Taylor's annotation

Taylor's Annotation

Citation

Here's a useful resource for citation: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/2/

Portfolio prompt

Your work in WRIT 1133 was motivated by a real world exigence, i.e., you desire to persuade your peers and others in the community to join you in making a concrete, positive change. Using as evidence specific pieces of writing that you produced for our class, please discuss how you used you research and writing to realize your desire for change.

• How did your library research inform your call to action? 
• How did the interviewing and/or observing that you conducted enrich your plan? 
• How did you use your knowledge of your audience to your persuasive advantage? 
• And how will you be able use what you learned this term as you write, research, and take action in future?

Interview with Dr. Vincent Harding

1. Note the main arguments.
2. Note the main stories.
3. Take down the "quotable quotes."

Colloquium flyer!

Cross-Talk 2 Flyer by DUSocialJustice

Presentation time!

• Remember that you have 3 minutes. That's 3 minutes exactly. Not "around 3 minutes" or "3 minutes more or less" or "It felt like 3 minutes to me," but exactly 180 seconds.

• Typed up, a 3-minute presentation equals about a page and a half of text, double-spaced, Times New Roman 12. That's 375 words.

• Speak more slowly than you in everyday conversation, so that your audience can absorb what you're saying. As a rule of thumb, it should feel like you're talking a bit too slow.

• Rehearse! Rehearse! Rehearse! 

Writing interview questions

Writing interview questions from DUSocialJustice

Writing a social justice action plan

Writing a social justice action plan from DUSocialJustice

How to make an entry for an annotated bibliography

The purpose of an annotated bibliography is to help you keep track of what you’ve read. When you’re working on a large, long-term project that involves reading lots and lots of texts, it can be difficult to remember who talked about what, what your opinion of the text was, what uses it might have, and so on. Keeping track of reading only becomes more important when you’re working with a research group, since something that you read today might turn out to be useful to someone else in the group a month from now.

So, in order that we keep track of our text-based research for this term, we’ll all annotate what we read. Your annotations should be 250-750 words in length. (Length will vary depending on what you read: for example, my sample annotation of Shipler's book is about 750 words, but an annotation of a single article might only run four or five hundred words). Regardless of length, each annotation should cover three topics:

1. A summary of the content of the piece you've read. This section should describe the basic idea of the piece, focusing on its main argument and its approach to the topic.
2. Your analysis of the piece. This section should explain what you feel to be the piece’s strengths and weaknesses, both in terms of substance (i.e., what it argues) and its presentation style (i.e., how it presents that argument). In other words, you’ll want to evaluate the piece both as someone interested in the issues and as someone interested in learning to become a more effective writer.
3. A description of the uses of the piece. This section should focus on what you/we can do with the text, both as scholar-activists and as writers. What use does the text have to someone wanting to learn more and act upon the issue that the text takes up? And what can we learn from the text that will help us to research and write more effectively.

Each annotation should begin with an MLA-style citation of the text, and then proceed through the three sections. There’s a helpful guide to MLA citation at the Purdue OWL site. (Look on the list of topics on the left for guidance on specific citation topics.)

You'll find my annotation of David K. Shipler’s The Working Poor below. It's a longer one (since I'm annotating a book), but it should give you a general idea of what to aim for.

Sample Annotation - Working Poor by writRHET

For Tuesday: The Invisible Poor

For Tuesday, please read "At the Edge of Poverty" and "Work Doesn't Work" from David K. Shipler's The Working Poor: Invisible in America, and then, by the start of class, please email me your responses to the following questions.

• What does Shipler mean when he says that the working poor are "invisible"? What causes this "invisibility"? What are its consequences? 
• The "Wealth Inequality in America" video that we watched last week relied on numbers to make its argument, and it presented that argumented in highly visual form. Iceland's argument relies on stories, presented in written form. Compare and contrast the two approaches: What insights into the issue do story-based arguments have that statistics-based arguments do not, and vice versa? What advantages do written modes of presentation have over visual ones, and vice versa?

Your responses need not be very long -- maybe a page altogether.

Shipler's book is available online via Penrose. After you click the link, you'll need to sign in with your DU ID and password.

Wealth Inequality in America

The original video:

And a response:
 

For Thursday: Writ writer and WRIT writers

For Thursday, please watch Writ Writer, a documentary about "jailhouse lawyer" Fred Cruz, and, by the start of class, email to me a paragraph or two that responds to the following:

How does the practice of writing and research depicted in this film compare to your own experience thus far? What about Cruz's writing and research practices would you like to adopt/adapt for yourself?

The video is available on DUCourseMedia. Click on the Social Justice gallery and then on the film.

Though this is an "informal" assignment, you should aim to write as clearly and as gracefully as you can, to use specific quotes and/or concrete descriptions of scenes from the film, and to write down the times at which those scenes or pieces of dialogue occur.

Our syllabus!

WRIT 1133 Syllabus - Spring 2013 by DUSocialJustice