The Final Essay Assignment

During today's class, you received the argumentative research essay assignment. After selecting a casebook from our class textbook, you began the research process by reading and taking notes regarding four related essays. We will continue this tomorrow during class and will move to the library for additional research starting December 2.

Argumentation Steps

When we return from break, you will be assigned your final essay assessment: the argumentative research essay. To give you an example on how to organize your essay, albeit an abridged one, you worked in groups to do the following items:
1. brainstorm several possible claims (you want to have options for research)
2. select your working claim (this may be changed, but you want to have a direction)
3. list all examples of evidence
4. group "like" evidence together
5. construct a warrant for each evidence grouping
6. write a counterclaim or select one from the brainstormed claims
7. provide evidence supporting the counterclaim
8. use a rebuttal with additional evidence supporting the original claim
9. construct a concluding statement

As you can see, there are many elements to an argumentative essay, and you will use the nine steps above to construct your essay.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Honey Boo Boo

No better way to review claim, evidence, and warrant and learn about counterclaim and rebuttal than using Honey Boo Boo as a topic. Remember, a counterclaim is another position that you could make regrading the given topic and you can add evidence to support it. It is not the opposite of the claim. A rebuttal is the opportunity to explain why the original claim is stronger than the counterclaim. It is not to show how the counterclaim is wrong.

For homework, annotate the articles regarding the women in the military. We will work on building a full argument in a group environment tomorrow.

Argumentation Half Review

As we start our last unit, we need to review the components of argumentation. For today's class, those components were the claim, evidence, and warrants. Remember, a claim meets this criteria: not obvious, engaging, specific, logical, debatable, and hypotactic. Evidence can be facts, statistics, historical documentation, expert opinion, and person anecdote. Warrants are the analysis, or the connection, between the claim and evidence. In math, it would look something like this: claim + evidence = warrants.

Next week will be the other parts of argumentation.

Rhetorical Assessment

What an impressive array of rhetorical analysis today! Each group analyzed the required logos, ethos, pathos, diction, tone, and syntax with specific evidence and explanation of purpose. However, what made these presentations impressive was the introductory measures to gain the audience's attention, the natural transitions from one speaker to another, the little dashes of extra strategies to further analysis (such as the parallelism examples), and the ability to communicate with mature, specific, measured diction.

I am so proud of all of you for utilizing your preparation time to construct such intelligent, engaging presentations. On Friday, we begin our last unit: argumentation.

Rhetorical Analysis Presentation Prep

After the official assignment, you were assigned a group to complete rhetorical analysis of the Meryl Streep Commencement Speech to Barnard College. During tomorrow's class, you will have the first hour for prep time and the last half hour for presentations.

Eponine, Food, & Meryl

After much technical difficulty, we began class by watching the performance of "On My Own" from Les Miserables. As we noted, Samantha Barks adjusts the tone of the repetitive phrase "I love him" to show the character's lugubrious melancholy and eventual bittersweet hopefulness.

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Next, we read an essay on food and identified how the author uses ethos, pathos, and logos to create his purpose. Pay attention to when persuasive appeals are used in a text and why the author is directing this particular order for the audience.

During the last half of class, we began the rhetorical analysis assessment -- a verbal group presentation. The text for this assignment is the commencement address at Barnard by Meryl Streep. I have a copy of the transcript for your annotations, but you may watch and listen to her speech at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-a8QXUAe2g .

In class tomorrow, we will go over evaluation expectations and components for a successful presentation. You will also be split into two groups and utilize the remainder of the hour to assign individual assignments and how the presentation will be.