Description
You are required to take a position on a current issue/event, direct your position toward a target audience, and attempt to persuade this audience of the legitimacy of your position. This project asks you to put into practice the major objectives of the course: Analyzing the ways in which ideas are presented through rhetorical designs; Recognizing rhetorical designs in an effort to encourage refutation (dialectic); Using rhetorical designs to engage in argument; Considering how argument can function as “meaningful disagreement”; Using argument as “meaningful disagreement” to learn more about our own identities and commitments and to perform acts of community; Achieving “meaningful disagreement” through the effective assessment and incorporation of research (“ongoing conversation”). You are required to use no LESS than five and no MORE than six sources. Please keep in mind that you will need to locate, examine, and evaluate roughly triple this amount in order to find five to six relevant, on-topic, reliable, and authoritative sources. You will pull the bulk of these sources from databases such as ProQuest Research Library, Academic Search Complete, Academic OneFile, and Project Muse. You will create a works-cited page for this project, following MLA (8th edition) formatting style.( the sources must come from the databases list above) It is not intended to function as a report on or review of a topic/issue. On occasion you might have to review/report on an aspect of your topic in an effort to provide sufficient context, but the central goal of the essay should be argumentative—taking a position on an issue, or more particularly an aspect of an issue, and developing a persuasive argument around your position. Identify a specific audience that you plan to target with your argument. It is up to you to decide whom this audience will be. For example, if you choose a topic in the field of education, depending on what your topic is and how you plan to approach it, you might target public school board members, or perhaps school administrators, or maybe even federal or state legislators, on and on. You should work under the assumption that your target audience disagrees with your position (holds an antithetical view to yours, to phrase it according to dialectic) on the issue. As a result, your argumentative objective is to draw this target audience into your argument and attempt to convince this audience of the legitimacy of your position. You should also seek to practice prolepsis (one of the rhetorical moves we examined, which is an act that attempts to anticipate the target audience’s responses to the claims being raised in the argument) on your audience in an effort to demonstrate both your awareness of the issue and your proficiencies in acts of communication.