Youve had the opportunity to test your initial ideas and cultivate source literacy techniques for your final Hybrid Argument

Cohen 1

Sarah Cohen

Instructor Qui Gon Jinn

ENGL 1164

6 November 2018

Annotated Bibliography

Ichniowski, Tom. “New Spending Measure Provides Construction Boost.” ENR: Engineering

News-Record, February 2018. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com.leo.lib.unomaha.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=128005

898&site=ehost-live&scope=site. This article highlights the budget that is being

increased to help the Army Corps of Engineers build a better infrastructure. It provides

quotes from the Army Chief and the Lieutenant General of the Army Corps of Engineers.

The article points out the flaws that come with the new increase in the budget. I will use

this source as it provides credible quotes from people who know first-hand how the

infrastructure in the United States needs to be improved. With the quotes, I will try to

persuade my audience that the budget “increase” needs to be raised as it is not enough to

make improvements across the nation. This source will help present logic that is needed

to persuade the reader, without knowing the numbers, the reader would not know the

little impact the budget has on infrastructure. By presenting this, it allows the reader to

see how inefficient the new budget is.

Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design.

Routledge, 1996. Kress and van Leeuwen provide means to examine visual and linguistic

compositional argument as it relates to the features of an image, including color choices,

subject representation, viewer positioning, framing, size and location of image, and other

Cohen 2

structural elements that speak to the designers’ intended visual effect. Analyzing the

relationship between producer and viewer by means of the visual interaction can begin to

address and “regulate what may be ‘said’ with images, how it should be said, and how it

should be interpreted” (114). Specifically, Kress and van Leeuwen’s text will be critical

as I need to establish the digital and rhetorical arguments pertaining to the design choices

featured on WeddingWire as it relates to the position of the viewer and the compositional

visual culture of the website.

Los Angeles Public Library. “Hartley Burr Alexander: Not Your Typical 20th Century

Philosopher.” https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/hartley-burr-alexander-

not-your-typical-20th-century Accesses 13 July 2018. This online publication illuminates

historical and biographic information about Hartley Burr Alexander. This text is useful in

corroborating primary source documents about Alexander’s conviction to Native American

cultural preservation against evidence other scholars and colleagues have provided,

speaking to the legacy and Alexander’s vita. This multigenre project is in part

bibliographic, so this source will be useful in establishing the character and personal

history of Alexander and the inspirations that contributed to his thematic consultation to

the NE capitol. This source also provides work that Alexander did after the Nebraska State

Capitol project including thematic curation to the Los Angeles Central Library

Commission, Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, the Oregon State Capitol, Fidelity Mutual

Life Building in Philadelphia, Metropolitan Life Instance Building in NYC, Rockefeller

Center in New York, and the Department of Justice Building in Washington D.C., among

many others; while these other curations are not the focus of this inquiry, these examples

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will be useful in establishing Alexander’s commitment to mediated memory and art

practices regarding Native American life in North America

Moore, Tami J. and Barbara Clark. “The Impact of ‘Message Senders’ on What Is True: Native

Americans in Nebraska History Books” Multicultural Perspectives, vol. 6 no. 2, 2009, pp.

17-23, DOI: 10.1207/s15327892mcp0602_4. This journal article was authored by two

University of Nebraska-Kearney professors and through a comparative Nebraska social

studies textbook study, they found five emerging themes as it relates to how contemporary

textbooks portray Native Americans. These characteristic Native American themes and

“images included thievery, brutality, lazy men, alcoholism, and magic” (Moore & Clark

19). Moore and Clark’s study details the damaging effects this kind of portrayal has upon

students in shaping their conceptions of Native lived experiences and presence in both

historic and contemporary contexts. This source offers a contemporary example of how

current educational traditions relating to Native American cultural education falters

tremendously from a space of commemoration and honoring the First Peoples of the Great

Plains. This source will be another supporting artifact which attempts to combine fragments

of both the current ways Nebraska treats Native American history and education against the

commemorative intentions of Alexander’s Nebraska State Capitol Building.

Week 6: Creating Bibliographies and Practicing MLA Citation

Annotated Bibliography Assignment Sheet and Rubric

Assignment: You will create an annotated bibliography of 8-10 high-quality sources you plan on using in your Final Hybrid Argument paper for this course. An annotated bibliography is a wonderful research tool that allows you to keep track of and represent your research in one condensed location. You will correctly cite and format each source according as you would on your Works Cited page, followed by a brief summary and personal evaluation of the source.

Further Annotated Bibliography Explanation Found on Owl Perdue Online Writing Lab: Annotated Bibliographies

What Is an Annotated Bibliography? An annotation is a brief summary of a book, article, or other publication. An abstract is also a summary, but there is a difference between the two. An abstract is simply a summary of a work, whereas the purpose of an annotation is to describe the work in such a way that the reader can decide whether or not to read the work itself. An annotated bibliography helps the reader understand the particular usefulness of each item. The ideal annotated bibliography shows the relationships among individual items and may compare their strengths or shortcomings.

Technical Requirements for Each of Your 8-10 Sources:

• Bibliography must be formatted according to MLA 8 style and formatting guidelines (i.e. format your citations as they will appear on your final Works Cited page)

• Each Annotation should be approximately 250-500 words in length and should include: o A 3-4 sentence objective summary immediately following the citation. You are required to use the

objective summary and attributive tag skills from Chapter 8 (Writing Arguments: A Rhetoric with Readings 11e)

o A 2-3 sentence evaluation indicating how this source might (or might not) contribute to your research (not your opinion of the source itself, but your opinion about how effectively it would serve as evidence for your argument; be specific and think rhetorically).

• A bibliography is an opportunity to demonstrate high quality research so as you select your 8-10 sources to annotate, make sure you are selecting the very best and most exemplar sources

Helpful Note: Consider the chart from pages 109-111 of your textbook, Writing Arguments: A Rhetoric with Readings 11e, to help you rhetorically evaluate each source. Attributive Tags can be reviewed on pages 369-371. Additional Requirements and Reminders:

• Sources should appear in alphabetical order by the author’s last name. If an author is not provided, alphabetize based on the first major word of the article title.

• Times New Roman 12-point font, Double-spaced, One-inch margins

• Minimal errors in punctuation or accuracy/completeness of information

• You are highly encouraged to not use any service or program that will “do it for you” – these are frequently inaccurate and cause unnecessary problems for students, particularly when you are doing an annotated bibliography (which requires extra, “human” attention to formatting).

Potential bibliography sources include but are not limited to: Books, journals, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, personal interviews, lectures, speeches, videos, tweets, YouTube videos, TED talks, textbooks, scholarly articles, etc.

Criteria

Below Expectation

(0-30)

Meeting

Expectations

(31-43)

Outstanding

(44-50)

Total

Points

Nuts and

Bolts

Did student annotate a minimum of 8 sources? Did students submit in an acceptable word

.doc or .docx format? While this assignment is based on completion, points will be awarded

based on the breadth, quality, and completeness of your reflection.

__/ 10

Style Conventional and accepted rules of good writing are followed including the following: 1) Summaries remain impartial, brief, abbreviations and direct quotes are avoided 2) Student does not rely on “fluff” to meet annotation length i.e. do not report information in the title 3) Remain objective and avoid introducing personal prejudices.

__/ 10

Length and

Breadth

Did student draft an objective and evaluate the rhetorical usefulness of the source meeting a minimum 250-word count for each entry? Did student stay focused on the key ideas but provided enough information to be useful for outside evaluators or researchers?

__/ 5

Perspective

Summaries are composed in third person perspective and the student remains objective during evaluation.

__/5

Language

and

Vocabulary

Student makes reasonable attempts to use the vocabulary of the author, as far as possible, to convey the ideas and conclusions of the author. Student avoids excessive paraphrasing and introducing annotations with superfluous and/or redundant phrases like “The author states,” “This article concerns,” “This new contribution to,” etc. Student avoids the monotonous starting of sentences with “It was suggested that,” “It was found that,” “It was reported that,” etc. Annotations in which most sentences end with “are discussed” and “are given” are similarly ineffective.

__/ 10

MLA

Formatting

Are all source entries cited without erroneous mistakes according to MLA 8 standard guidelines? Did student meticulously follow document formatting requirements of an Annotated Bibliography?

__/ 10

Annotation Example:

Micciche, Laura R. “Making a Case for Rhetorical Grammar.” College Composition and Communication. 55.4 (2004):

716-37. JSTOR. Web. 18 Nov. 2010. Micciche focuses on the rhetoric of grammar—what we say and how we

say it. She acknowledges that grammar instruction out of context may not produce better writing and she

admits that the “drill-and-kill” exercises may not be beneficial at all. She offers a more succinct definition of

rhetorical grammar, which she defines as “teaching the effective communication through language use.”

Micciche argues that rhetorical grammar instruction is central to composition’s commitment to teaching critical

thinking and cultural criticism. She suggests that the ability to develop sentences to serve a purpose require a

conceptual ability to envision relationships between ideas. In order to link grammar and conceptual thinking,

she encourages writers to stray away from the error-correction goals of formal grammar and assess the

meaning provided by the manipulation of syntactic structure. She maintains that even rhetorical grammar

should be reserved for the end stages of drafting as she concedes that it may reduce time spent on higher-

order concerns if not appropriately applied during the correct stage. Rhetorical grammar instruction will then

move the students toward conscious decision making in order to shape meaning effectively. By creating an

awareness of the power of grammar, instructors encourage students to identify the functions of grammar in

culture as, for instance, a form of resistance. Micciche presents an assignment which she titles “commonplace

books,” which are simply journals kept by all students in which they write daily. Micciche then asks the students

to write a paragraph on the effectiveness of the writing itself or to imitate a writer’s style (not content) in an

attempt to assess the power in the syntax. These assignments open the students’ eyes to more than just the

traditional grammar error-correction and turn them into cultural critics capable of analyzing the manipulation of

grammar. Micciche offers many different examples of student responses to grammatical choices and how

those choices may or may not have been effective in order to illustrate the effectiveness of her commonplace

book assignments. Micciche suggests that rather than abandon grammar instruction, teachers should seek

avenues from which to revitalize the practice in order to promote composition’s goals “to equip students to be

active citizens of the world they inhabit.” This resource will be useful for my overview of grammar instruction

and some of the critiques waged by rhetoric and composition scholars.

1

Shitty First Drafts Anne Lamott from Bird by Bird

Born in San Francisco in 1954, Anne Lamott is a graduate of Goucher College in Baltimore and is the author of six novels, including Rosie (1983), Crooked Little Heart (1997), All New People (2000), and Blue Shoes (2002). She has also been the food reviewer for California magazine, a book reviewer for Mademoiselle, and a regular contributor to Salon’s “Mothers Who Think.” Her nonfiction books include Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (1993), in which she describes her adventures as a single parent, and Tender Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (1999), in which she charts her journey toward faith in God.

In the following selection, taken from Lamott’s popular book about writing, Bird by Bird (1994), she argues for the need to let go and write those “shitty first drafts” that lead to clarity and sometimes brilliance in our second and third drafts.

1 Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts. People tend to look at successful writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take in a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

2 Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled. They do not type a few stiff warm-up sentences and then find themselves bounding along like huskies across the snow. One writer I know tells me that he sits down every morning and says to himself nicely, “It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do — you can either type, or kill yourself.” We all often feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time. Now, Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning — sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.

3 For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

4 The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, “Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going to see it. If the kid wants to get into really sentimental, weepy, emotional territory, you let him. Just get it all down on paper because there may be something great in those six crazy pages that you would never have gotten to by more rational, grown-up means. There may be something in the very last line of the very last paragraph on page six that you just love, that is so beautiful or wild that you now know what you’re supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go — but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages.

5 I used to write food reviews for California magazine before it folded. (My writing food reviews had nothing to do with the magazine folding, although every single review did cause a couple of canceled subscriptions. Some readers took umbrage at my comparing mounds of vegetable puree with various ex-presidents’ brains.) These reviews always took two days to write. First I’d go to a restaurant several times with a few opinionated, articulate friends in tow. I’d sit there writing down everything anyone said that was at all interesting or funny. Then on the following Monday I’d sit down at my desk with my notes and try to write the review. Even after I’d been doing this for years, panic would set in. I’d try to write a lead, but instead I’d write a couple of dreadful sentences, XX them out, try again, XX everything out, and then feel despair and worry settle on my chest like an x-ray apron. It’s over, I’d think calmly. I’m not going to be able to get the magic to work this time. I’m ruined. I’m through. I’m toast. Maybe, I’d think, I can get my old job back as a clerk-typist. But probably not. I’d get up and study my teeth in the mirror for a while. Then I’d stop, remember to breathe, make a few phone calls, hit the kitchen and chow down. Eventually I’d go back and sit down at my desk, and sigh for the next ten minutes. Finally I would pick up my one-inch picture frame, stare into it as if for the answer, and every time the answer would come: all I had to do was to write a really shitty first draft of, say, the opening paragraph. And no one was going to see it.

6 So I’d start writing without reining myself in. It was almost just typing, just making my fingers move. And the writing would be terrible. I’d write a lead paragraph that was a whole page, even though the entire review could only be three pages long, and then I’d start writing up descriptions of the food, one dish at a time, bird by bird, and the critics would be sitting on my shoulders, commenting like cartoon characters. They’d be pretending to snore, or rolling their eyes at my overwrought descriptions, no matter how hard I tried to tone those descriptions down, no matter how conscious I was of what a friend said to me gently in my early days of restaurant reviewing. “Annie,” she said, “it is just a piece of chicken. It is just a bit of cake.”

7 But because by then I had been writing for so long, I would eventually let myself trust the process — sort of, more or less. I’d write a first draft that was maybe twice as long as it should be, with a self-indulgent and boring beginning, stupefying descriptions of the meal, lots of quotes from my black-humored friends that made them sound more like the Manson girls than food lovers, and no ending to speak of.

2

The whole thing would be so long and incoherent and hideous that for the rest of the day I’d obsess about getting creamed by a car before I could write a decent second draft. I’d worry that people would read what I’d written and believe that the accident had really been a suicide, that I had panicked because my talent was waning and my mind was shot.

8 The next day, I’d sit down, go through it all with a colored pen, take out everything I possibly could, find a new lead somewhere on the second page, figure out a kicky place to end it, and then write a second draft. It always turned out fine, sometimes even funny and weird and helpful. I’d go over it one more time and mail it in.

9 Then, a month later, when it was time for another review, the whole process would start again, complete with the fears that people would find my first draft before I could rewrite it.

10 Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something — anything — down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft — you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft — you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

1. Lamott says that the perceptions most people have of how writers work is different from the reality of the work itself. She refers to this in paragraph 1 as “the fantasy of the uninitiated.” What does she mean?

2. In paragraph 7 Lamott refers to a time when, through experience, she “eventually let [herself] trust the process – sort of, more or less.” She is referring to the writing process, of course, but why “more or less”? Do you think that her wariness is personal, or is she speaking for all writers in this regard? Explain.

3. From what Lamott has to say, is writing a first draft more about the product or the process? Do you agree in regard to your own first drafts? Explain.

Lamott, Anne. “Shitty First Drafts.” Language Awareness: Readings for College

Writers. Ed. by Paul Eschholz, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia Clark. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005: 93-96.

How to Read Like a Writer by Mike Bunn

This essay is a chapter in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 2, a peer-reviewed open textbook series for the writing classroom.

Download the full volume and individual chapters from: • Writing Spaces: http://writingspaces.org/essays • Parlor Press: http://parlorpress.com/writingspaces • WAC Clearinghouse: http://wac.colostate.edu/books/

Print versions of the volume are available for purchase directly from Parlor Press and through other booksellers.

This essay is available under a Creative Commons License subject to the Writing Spaces’ Terms of Use. More information, such as the specific license being used, is available at the bottom of the first page of the chapter.

© 2011 by the respective author(s). For reprint rights and other permissions, contact the original author(s).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Writing spaces : readings on writing. Volume 1 / edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60235-184-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-60235-185-1 (adobe ebook) 1. College readers. 2. English language–Rhetoric. I. Lowe, Charles, 1965- II. Zemliansky, Pavel. PE1417.W735 2010 808’.0427–dc22 2010019487

71

How to Read Like a Writer

Mike Bunn

In 1997, I was a recent college graduate living in London for six months and working at the Palace Theatre owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber.* The Palace was a beautiful red brick, four-story theatre in the heart of London’s famous West End, and eight times a week it housed a three- hour performance of the musical Les Miserables. Because of antiquated fire-safety laws, every theatre in the city was required to have a certain number of staff members inside watching the performance in case of an emergency.

My job (in addition to wearing a red tuxedo jacket) was to sit inside the dark theater with the patrons and make sure nothing went wrong. It didn’t seem to matter to my supervisor that I had no training in se- curity and no idea where we kept the fire extinguishers. I was pretty sure that if there was any trouble I’d be running down the back stairs, leaving the patrons to fend for themselves. I had no intention of dying in a bright red tuxedo.

There was a Red Coat stationed on each of the theater’s four floors, and we all passed the time by sitting quietly in the back, reading books with tiny flashlights. It’s not easy trying to read in the dim light of a theatre—flashlight or no flashlight—and it’s even tougher with shrieks and shouts and gunshots coming from the stage. I had to focus intently on each and every word, often rereading a single sentence sev- eral times. Sometimes I got distracted and had to re-read entire para-

* This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License and is subject to the Writing Spaces’ Terms of Use. To view a copy of this license, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. To view the Writing Spaces’ Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces. org/terms-of-use.

Mike Bunn72

graphs. As I struggled to read in this environment, I began to realize that the way I was reading—one word at a time—was exactly the same way that the author had written the text. I realized writing is a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence process. The intense concentra- tion required to read in the theater helped me recognize some of the interesting ways that authors string words into phrases into paragraphs into entire books.

I came to realize that all writing consists of a series of choices. I was an English major in college, but I don’t think I ever thought

much about reading. I read all the time. I read for my classes and on the computer and sometimes for fun, but I never really thought about the important connections between reading and writing, and how reading in a particular way could also make me a better writer.

What Does It Mean to Read Like a Writer?

When you Read Like a Writer (RLW) you work to identify some of the choices the author made so that you can better understand how such choices might arise in your own writing. The idea is to carefully examine the things you read, looking at the writerly techniques in the text in order to decide if you might want to adopt similar (or the same) techniques in your writing.

You are reading to learn about writing. Instead of reading for content or to better understand the ideas in

the writing (which you will automatically do to some degree anyway), you are trying to understand how the piece of writing was put together by the author and what you can learn about writing by reading a par- ticular text. As you read in this way, you think about how the choices the author made and the techniques that he/she used are influencing your own responses as a reader. What is it about the way this text is written that makes you feel and respond the way you do?

The goal as you read like a writer is to locate what you believe are the most important writerly choices represented in the text—choices as large as the overall structure or as small as a single word used only once—to consider the effect of those choices on potential readers (in- cluding yourself ). Then you can go one step further and imagine what different choices the author might have made instead, and what effect those different choices would have on readers.

How to Read Like a Writer 73

Say you’re reading an essay in class that begins with a short quote from President Barack Obama about the war in Iraq. As a writer, what do you think of this technique? Do you think it is effective to begin the essay with a quote? What if the essay began with a quote from someone else? What if it was a much longer quote from President Obama, or a quote from the President about something other than the war?

And here is where we get to the most important part: Would you want to try this technique in your own writing?

Would you want to start your own essay with a quote? Do you think it would be effective to begin your essay with a quote fr

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