Sequence 2 Writing Assignments

The following Sequence 2 sample assignments are included here:

Short Assignment: Analysis Essay

Due: xx
Your final piece of writing should be approximately 2 pages.

Select an article from our Sequence 2 course readings or choose an academic text about intellectual property that you are considering for your Sequence 2 informative feature article. Briefly summarize the major argument(s) and ideas from the essay (what the writer says), then analyze how the writer presents the nature of the issue or problem (how he or she develops a perspective on the problem or issue).

Imagine that your classmates have not yet read this article but are considering using it in their own features for Sequence 2 (which may well be the case). Our goal with this assignment is to practice taking apart a writer’s argument and explain to other readers how that argument works. This can make it easier for readers to understand how that writer’s understanding of the issue compares to that of other writers.

Be sure to begin by explaining the rhetorical situation of the article (purpose, audience, etc.). Then, delve into the rest of your analysis, using questions such as:

  • Who else is presented as being involved or affected by this issue and what roles do these other stakeholders play, according to the article?
  • What does the writer present as being at stake?
  • What kinds of questions does the article raise, and what key assumptions does it make?
  • What major trends does it cite, or what predictions does it make?
  • What kinds of sources and authority does it cite
  • How does it organize and make sense of the information it uses?
  • How does the article try to present itself as being timely?
  • What, if anything, might need to be updated if this article were rewritten today?

Short Assignment: Feature Article Proposal

Due: xx
Your final piece of writing should be approximately 2 pages.

Write a proposal for an informative feature article about an aspect of intellectual property that we have discussed so far in this class. From our earlier workshops in class, you should already have selected the problem or question you will explore and have started looking for relevant source materials. Think of this proposal then as proposing not just what you will write about, but your plan—how you want to organize and develop your ideas.

Your proposal should include:

An introduction that clearly lays out the issue, problem, or question you are interested in writing about, and why you think it is both significant and relevant to persons in the UW community.

A middle section that explains how you intend to investigate this issue using sources. Describe where you have searched for sources. For sources you intend to use, briefly compare their takes on the issue with those of the texts we have discussed in class. Explain the ways you think you might make sense of the varying perspectives and information offered by your different sources. For example, in looking at your sources as a whole, what similarities or differences have you seen so far in the way they approach the question or issue? What has surprised you and why? How have trends or understandings of this issue changed over time? What questions are left unanswered, or where do you wish they would go in a different direction?

A conclusion that lays out how you think you will focus and organize the paper, explains challenges you think you may face between now and your first full draft of the paper, and any questions you have for yourself about how you can best meet those challenges.

Note: Your proposal is not necessarily a blueprint for your article, but it is a way for you to think through the potential sources, methods, and challenges of it.

Short Assignment: Fake News Story

Due: xx
Your final piece of writing should be approximately 1-2 pages.

Goal: Improve information evaluation strategies, increase genre awareness, improve digital literacy skills

Write a “fake news” story that demonstrates your understanding of the genre. This means that you should use the available features of the genre (including headline, images, tone, etc.) that both make fake news viral, attention-grabbing, and emotionally-driven along with those features that help us identify fake news. In other words, as students of fake news, we should be able to identify your piece as fake news—it should both appear real while giving hints at its invalidity.

Inspired by an assignment by Brandee Easter

Short Assignment: Poster Presentation

Due: xx

Create a Poster Presentation about your Sequence 2 major project to share with your peers. The poster need not encapsulate every major idea you will explore in your paper, but it should visually present the key way you are organizing and making sense of what you have found.

Write a 1-page reflective memo to accompany your poster presentation that explains the perspective you are presenting, what you want to teach your peers, your process, and the choices you made in designing the poster.

Information Literacy Mini-Module

Brief Annotated Bibliography

This module provides a series of exercises that can be integrated into your course calendar to support the development of information literacy skills and strategies. Please note you should incorporate this and adapt it accordingly for your own class in advance of your scheduled library day. It can be in addition to the short assignments or adapted as its own short assignment.

Among other things, the culminating assignment provides students with a time-sensitive, specific reason to engage with the online sections of Sift & Winnow as well as with Library Day. Use of this module is not required, but you will help your students make use of Library Day if you include some kind of sequenced series of exercises and an assignment that makes clear connections.

1. Two weeks before your Library Day

  • Assign online Sift & Winnow sections. Make time during class to discuss students’ experiences with research and the learning goals for the information literacy component of English 100.
  • Assign the Brief Annotated Bibliography that will be due within one week of Library Day. (Sample assignments included at end of this document.) Discuss your class goals for the assignment. How does it fit with the current Unit’s major assignment or the skills you are working on? How does it fit within the course as a whole?

2. In the weeks before Library Day

  • Include class activities and/or short assignments that help students focus on writing strong summaries and analyses of texts, moving from simple and short toward more complex scholarly texts. Provide models and opportunities for synthesis, too, for example, by working through comparative questions about a small group of texts, individually or in small groups.
  • Provide time in class for invention activities related to the short assignment – or frame the short assignment as an invention activity.

3. Library Day

Ask students to bring to class one specific question for the librarian about their assignment or a larger research project.

4. Debrief Library Day during the following class and connect to the bibliographic assignment. Debriefing activities can include

  • in-class freewriting about what was learned, what was most useful, etc.; share and discuss.
  • in-class game or activity to extend one area of learning—e.g., generating search terms
  • as a class, generate a list of unanswered questions related to the research process
  • Jeopardy game to reinforce information literacy concepts and skills

5. Bibliographic assignment due within one week after Library Day.

SAMPLE ASSIGNMENT

Brief Annotated Bibliography

Direct students toward the guidelines available through the UW Writing Center’s online Writer’s Handbook or develop your own guidelines in the context of your class: http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/AnnotatedBibliography.html

For this assignment, students will:

1. Create a focused research question. [This can be in relation to the larger sequence project or simply a topic of individual authentic interest. The main purpose is to give students a reason for locating good sources.]

2. Locate 4 or more, strong sources that provide different perspectives on their question. You must include

  • 2 sources from two different academic disciplines
  • a primary source
  • a reliable source of general interest (e.g., The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Mayo Clinic Health Letter, government website)

3. Write an annotated bibliography using correct MLA citation. Each annotation should be about 150 words, including a summary [You can give specific questions for students to answer to help raise awareness about the usefulness of different kinds of sources.] and a statement about how the source could be useful for responding to your question.

Writing Project 2: Informative Feature Article

Due: xx
Your final piece of writing should be approximately 4-5 pages.

Task: Research an issue or question related to intellectual property that connects to our class discussions and course readings in this sequence. Then write an informative feature article that offers UW students and staff a thoughtful way to make sense of the wide array of information and perspectives related to the question or issue you have chosen.

Your feature should show or suggest why your question is relevant or timely, especially to those in the UW community. For this, you should try to understand the issue in as much depth as possible. This means you’ll want to engage in extensive fact-finding and also seek to understand multiple perspectives.

In your article, you must draw from five or more strong sources. At least three of these must be scholarly. The rest may come from academic, professional, non-profit, or governmental sources that address the issue generally, and/or from in-depth local news articles, interviews, surveys, or reports that connect the issue in some way to students at UW Madison. You may also make use of charts, graphs, tables, or images that can help support your understanding of this question/problem/issue, as long as they are properly cited.

Tips about the genre and the process:

The point of an informative feature is to teach, analyze, and engage. It’s not meant to convince readers to take anyone’s side or carry out an action.

Feature articles help readers better understand the nature of a problem, issue, concept, or question.

Although informative feature articles may sometimes rely on the writer’s firsthand experience or thoughts, this assignment asks you to leave your own experience and musings out of the article.

Instead, you will gather information and perspectives about the issue or question from a variety of published sources, then creatively offer readers a way to better understand it through your analysis of the information and multiple perspectives that the article will summarize.

Different approaches

You may choose to make sense of what you find in many different ways. Among the possibilities, you could focus on

  • Carefully defining the problem
  • Comparing how different writers approach the question in similar or different ways
  • Examining the cause or the likely effects of the issue
  • Showing what is at stake for each party involved and why
  • Exploring what has changed in various perspectives over time

Whatever approach you choose, the feature article should have a clear focus and develop detailed explanations of the perspective it offers.

Keep in mind too, that your feature article, like all informative writing that uses sources, requires thoughtful analysis of the information you gather throughout your research and writing process. For example, as you research, you will need to decide who needs to know about this issue or problem, why, which information and perspectives deserve attention, how to organize what you find, and how to present it in a way that both teaches your readers something new while offering them ways to think more critically about the problem or question at hand.

To complete project 2, you’ll need to do the following:

  • Use research skills to find articles or essays that discuss the problem or question you have chosen. You will need to use five sources; at least three should be scholarly.
  • Clearly articulate how you are making sense of (analyzing) what your sources have to say about the issue or question
  • Summarize and analyze key arguments, ideas, and information from your sources. Use the synthesis skills practiced in this unit to compare/contrast ideas you find, select the most important or surprising information,
  • Include citations for your research and a bibliography.

Learning Outcomes

In this project, you will

  • Gain experience in selecting, narrowing, and focusing a topic for a specific purpose and audience.
  • Learn to locate, evaluate, and carefully select published sources for your intellectual project.
  • Become familiar with library resources at UW-Madison.
  • Build on your skills in summary and analysis.
  • Learn strategies for critiquing and evaluating the information presented in a text.
  • Use rhetorical concepts to analyze writers’ choices, including your own.
  • Gain practice in drafting and revising in response to peers and your instructor.
  • Practice strategies for artful, strategic integration of sources into your discussion of an issue.
  • Become familiar with college-level expectations for citing sources, avoiding plagiarism, and compiling an accurate bibliography.

Portfolio and Writer’s Memo

You’ll complete the project in the form of a portfolio, while will include:

  • A Writer’s Memo
  • All planning, brainstorming, and research notes or worksheets
  • All drafts of your project
  • All feedback you received, from me and your peers
  • The final revision of your project

The Writer’s Memo serves as a coversheet to your project. In the memo you should describe your purpose and strategy in writing this project and ask any questions about the writing that you may have yourself. This is your opportunity to provide some context for the writing but also a chance to ask your reader directly about the effectiveness of the piece.

Additional Sequence 2 Writing Projects

Following the narratives composed in Sequence 1, this sequence encourages students to practice analyzing and evaluating information and research within the writing and argument process. In this unit, students begin finding, recording, and analyzing the stories and viewpoints of other people. Rather than thinking of each unit as a separate entity consider how each unit builds upon skills and leads students toward new engagement with writing and analysis. There are a number of strategies for incorporating this type of thinking into your writing projects in addition to the more descriptive assignments above.

  • Consider asking students to engage in a field research project or “mini-ethnography” for Sequence 2 with a number of scaffolded assignments. A link to a sample assignment can be found in the model calendar.
  • Get your students out into the field and practicing different forms of observation and analysis with a field trip or activity on campus. Possible places include the Chazen Museum, a walking trip to Picnic Point, or observing at the Memorial Union.
  • Ask students to engage in a review of a piece of media, art, or place. Every review that Roger Ebert has ever written is available online and a great tool to underscore rhetorical engagement, strong writing, and clear stating of facts and experiences. This assignment can be combined with a trip to a museum (as suggested above) or an opportunity for you to encourage students to explore a different form of media for analysis on their own. In addition, this form of writing offers students the opportunity to analyze information in a different argumentative context.

Incorporating Sift & Winnow with Sequence 2 Assignments

This section contains some tips and practices for incorporating Sift & Winnow and its accompanying library session into your Sequence 2 plans. Sift & Winnow is an important part of the course’s approach to information literacy and can support your teaching beyond the day you visit the library. At the beginning of the semester, you will be sent a Google Forms to aid in scheduling. You may have the opportunity to choose between an in-person session or a secondary Canvas module that builds on the Sift and Winnow modules. The librarians work very hard to provide sessions during the times that work for you, and you will know when your session will be scheduled within the first couple of weeks of class.

Tips and Practices

More often than not, librarians give feedback that classes come too early in the sequence. The session is most helpful when students have a developed research question to work with during the class.

As in the model syllabus, consider dividing up the assignment of the six modules so that students can discuss and practice before going to the library. Some instructors practice Sift & Winnow skills on a set selection of sources or topics for class and then have students expand on this work in their library session by researching their own chosen topic.

Work with your librarian to tailor the session to your sequence 2 or 3 assignment. Your librarian should be added to your Canvas site, and you should hear from them before your library session. It is a good idea to let them know just before your session what kinds of topics your students have been developing. Giving them a sense of this can help them provide more relevant activities and examples.

Have students continue to practice their research skills after your library session. This may include having an assignment, such as an annotated bibliography or research proposal, that students produce out of that session. This may also be as simple as taking a few moments at the beginning of the next class to debrief and discuss how to carry over these skills into their Sequence 2 project.

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Sequence 2 Writing Assignments Copyright © 2023 by University of Wisconsin-Madison English 100 Program. All Rights Reserved.