Your final project for English 111 will take a problem-based learning approach to understanding a problem related to higher education: Is college worth it? You will produce three separate documents to complete the project: (1) a rhetorical bibliography, (2) an analysis report, and (3) a reflection. I have written three broad problems (see below). You will choose one, research it, and discuss what you’ve learned across the three documents. The rhetorical bib is a discussion of your sources, the analysis report is a discussion of the various perspectives you discovered in your research, and the reflection is a discussion of your writing, researching and learning process. Each document is discussed in (great) detail below! Purpose Conducting academic research is all about finding and communicating trustworthy information. How you use that information depends on several factors including your purpose, your audience, and your writing context. Additionally, the genre of the document your research will appear in determines how you will incorporate it into your writing. In school, you use research–largely gathered by finding, reading, and selecting specific information from sources– to develop your own knowledge before writing common academic papers like reports, proposals, literature reviews, and arguments. Outside the classroom, you research to satisfy your curiosity, find answers to questions, and even help with making decisions or solving problems. Knowing how to find, evaluate, and incorporate information and ideas from other people’s writing into your own writing and thinking is the basis for scholarship and professional work. More than this, it helps you create writing worth reading.
Outcomes for the research project: Analyze and investigate ideas and pull them together in well-structured prose, Develop a pre-research and research strategy that focuses the scope of a research project, Become familiar with library databases, Demonstrate digital literacy with source selection, Demonstrate an understanding of rhetorical features such as evidence, context, purpose, etc. Effectively gather internet research, identifying the author and publisher of online material and evaluating the hosting site of that material as well as the material itself Collect, ev, aluate, interpret, and synthesize information from a variety of valid and relevant sources, Adequately paraphrase and quote source material while documenting all research accurately using MLA citation style
