Digital Composition and Rhetoric Fall 2016: OpenLab Site

Please post your questions and concerns related to the specific elements involved with writing an overview of sources essay.  There is a lot to think and talk about when writing in this genre.  Do you have questions about how to structure your essay?  Using textual evidence? Distinguishing between claims and evidence?  Paragraph development?  Needless to say, all and any questions are welcome.  If you can post specific examples from your essay in progress to give us something concrete to discuss, they will be most appreciated.

One Paragraph Blog Post Comparing and Contrasting Your Three Sources

The purpose of this blog post is two-fold:  First, you will introduce your sources to your audience (title, author, source).  Second, you will compare and contrast the purpose, tone and style of the three sources.

Here is one sample from Nicole Waite, who was a student in my ENG1101 course in the Spring, 2014 semester.  Nicole made the decision to list her sources first and then discuss and refer to them.  If she had had time to write a second draft of this discussion of her sources, I suspect she may have been able to introduce the sources as she was discussing them.

GA12: Nicole Waite:
MY SOURCES:
(1) Denhart, Chris. “How the $1.2 Trillion College Debt is Crippling Students, Parents and the Economy.” Forbes 7 Aug. 2013. Forbes, Inc. Web. http://www.forbes/sites/specialfeatures/2013/08/07/how-the-college-debt-is-crippling- students-parents-and-the-economy
(2) Hiltonsmith, Robert, and Tamara Draut. “The Great Cost Shift Continues: State Higher Education Funding After the Recession.” Demos 6 March 2014.
http://www.demos.org//publication/great-cost-shift-continues-state-higher-education- funding-after-recession
(3) Bidwell, Allie. “The Rise in Tuition is Slowing, But College Still Costs More.” U.S. World & News Report 24 October 2013. http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/10/24/the- rise-in-tuition-is-slowing-but-college-still-costs-more

Each of my sources addresses the rising cost of tuition and fees that have occurred on a national level, as the result of budgetary cuts to education. Each also speaks to the fact that students are graduating with enormous debt because of loans that they take in order to pay for school. The tone of each of the pieces seems to be educational in that they are informing the reader about the crisis and why it exists. I feel that the audience for each of the articles are students/parents and anyone that is affected by the economy; the latter because student debt has a direct effect on financial matters such as state budgeting, national interest rates, and tax burdens on the community.

The article written by Hiltonsmith and Draut entitled “The Great Cost Shift Continues: State Higher Education Funding After the Recession” (DEMOS 2014) is longer and more formal than the other two pieces; it includes both statistics and charts. Bidwell’s article, “The Rise in Tuition is Slowing, But College Still Costs More” (U.S. World & News Report 2013) explains how and why the tuition rate has been increasing even though tuition rates have slackened, while Denhart’s article “How the $1.2 Trillion College Debt is Crippling Students, Parents and the Economy” (FORBES 2013) focuses more on paying for college and the consequences of taking out loans. But each of the writings have similar summations – the rising cost of attending a public college, or private institution for that matter, has become so unaffordable that students are amassing huge [loan] debt in order to pay for their higher education.

Topic Sentences: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/engagement/2/1/29/

Paragraph Coherence:  https://owl.english.purdue.edu/engagement/2/1/30/

1. Write letters to newspapers and congress people.
2. Organize a protest.
3. Write a position paper.
4. Collect and distribute information and resources about this election and future elections.
5. Coordinate activities and actions across CUNY campuses and across universities nation-wide.

Key Questions

1. Why did people who will not benefit from Trump’s economic policies vote for Trump?
2. Why did many voters in the U.S.A. choose to believe Trump when he claimed there was an “easy” answer to the complex problems involved with globalization and income inequality?

Please post your revised draft research question here.  Please also feel free to post any and all questions you may have about the course research project.

Please post one paragraph (you wrote this as part of LJ9) explaining what short story you chose to read and why you want to read it.

Please post your questions about developing research questions and about other aspects of college research here.  Also, please feel free to post information about or links to any resources (web sites, articles, books) that you believe may be useful to other students in the course as they work on developing their research questions.

Part I:  Please post three questions about some specific aspect of the SWE sentence.  For instance, “what is a run-on?”  “What is the difference between a period and a comma?”  “What is wrong with this sentence:  ‘The is dog cat eating the.’” “If it is possible to start a SWE sentence with the word ‘Because,’ why did my high school English teacher tell me NEVER to do that?”  “What is a sentence fragment, and how can I revise these in my writing?”  Be creative!  Ask anything and everything you’ve ever wanted to know about SWE sentences, their functions, and their malfunctions.

Part II: Please read through all of your own and your classmates’ questions posted to GA9.  Locate the answer to ONE of your own questions and TWO of your classmates’ questions by looking up the answer to these questions on the Purdue OWL or in your English handbook.  Post a brief synopsis of the “answer,” along with a link to the Purdue OWL site or a reference to the page number of your handbook where you located this information.