Mini-paper 2

Mini-paper 2

Final Draft due: March 10 by 11:59p.m., in the appropriate D2L assignment folder

Quick Reference Guide

• Word count: 500 words
• Genre: academic essay for the Humanities
• Exigence: to help develop knowledge and practices of writing transferable to future writing contexts
• Purpose: defining, referencing, and using a key term
• Format: MLA or APA
• Audience: Me

·       Background

We have spent this semester focused on key terms—how they understood and defined in scholarship by people who study writing, how you understand and use them in your school and non school writing, and how they will drive the writing you undertake in future witting contexts.

By analyzing your own writing, as we did for the first literacy task, you engaged in reflection and thought deeply about rhetorical situations, exigence, audience, and genre as well as other important writing-related terms that are not part of our eight key terms (e.g., constraints and purpose).

The goal for this class to help you develop knowledge and practice of writing which you can transfer to future writing contexts. As I wrote in the Background for Mini-paper 1 writing researchers believe key terms are central to helping you develop this knowledge and practice.

Objective

For this mini-paper, I invite you to select one of the three key terms we have recently introduced (i.e., knowledge, discourse community, and context) and

• provide a definition of this term grounded in the Swales, Mahiri and Sablo, and/or Grant-Davie readings,
• explain how you understand and use the term,
• and detail how understanding and defining this term will help you in future writing contexts—be those contexts school related or non-school related.

Assessing

I plan on using this brief assignment to gauge your current writing level and will spend more time providing feedback on mechanical, syntactical, and grammatical areas of your writing than I will do for the longer literacy tasks. Specifically, I will be looking for you to

• Pull appropriately from any of the three readings to offer a definition of your selected key term
• Construct a clearly articulated main point early in your writing
• Reflect and draw on examples from your life experience to illustrate how you understand the key term
• Illustrate a command of grammatical and mechanical elements of writing
• Trim superfluous words and, when needed, passive voice from your writing
• Properly format your essay according to MLA or APA guidelines

Good luck! I’m happy to help if you need some additional assistance at any stage of this paper. You can reach me as well via email at Michael.rifenburg@ung.edu or on Twitter @JMRifenburg.