American Conservative Union
Assignment Description: We have studied a couple of different activist groups together, and now you’re going to choose one of your own to research and analyze. This project will build on your research skills, and descriptive and analytical writing skills. In addition, this project continues to address the qualities of professional and academic writing. Project Components: An Annotated Bibliography A Research Report with Genre Analysis Component One: The Primary Assignment For this final project, you will write a Genre and Rhetorical analysis of at least eight full pages that presents your findings about the literacy practices of a particular activist community. You will plan, conduct, and analyze research that will involve gathering samples of writing in the genres the discourse community uses as well as secondary sources about the discourse community. The focus should be on the ways this community understands and communicates its identity, and its discourse (or literacy) practices. Direct quotations, actual samples of documents, and your observations will compose the evidence in your essay. Along with your primary data, your research should also include secondary sources, including scholarly sources, to support or amplify your research. These will be articles, scholarly or otherwise, written about the activist group by members who are not necessarily a part of the community. Skills you will learn or build on for this assignment include Researching to discover documents from various genres related to the same discourse community Analyzing rhetorical maneuvers of various writers in various genres and arguing about the differences used and the reasons for the variations Synthesizing research into a written format Minimum Source Requirements: Primary Sources: Four texts from four different genres. All of these texts must be produced/written by members of the Discourse Community, i.e., people who are actually involved in/with the Activist Group. Secondary Sources: Two articles, one of which must be scholarly, written about the Activist Group by a person who is not an active member of the Discourse Community/Activist Group. Format Requirements: The essay will have three parts: · Part One: Introductory material. This part will focus on introducing readers to the topic and the background of the Activist Community. · Part Two: A genre (and rhetorical) analysis of the four texts produced by the Activist Discourse Community. · Part Three: Concluding material. This section will include a discussion of the two articles written by non-members of the discourse community (what are others saying about this activist group? How are they saying it? Are they persuasive?), and concluding remarks. Use the Modern Language Association (MLA) citation guidelines for this paper. Post your final essay to Blackboard. Component Two: The Annotated Bibliography Prior to submitting the final report, you will write and submit for grading an Annotated Bibliography of the sources you find. For each of the sources you choose, you will provide a proper MLA citation and a single-spaced annotation of the work. The annotation should summarize the author’s purpose and the pertinent points he/she makes. You are NOT critiquing the piece; you ARE objectively offering a quick review of it so that others can ascertain its potential value to them as researchers. Each annotation should quote from the article at least once (citing properly). Finally, in a couple of sentences, briefly describe where the piece was published and the genre for which it was written. You will do annotations for ALL sources, to include the four from the Activist Community and the two from non-members of the community.
