Assignment 1

Your goal in this assignment is to develop an original and arguable claim in response to one version of the story of Little Red Riding Hood by identifying an opportunity for conversation in the text. An opportunity for conversation can be understood as a gap, tension, contradiction, ambiguity, or difficulty in the text or the subject of the text. The best way to find an opportunity for conversation is to locate an element of the text that fascinates, shocks, or perplexes you. By articulating what interests you in your chosen text, you should have an easier time identifying a specific opportunity for conversation.

Compose a paper of four full pages in which you offer your original claim and support that claim with evidence from your close reading of the text. In this assignment, you will draw on one aspect of this text to develop a new, original view of your own. Please format this paper according to MLA guidelines. If you would like to download a template document already formatted in this way, click here. The audience for this paper is ________ . Please  include a “note on audience” after your works cited page explaining the decisions you made to appeal to that audience (you will see an example of this note in the template document). You should write formally and according to academic writing conventions, but take care to write in a way that will be compelling and persuasive to this audience.

Tip: A strong claim is an answer to a complex question. You might find it useful to begin this assignment by first formulating a question and then drafting your essay by pursuing the question through close analysis of passages from the text. You can then revise your draft so it is organized to support your claim. 

Extra credit: If you volunteer to share your draft with the class for feedback, you get an extra half letter grade bump. E-mail me if you want to volunteer to share your draft because we can only do one per class period!

Frequently Asked Questions

What can I cite in this paper? 

Choose ONE of the following texts:

• Little Red Riding Hood (Charles Perrault).
• Little Red Cap (Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm).
• Little Red Hood (Germany/Poland).
• Little Red Hat (Italy/Austria).
• The Grandmother (France).
• The True History of Little Golden-Hood (Charles Marelles).
• The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck (Beatrix Potter).
• Little Red Riding Hood (Film by David Kaplan)

What are MLA guidelines?

The Modern Language Association (MLA) guidelines provide the citation and formatting rules used by many scholars in the humanities. It is not the only citation style you will need to use during your university career, so ultimately you should learn to follow (not memorize!) these guidelines. You can find instructions on the MLA guidelines at this link. You can find resources for signal phrases  at this link and this link.

When is this paper due?

The course schedule in our syllabus includes deadlines for freewriting, drafting, and revision for this assignment. I strongly encourage you to follow this schedule so you can benefit from our class conversations about the writing process. 

How can I get feedback on my draft?

You can get feedback on your work at any stage in the process in a variety of ways:

• In class: My absolute favorite way to provide feedback on drafts is by workshopping the draft in class. To do this, make sure you have the most up-to-date draft in your word online document or in Kaizena so I can pull it up easily from the classroom computer.
• One-on-one: Drop by my office hours (in the syllabus; always reserved for students), make an appointment using my online scheduler (http://www.meetme.so/MaryIsbell), or talk to me before or after class.
• Online: Join our course group at Kaizena and share your document (or just post a message about your ideas) in a conversation with me or the whole class. I’ll demonstrate how Kaizena works in class.
• At the Writing Center: Tutors at the writing center will encourage you to talk through your ideas and read whatever you’ve got written aloud. These 45-minute appointments are a fantastic way to improve your work. You can sign up for an appointment using the online schedule.

How do you grade?

I will read your paper and determine a grade based on how successfully your paper accomplishes the work of the assignment. I will also give you a spreadsheet that I call the “framework for feedback,” which will help you see where you should focus your attention on future assignments. This framework breaks the work of an assignment down into seven sections and then indicates how successful you’ve been in each section. I’ve included the range for each section below:

Claim

Basic	Beginning	Developing	Competent	Mature
Writer has not developed a claim that responds to the assignment. The project is a series of observations or attempts at ideas.	Writer has struggled to develop a claim that responds to the assignment. One or more ideas could become the primary claim of the project, but the entire project does not work to support this point	Writer has developed a claim and introduced it to the reader somewhere in project, but that claim is significantly lacking in complexity and originality.	Writer has developed an original claim, but has not accounted for counterclaims as he/she revises the project. The claim could be more complex by addressing counterclaims.	Claim exhibits complexity and nuance through the writer’s consideration of counterclaims.

Process

Basic	Beginning	Developing	Competent	Mature
The writer has turned in a final project, but has not participated in the drafting and revision process	The writer has composed a draft and made surface changes before handing in the final draft. The writer has not participated fully in the drafting and revision process.	The writer has participated in the revision process in a superficial way. The writer has not used the revision process to full advantage	The writer has participated actively in the process and made substantial revisions from rough to final draft, taking full advantage of feedback from instructor and peers.	The writer has participated actively in the process and made substantial revisions from rough to final draft, taking full advantage of feedback from instructor and peers. Furthermore, the writer has continued with this process of revision until the final product is as strong as possible.

Analysis

Basic	Beginning	Developing	Competent	Mature
The project does not engage the text in any meaningful way	The project references one or more sections of text as appropriate for the assignment, but misunderstands the text or introduces sections of the text that are irrelevant to the goals of the project	The writer draws on sections of the text that are implicitly relevant to the project, but does not offer explicit analysis in individual paragraphs to make the relevance clear to the reader. There is a logic to the ideas introduced, but the reader has to guess why they have been chosen.	The writer has demonstrated that he/she can offer analysis of one section of the text to support his/her project, but has not done this consistently in the project	The writer has offered thoughtful analysis of all sections of the text introduced and demonstrated how those sections support the goals of the project. In so doing, the writer has offered a truly inventive angle on the assigned text.

Organization

Basic	Beginning	Developing	Competent	Mature
The project reads like a list of unrelated ideas. The writer would benefit from more careful attention to logical arrangement of well-structured paragraphs with transition sentences	The project reads like a list of unrelated ideas. One of the ideas might have the potential to become a primary claim, but it is not presented as such, and the other unrelated ideas do not support that claim.	Ideas are introduced in a logical order, but the writer has not taken advantage of paragraphs with clear topic sentences and transitions between ideas	The writer has demonstrated that he/she can construct a persuasive paragraph with a clear topic sentence and careful analysis related to one distinct point, but has not done this throughout the project.	The writer has organized his/her project thoughtfully, offering carefully ordered paragraphs that contain clear topic sentences. Transitions between these paragraphs are logical and the reader is able to understand the purpose of all components of the project.

Citation 

Basic	Beginning	Developing	Competent	Mature
It is difficult to tell if the ideas in the project are the ideas of the writer or something the writer has read. This is the grade given when the instructor believes the errors in citation are not deliberate cheating but a misuse of sources	Writer references the work of other writers and indicates in some way that those ideas are not the writer’s own ideas, but the writer does not include in-text citations.	Writer includes in-text citations and a works cited page, but struggles to indicate through sentences that the ideas of others are not his/her own.	The writer has demonstrated that he/she can introduce the ideas of others clearly, but has not done this with every text referenced in the project.	The writer has introduced all ideas from other writers and has even made it clear how his/her ideas forward or counter those ideas to say something new

Clarity

Basic	Beginning	Developing	Competent	Mature
The project is impossible to understand because of sentence-level issues	The project is difficult to understand because of sentence-level issues	Multiple sentence-level errors make the project confusing in places	Occasional sentence-level issues interrupt an otherwise easy-to-understand project	The writer has expressed his/her ideas clearly

Audience

Basic	Beginning	Developing	Competent	Mature
The project exhibits no attention to an audience for the writer’s work.	The project makes occasional moves that might be effective with a particular audience (or perhaps moves that would be effective with different audiences), but this does not seem to have been done deliberately.	The writer makes a sustained effort to appeal to a particular audience, but makes poor decisions that would likely prove ineffective or counterproductive. The project would be stronger if the writer considered the values and expectations of his/her audience	The writer has demonstrated that he/she can appeal effectively to a particular audience, but hasn’t used this sense of audience to full advantage	The writer has appealed consistently to a specific audience, anticipating potential counterarguments and demonstrating the relevance of the project to the values or concerns of the audience.