay intro is an invitation to the reader. Like a trailer for a movie, it helps readers decide whether this is something they want to read. So the most important task is conveying a sense of what the reader will learn by (1) defining the topic and (2) voicing a thesis claim about that topic. But you should also consider how to motivate your reader’s interest: why is this an important topic for discussion? How will your thesis, once proven, change the world? In short, what is at stake in this essay?

Two distinct ways to approach this challenge:

  1. Open by introducing your essay’s principal source, briefly characterizing it in such a way as to embody the larger issue at stake in the essay.
  2. Start by motivating interest in the essay’s larger issue, waiting until the first body ¶ to introduce your essay’s principal source.

For class, write an essay introduction, pasting it into the comment space below. If you choose option 2, above, include the first sentence of the ¶ that would follow after, so we can see how you plan to engineer the transition from an intro with a general focus to an essay body with a focus principally on just one source.