Exploratory Essay

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Reading for college often involves engaging with new types of texts—sometimes longer or denser than what you’re used to; sometimes surprising in their content; sometimes loaded with new concepts and vocabulary; and sometimes just opaque and confusing. Reading for college in many ways is not so different from meeting new people in college. Meeting new people requires that you pay attention to and learn about who’s in front of you, maybe listen in before contributing to the conversation, and perhaps ask questions in order to position yourself more comfortably and confidently. Meeting new people also means that at some point you have to figure out what you know and understand and think. Your new acquaintances will expect to hear your voice and ideas.

For the Exploratory Essay I’d like you to carefully consider the ideas of our course readings and compose an essay that demonstrates your engagement with those ideas. The essay will require you to do several things with texts: you’ll need to figure out what the readings say and do, and in what ways their ideas and arguments differ and in what ways they connect; you’ll need to determine a point of entry for yourself—that is, decide which ideas in which texts are worth further attention and exploration; and you will eventually need to take stock of your own ideas, find a “place to stand” in relation to texts, and piece things together in an organized academic essay.

The rhetorical purpose of your essay is to demonstrate the ways in which your thinking about language and literacy has developed so far in the course; it should engage your audience (your classmates, instructors, and other college students) in a new, more complicated or more thoughtful way of thinking about the language and literacy issues you discuss. The topic you choose to explore should fall under our course theme of “language and literacy” and should relate (in one or many ways) to several of our course readings. The evidence you provide will be based on your interpretations, ideas, and examples (~50%) as well as passages from several sources (~50%).

Summary, synthesis, and crafting effective thesis statements are the primary critical reading and writing strategies required of you in this assignment. As you do writing throughout your college experience, you will find yourself continuing to draw on these three strategies.

• First, the essay requires that you summarize texts, identifying and articulating their rhetorical situations (especially the authors’ arguments and purposes) as well as key ideas/passages.
• Next, the essay also asks you to synthesize, to create something new out of several different elements. This is different than merely comparing and contrasting. You’ll be challenged to put the ideas from multiple texts in conversation with each other—to show complicated and dialogic (conversational) relationships across the texts.
• Lastly, the essay challenges you to construct effective thesis statements that demonstrate where you stand among the differing perspectives you’ve shown with your synthesis. You might find yourself more aligned with one text’s ideas and feeling like your perspectives differ (a lot or even just slightly) from another; you might appreciate one writer’s ideas but want to complicate those ideas (yes, such-and-such is true, but…); you might find yourself generating an entirely new perspective as a result of seriously considering what others have argued. What’s most important about your thesis statements is that they show that your thinking has evolved over the course of your paper due to the close work you’ve done with synthesizing sources.
  

General Requirements

Your Exploratory Essay must be informed by 4-6 sources comprised of the following:

• 2-3 of our shared course readings.
• 2-3 sources specific to your topic that you locate (1 of which must be a peer-reviewed academic research article). The other(s) can be a chapter in a scholarly book, a scholarly website (.edu), reference work (e.g., encyclopedia), as well as public affairs, advocacy, government, or commercial sources/statistics/websites.
• 1-2 supplementary sources in the form of images, video clips, sound bites, links, lyrics, etc.

Your Exploratory Essay should be 5-7 pages (12-point font, 1-inch margins, double spaced) plus any images you choose to include. Please use MLA citation within the body of your essay and on a Works Cited page, and please compose a relative and inviting title for your essay. You are encouraged to personalize the delivery of your essay as you see fit. Thus, you decide the order, tone, style, and language you’ll craft in order to best reach your audience. You’re welcome to draw on your “native,” “home,” or “other” languages, literacies, and ways of being as you so choose.

A full draft of the essay is due for peer review on Monday, April 1 and your final draft is due Wednesday, April 8. This essay is worth 20% of your Course Grade.

Evaluation Criteria for the Exploratory Essay	Points Possible
1. Thesis. Are new and more complicated ideas/conclusions pulled out from the synthesis to establish the writer’s thesis/stance? Is the thesis relevant, explicit, specific, qualified, and complicated? Does it evolve as the essay progresses and as new perspectives are raised?	5
2. Evidence. How effectively are ideas and sources delivered and developed in the essay? How effective, specific, and appropriate are the examples and passages used? How effective is the relationship between thesis and evidence? How well are the writer’s ideas distinguished from the ideas of sources?	5
3. Summary. How effectively and accurately does the essay introduce and summarize the rhetorical situations and main ideas from each source used?	5
4. Synthesis. How effective is the synthesis in the essay? Are the perspectives across texts treated dialogically and are the relationships across texts named explicitly—are ideas from across texts shown as supporting, extending, complicating, and/or challenging one another?	5
5. Revision and Editing. Does the essay show evidence of thoughtful revision and editing? Are ideas and sources introduced in ways that an unfamiliar reader would understand? Has the essay been effectively formatted, including the Works Cited page?	5
6. Were all general requirements for length, source use, and due date met?
TOTAL POINTS	25