Major Writing Assessment: Position Paper (Assignment Sheet and Submission Portal)

I will include my pre-essay material as well as my previous essay about the issue. Include the information presented in this material and as a starting point for the essay.Prompt:

You will write a 8-10 page position paper plus a bibliography featuring at least twenty sources (the bibliography does not count toward the page requirement).

• Purpose: You have been working toward this paper all semester, brainstorming key questions, conducting research throughout the term and considering (and re-considering) the positions of others. Your work in this essay is to finally take your own position within the debate that you’ve focused upon as you’ve worked through in units 2 & 3 (the Argument of Inquiry Essay and the Digital Forum).
  The goal is to build on what you’ve learned in order to take a position within the conversation concerning your issue and make a relatively new claim concerning your issue.
  • To do so successfully, I strongly encourage you to take a position that ultimately addresses a question that pertains to the stasis categories of action and/or jurisdiction.

This argumentative essay will be the place where you can share the fruits of your research and argue for the ideas as they have developed in your mind through the writing and research process conducted this semester.

This is the unit in which you, finally, argue for your own stance on the key questions concerning your issue (you might even take a position that the major problem with your issue is that people are not debating the right question).

• Writing the Position Paper

1. 1. You may feel as if you’ve said all there is to say on your topic, but our work during this unit turns your attention to rhetorical strategies that take up concerns of cause, consequence, and proposals for new action concerning your issue. Thus, you might work in this Position Paper to pinpoint, among other things, the cause and the consequences of the problem you have been exploring and then propose a solution.
      • Such a focus on proposals and solutions is strongly encouraged, for we can all identify problems. The challenge is to propose and argue for solutions to those problems.
2. 1. For this project, you are required to have a bibliography of at least twenty sources.
      • At least 10 of these sources need to be scholarly; the others might include popular sources such as blogs, interviews, magazine or newspaper articles, documents from government agencies, think tank websites etc.
      • All sources must be reputable, credible, and useful for your case. Of course, you should draw on your Annotated Bibliography assignment, the Argument of Inquiry Essay, and your Digital Forum when collecting the sources for your bibliography.
      • You may, though, need to conduct more research.
      • A great part of your success in this assignment will be determined by how well you employ your research.

You must cite at least ten sources in the body of your essay.

• • • At least six of those sources cited must be scholarly (if you want to cite a popular source, it must be in addition to the six scholarly sources).
    • But remember, your ultimate goal is to support all claims using as many credible sources as needed, so you should feel free to use more than six scholarly sources if necessary.

1. 1. One of the trickiest parts of a long argument is organization. You need (not necessarily in this order) to give an overview of the issue, to stake your claim, to offer evidence in support of your claim, and to refute those who might not immediately agree with you by providing counter-arguments—so, the question is: how will you put it all together?
      There are two rhetorical tools to help you here:
      • The first is the stases categoriesLinks to an external site.. You can use the hierarchy of the stases, the way that the answers to a question in one stasis depends on the answers to a question in another stasis, to help shape your argument.
        • If you are making an argument about action, for example, you might introduce your thesis, but then address questions of fact/definition to establish background, then move on to questions of cause/effect to show exigence, then move on to questions of value to further develop a sense of importance and urgency, and then ultimately provide you answer to questions regarding action and/or jurisprudence.
      • The second piece of rhetorical theory is the parts of a full argument found in chapter 40 of Fearless Writing. The parts of a full argument offer guidelines about how to begin and offer background and how to lay out a map for the paper.
        • Many of the daily activities we conduct during this unit will follow the parts of a full argument outlined in chapter 40.

• Evaluation: Your essay will be evaluated on how well you:
  • Clearly state your position in the thesis and support it throughout the essay
  • Effectively employ rhetorical appeals given your particular rhetorical situation
  • Provide a thorough, sophisticated and well-supported argument supporting your position
  • Grab the reader’s attention with a hook and argue for the exigence of your issue in the introduction (and maintain that argument of exigence throughout the rest of the essay)
  • Employ the compositional conventions of academic writing
  • Adhere to MLA style guidelines (including, but not limited to, in-text citations and a Bibliography page, which is not to be considered part of the 8-10 page count)