Overview
For assignment one, you developed an original and arguable claim in response to one version of Little Red Riding Hood. For assignment two, we will explore a historical event–a slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in 1830–through two adaptations of that event: Thomas Gray’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1831) and Kyle Baker’s graphic novel Nat Turner (2005/6). We will work together to build a set of sources interpreting and contextualizing these materials and then decide how those resources might be shared.
The Basics
Your goal with this assignment is to formulate questions emerging from our shared set of texts. Instead of immediately moving to develop an original and arguable claim, however, we are going to linger on arguably the most important part of the academic writing process: answering complex questions with research. The creative works we are discussing are challenging, and we want to approach that challenge with rigorous research and creativity. I will be guiding you through a process of finding and interrogating sources for this project. It may be that you will emerge from this process with an answer to a specific question, but the options for this assignment give you the freedom to focus on formulating complex questions if that’s where you are. If you would like, you can build on the work you do with this assignment in your research project (our third assignment).
Process
This assignment asks you to devote considerable time to reading and taking notes on the sources you find. You will notice a deadline to submit a draft of your research notes and a deadline for the final project. Your first draft can just include your responses to the “prompts for note taking” below; you should plan to revise that draft significantly before handing in the final draft. I describe two options for submitting the results of this work, but I’m open to other ideas!
Genre Options
- Research Notes with a specific purpose for a particular (hypothetical) audience: The best way to begin this process is to create a Microsoft Word document and copy/paste the “Questions for Note-Taking” below, repeating the bolded area for each source you find in your research process. The final version of these notes can be formatted in whatever way you think will be most impactful for your audience (this might mean you don’t include ALL of the questions and answers in your final version).
- Curate a collection of sources in Zotero with a specific purpose for a particular (hypothetical or real) audience: If you want to learn how Zotero works, this is a great opportunity to practice with it. If you choose this option, you will devote some energy to ensuring that the metadata is correct for the sources you find and you will add what you’ve learned about each source as a child note. Watch my introductory video about Zotero if you haven’t already and send me an e-mail when you’ve created an account so I can add you to our class group. Note that if you create a collection in Zotero. Check out the template I created in our course Zotero library for inspiration.
- Have another idea? Let me know!
Your work for this project can remain private and shared only with me, but option 2 gives you an opportunity to make your work public on our course website. No matter which what you produce, you will start this project by creating research notes. And you will start that process by reading the assigned texts and formulating context questions.
Prompts for Note Taking
Describe the Project
- Explain how you arrived at the questions you’re pursuing with this project.
- State your questions explicitly.
- Describe the audience (hypothetical or real) you want to share your project with and why they will be interested in what you’ve discovered.
Source #1
- Provide the full title of the source and the larger work it is a part of (a single web-page on a website, a story in a book, a song on an album, etc.). It’s best to write the title in accordance with the citation style you will use (MLA for this paper).
- Describe the genre of this source. What is it (play, story in a collection, article on a website, article in a peer-reviewed journal) and how does that matter?
- Describe the author/creator, starting with the full name. If it was created collaboratively, try to include all of the people who contributed in a significant way to the creation of the source. For each significant contributor, Include birth and (if relevant) death dates, country of origin, and noteworthy bits of biography. Then explain how these things matter.
- Describe the publisher, starting with the name of the publisher. Is this a company selling stories? An academic press? An individual who has self-published on the Internet? A company more interested in selling a product other than the source? What does the publisher tell you about the quality of the information presented in the source? Does the publisher make you think this source is appropriate for your project?
- When and where was this source originally published/produced and who do you think it was produced for? Was this the original publication date or has it been republished for a new audience? How does this publication history matter?
- What do you think the purpose of this source was when it was first published? If the source was translated or edited for a later publication, you might also comment on the purpose of the source at that time.
- What did you find useful in this source? It will be most helpful if you include particular page numbers or timestamps for material you might cite. You are also welcome to include a link to another document you’re using to take notes.
Source #2 and all following
[repeat for as many sources as you find]
Concluding Thoughts
- Explain where you are now in your thinking and how your research questions and your sense of how to answer those questions have changed.
- Present your current answers to your questions based on all that you have learned so far, or explain why you still can’t answer your questions. Perhaps describe what research you might pursue further.
Frequently Asked Questions
When is this project 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 share the most up-to-date draft with me before class.
- One-on-one: Make an appointment with me by e-mailing or talk to me before or after 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 describe in the syllabus my approach to grading in this course. For this assignment, I provide below a framework for reflection that you can use, alongside detailed feedback from me, to decide the grade you should receive on the assignment. As long as you’ve written a project reflection that signals familiarity with my feedback and the framework for reflection, the grade you give yourself is the grade I will enter in the gradebook for the assignment.
The framework below is based on my observations of students over many years and breaks this writing project down into six sections, offering descriptions of work within each section. When I used to assign grades, I would select one block for each section and occasionally change the language to better describe what I was observing. This helped my students identify areas of focus for future writing projects. I offer it here in the assignment prompt because it might help you get a sense of expectations for this assignment if you look at it before getting started.
Framework for Reflection
Question
| Writer has not developed a question that responds to the assignment. The project is a series of observations or attempts at ideas. | Writer has struggled to develop a question that responds to the assignment. One or more ideas could become a question to guide the project, but the entire project does not work to answer this question | Writer has developed a question and introduced it to the reader somewhere in project, but that question is significantly lacking in complexity. | Writer has developed a complex question, but has relied too heavily on existing answers. The project could be more complex if the writer thought critically about the sources providing answers. | Questions exhibit complexity and nuance and the writer thinks carefully about the sources they find. |
Process
| 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
| The project does not engage source material in any meaningful way | The project references one or more sources 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 sources that are implicitly relevant to the project, but does not offer explicit analysis to make the relevance clear to the reader. There is a logic to the sources included, but the reader has to guess why they have been chosen. | The writer has demonstrated that they can offer analysis of source material to support their project, but has not done this consistently in the project | The writer has offered thoughtful analysis of all sources introduced. |
Citation and Attribution
| It is difficult to tell if the ideas in the project are the ideas of the writer or something the writer has read. It does not seem like the errors in citation are deliberate cheating nor the errors in attribution deliberate copyright infringement; instead they seem to point to 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 or attribution statements. | Writer includes in-text citations and a works cited page and/or attribution statements, but struggles to indicate through sentences that the ideas of others are not their own. | The writer has demonstrated that they can introduce the ideas of others clearly, but has not done this with every source referenced in the project. | The writer has introduced all ideas from other writers and has even made it clear when their ideas forward or counter those ideas to say something new |
Clarity
| 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 their ideas clearly |
