This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Writing With Substance: You Can Haz it! SRSLY!

Reading and Writing Assignment 9

For this Assignment (one of three major papers for this course) is linked to the research you will conduct on your chosen topic for Assignment 10: you will write an overview of the history and existing scholarship on it. This kind of overview is an important part of any substantive academic project; accordingly, this assignment gives you an opportunity to learn more about the library and online databases so that you will be comfortable using these resources throughout your academic career. It will also give you practice at producing academic prose; in particular, this paper requires you to improve your ability to integrate source materials––through summary, paraphrase and direct quotations––into a discussion of a topic. This skill will be invaluable as you take more advanced coursework in college.

The mode of this paper will be similar to the "Narrative Bibliography" you read for Reading and Writing Assignment 1 and wrote for Assignment 6. It should be more formal in style than your previous attempt for Assignment 6; though you may use the first-person pronouns "I" and "we," you should frame your discussion as an overview of existing work rather than as an account of your own journey through the topic.

After conducting preliminary research on the topic you have chosen for your final paper for this course, you will discuss what you've learned about the available research. You will start the writing process by taking good notes on what you read and then doing some basic free writing. What elements of your sources are worth discussing? For each source, consider the following:

The argument an author makes
The trajectory of the author’s argument
The structure of the study (introductory matter? Specific chapters?)
The various kinds of research a study includes. What kinds of information does the study cover? Where does the information come from? How does a scholar support his or her claims?

After writing about these aspects of your source material, develop a working thesis about your sources. NOTE: this thesis should NOT be a thesis about the topic itself so much as a claim about how scholars have approached that topic.

Towards this end, contemplate possible relationships amongst your sources.

Does one source cite or invoke others you've read?
Do any of your sources cover exactly the same things? What distinctions do you see in coverage/attention/areas of focus?
Does one update the information in the other? How do they work together chronologically? See if you notice a particular trajectory that scholarship has followed over time, or whether specific events or discoveries have had impact on the way scholars treat a subject.
Are there “new faces” that have surfaced in studies of the topic's history? (i.e., previously ignored groups or people)

If you don't see many overt connections amongst your sources, you can still focus on the various aspects of your topic that get covered in academic work: “Some scholars focus strictly on [x]; some discuss [y]. Others focus on [z]. Those who focus on [z] offer diverse perspectives. Collectively, they demonstrate the range of responses engendered by [topic].”

Finally, you'll need to conclude your paper with some thoughts on how you will enter into the discussion. What questions do your sources raise or leave open for your consideration? How might you bring the questions and answers your sources offer to bear locally, for our campus, your major, or other communities in which you are a participant?

Primary Objectives for this Assignment

To learn strategies for conducting academic research;
To gain experience using the university's library resources;
To gain practice reading academic scholarship;
To build a foundation upon which a final paper in the class will be based;
To teach your classmates historical/cultural information that will enhance their understanding of the literary works we will read in the class;
To learn material that you will share with your classmates;
To improve your ability to discuss source materials in writing;
To develop your skill at summarizing and paraphrasing;
To improve your ability to introduce and comment on quotations;
To develop your skill and efficiency at crafting smooth transitions between ideas and paragraphs;
To review and apply the basic tenets of MLA documentation;
To produce clean, clear, academic prose that is as free of grammatical and mechanical errors as possible.

Requirements and Tips

Your final draft of this assignment will be 4-5 pages and should address several of the following questions: What aspects of the topic’s history are most interesting to you and your audience? What aspects of this history have scholars explored and addressed? What particular arguments do these scholars make about the topic? What conversations and debates seem to be taking place, or have taken place, over time? What does this scholarship teach us about your topic? Of course, you shouldn't answer each of these questions one by one--such a response will read more like a list than an a discussion. Begin by freewriting about each question, and then work on organizing what you've read into a visual map or outline.

Your paper should discuss at least three academic sources and at least one public source (newspapers or blogs or anything you find online that you believe is credible and appropriate). Ideally, you will cover a variety of academic sources, including books and articles, older sources as well as more recent ones (1990 and later).

Your academic sources must be refereed academic sources obtained from Hofstra’s library databases. You may not use an encyclopedia (neither on-line nor print) as a major source of information in your paper, but feel free to begin your research process with one.

You should conceive of your audience as being an academic one; you are writing for the Hofstra community at large, which includes me and members of our course as well as other students, professors, and staff members. This audience will expect a tone and style that are formal and your sources should be credible to critical readers.

Keep in mind that this paper should cover primarily the historical background for your topic and a basic overview of what scholars say about your topic––what you'll hear sometimes described as a "review of literature."

In Assignment 10, you will be writing more specific arguments about this topic; here, in Assignment 9, you are providing yourself and your readers with the foundation that will lead to a deeper understanding and the ability to make and understand more sophisticated claims about it. That said, in reading the scholarly work of others, you should learn quite a bit about the topic itself along the way. You will eventually channel what you learn from this paper into a longer essay for Assignment 10, in which you will write your own argument about your topic using these and other sources as evidence for your claims.

You will practice writing Assignment 10 by working collaboratively with other members in the class to write a paper that meets most of these requirements (but will be significantly longer) in Assignment 9 3/4.

This page is referenced by:

Appendix 2: Assignments 9, 10, and 9 3/4
Assignments 1-8 in this course all lead up to the final three assignments:

The final and most important will be Assignment 10, a 5-6 page discussion of a topic relevant to a university audience; we will use Assignment 8 to lay out possible topics; you will post the topics to a Discussion forum and I and your classmates will comment upon them. Once I approve a topic/course of study for you, you can embark on the research for the paper that will form the basis for both Assignments 9 and 10.

Assignment 9 is a 4-5 page historical overview of scholarship on your topic; you will use it to practice basic writing skills and the communication of complex ideas. The feedback I give you on this paper will be applicable for your work on Assignment 10.

The idea behind both assignments is that you will write with substance if you are given the opportunity to think substantively about a topic and learn about it from multiple perspectives and at length.

In order to give you additional opportunities to practice writing a substantive academic discussion, you will also work on Assignment 9 3/4, in which you will fulfill most of the requirements for Assignment 10 by writing a collaborative essay on one of two topics, the phenomenon of "adjunctification" or the use of student data in the university setting. Through the process of writing this paper, you'll learn the skills and methods appropriate to college-level writing.