Logical Reasoning and Evidence

Write with a purpose: This project is designed to expand your critical reading, analysis and argumentation skills as you assemble information and persuasive moves that will help you convince an audience to respond when you present a clear argument. By now, you have identified a topic; have found, evaluated, learned from, and mined a range of academic and other credible source material, and have composed a literature review. Now you will craft an original, focused argument for a general audience. The requirement is that you present a clear, specific, and arguable thesis about your topic and that you support it with logical reasoning and evidence.Good scholars write important documents for readers who exist outside of universities—but they’re rarely long researched essays full of quotations and citations, line after line of text discussing the abstract elements of an issue. It’s crucial for you to be able to represent the final conclusions and best elements of a long thinking-and-reasoning process in a format that is immediately accessible to another audience.You may need to communicate with readers who can apply your knowledge to improve their own lifeYou may need to write for readers who have the ability to respond directly to your proposals so you can gain funding or receive employmentYou may need to write for readers to motivate them to join with you to improve the world around youFor this  project, you will “transform” the research and the work you did for your literature review assignment into a 500-600 word intensely edited document. You need to adapt your work for a specific, real audience of non-experts. You should present a clear argument on your topic, using your main research question as a starting point.  Adapting your work means you will need to “translate” the academic writing you did for your literature review project for a sort of a Public Service Announcement  (PSA) document for audience of non-experts. You will not be able to simply lift chunks from your literature review assignment or cut information here and there to meet the length requirement. Think more in terms of “here is what a general audience who has not done this research should know about this topic and its importance.”You may draft a letter or a white paper of sorts that you believe will catch and hold your audience’s attention—and move them toward useful action. You may focus on a single angle of your overall research or address the whole issue. Your project should be free of credibility-crushing errors.