Assignment for Thursday – Updated

Write a blog post in which you discuss three sources on #occupywallstreet. In choosing your three sources, please take one of the following two paths:

Option A: Find three sources that address the same particular issue or event. For instance, you might try to find three different sources that all address this morning’s eviction of the protestors by the NYPD. Or you might try to find three sources that address the NYPD’s treatment of protestors who tried to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge a month ago.

Option B: Find three sources that address different aspects of the larger #OWS protest. For instance, you might try to find one source that discusses the protest in terms of economics, one that discusses it in relation to the history of previous protests, one that discusses it in relation to legal issues, etc.

For EACH source:

1. Identify the source — both the writer/speaker AND the venue of publication. Link to the source if possible.

2. Analyze the venue of publication. Who owns this publication venue? For instance, is it National Public Radio, which is a publicly owned entity of the U.S., or is it NBC television, which is privately owned by the General Electric Corporation? See what you can find out about the venue of publication. Your goal here is not to make a 1-to-1 link between the ownership of a venue and the content posted there, but rather to have a better sense of the complicated ties that bind the venue of publication).

3. Summarize the content of the source. WHAT is being said here? What positions are being articulated?

4. Analyze the rhetoric of the argument. HOW is the argument being made? What types of rhetorical strategies are being employed? Use our in-class discussion of Mayor Bloomberg’s speech as a model (i.e., we discussed the Mayor’s rhetorical strategy of defending his decision as one based on safety, hygiene, and protection of the public good.)

At the end of the post, use They Say/I Say templates to describe your own position on the topic.

Please put your post in the category “Student Posts” and tag it “ows”

If you have questions, please ask them in the comments.

SAMPLE TEXTS to respond to:

— Mayor Bloomberg’s speech on the OWS “cleanup”
— Keith Olberman on Bloomberg
— NYTimes coverage of OWS
— NYPost Op-Ed on OWS
— Bloomberg News piece
— McKenzie Wark – “How to Occupy an Abstraction”
— Morgan Buck
— Jesse Kornbluth The Police Riot at Berkeley: If They’ll Beat a Poet Laureate, Will They Kill a Student?