en-112-spring-2020

Welcome to Your Unexpectedly Digital EN 112 Experience

[en-112-spring2020]

what are journals and is it too late to turn them in

Journals are short writing assignments of about 2-3 paragraphs per week. They were originally intended to be due at the end of EACH week during the semester, but since your instructor (um, that would my Me, Myself, & I) took forever to post the submission boxes, you get a little more leeway than that. 

Assuming all goes well, this week you WILL see a submission box, and you will have one each week from now until the end of the semester, for a total of eight submissions; you will also have the opportunity to submit a reflection on the first half of the semester for extra credit (look out for more details on that later this week!). 

2020 has been a wild ride for everybody, so a) I appreciate your patience on the journals (every time I sit down to format the boxes, YET ANOTHER emergency comes up and I go running off to put out THAT fire ... but THIS WEEK IS THE WEEK, dang it!) and b) goodness knows you’ll have plenty to write about! 

Hope this helps, 

Dr. C. 

[en-112-spring2020]

End-of-Semester FAQs

In no particular order: 

The Rough Drafts assignment in Canvas is now complete/incomplete. This means that if you submitted anything by the original due date, you get the points. That will help a number of you out on your final score –– but it is no substitute for completing the actual revisions! 

Speaking of revisions: The Checklist for Research Essays exists for a reason. You should use it. Download it, print it out, and use it as a guide to checking your own work in addition to my comments. 

If you realize your essay is missing/does not meet some of the criteria on the checklist, now is your chance to fix that. I will accept revised research essays at any point up until 12pm (noon) this Saturday (May 2nd). 

I have learned that some of you have had trouble accessing my comments in Canvas, especially via the mobile app. The instructions Canvas provides for how to do this are needlessly complicated. Basically: There are two sets of comments in Canvas. The first is a set of overall comments on the document as a whole, and usually appears in the sidebar (on desktop), or when you swipe up from the bottom of the screen (in mobile). The second is where you get more detailed feedback, and is visible as linked text “bubbles” in desktop –– but to view these same comments in the mobile app, you need to tap the spot in your document where I have highlighted/circled/struck through/otherwise indicated a particular part of your text, and then tap again on “Comments” to see what I had to say. 

As you may remember from the syllabus, you have the option to revise any single expository essay at the end of the semester for a higher grade. If you choose this option, you must: 

a) choose an essay 

b) tell me which essay you are choosing 

c) make an appointment with me to discuss the revision 

d) submit that revision in the appropriate box, in Canvas, no later than the time originally indicated for our “final exam” on the UNA Spring 2020 Exam Schedule (please note, however, that there is no actual final exam in this class) 

e) you have to meet ALL of these criteria to get the improved revision grade 

During finals week, I typically do what I call “grade audits” for each student: I review your submissions, MAKE SURE I HAVE EVERYTHING GRADED for you (particularly important this semester since we had so many interruptions and an unexpected shift in submission protocols mid-semester) and give you a chance, if you wish, to contact me about any parts of your grade you don’t understand. In other words: there should be no surprises when grades are officially entered into Portal for the semester. 

If there ARE surprises –– or if you think of something at the last minute, or if you have questions or want to follow up on some of your work over the summer, for whatever reason –– I am available both by UNA email and via the Gmail address I gave you for emergency purposes when we made our shift to online learning (if you have lost that Gmail, please message me in Canvas ASAP and I will send you the info; I don’t think I really want to post that on Tumblr). 

I hope I have covered everything, but realistically I am sure there must be something I am forgetting, because this is Spring 2020 and that is just WHERE WE ARE RIGHT NOW, folks. So: this is not the last time we will communicate, I am sure. Nevertheless, before anything else goes all pear-shaped, I want to take this opportunity to thank you for being a lovely, collegial, engaged and engaging group. Some of you have struggled to get access, and I am absolutely dead certain that in making the unanticipated transition I have also made plenty of mistakes. Probably most of us have a list of Things We’d Do Differently, If Only We’d Known –– but we didn’t know, and we couldn’t have known, and I genuinely believe every single person in this course has done the very best they could. 

I hope you’ve learned some concepts that will stick with you and enrich your intellectual futures, wherever they may lead –– and some skills you can use to forge those paths. From the bottom of my heart (and my brain):  GOOD LUCK. 

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Rogerian Essays: From Arguments to Letters

PART ONE: REVIEW YOUR WORK 

Look back at the assignments you completed last Wednesday and Friday in preparing for the Rogerian arguments: review your work. Pay special attention to areas in which you can improve your specificity: one of the benefits of this particular assignment is that you have the opportunity to craft a real argument about a real problem and address your words to a real person –– you should take advantage of the opportunity this gives you, and be as clear and precise as possible. 

Here is an example of how to tighten up one paragraph: 

“overconsumption” = How much consumption is “over”consumption? What would an appropriate level of consumption look like, and who would decide?

  “resources” = What resources? Land, forest, water, oil? Narrow this down. There is no way you can effectively address the responsible usage of ALL resources within a single essay –– especially a single essay written as a letter to a specific person or office/organization (which this assignment will be, by the time you finish today’s module). 

“shortages of resources in the future” = Same kind of deal as above: shortages of which resources, and shortages for whom? How far into the future? It’s a good bonus if you can show the reader why they should give a flip about something that is going to happen at some ominous point in “the future” –– human beings are notoriously bad at recognizing and responding to any threat that is not RIGHT IN OUR FACES, RIGHT NOW. 

“very straining” = What does this mean? What actual effects/problems fall under the heading of “strain” here? Who or what is suffering, and how do we know? Why should we care (is this a subset of the upcoming shortages, or is there an ethical argument here about how we should care about what is going on right now, regardless of what may be coming later?????)? 

“the environment” = What is this????? “The environment” is widely used (and when I say “widely,” I mean by academics, intellectuals, public officials, and PEOPLE WHO SHOULD KNOW BETTER at every conceivable level of public discourse) as a shorthand for “anything that is not a manmade invention. This covers a LOT of territory –– far too much territory to be a useful term in most cases! As I said, this particular imprecision is widespread; hopefully everybody who takes this class can do their own small part to improve public discourse by making better and more precise word choices when discussing whatever specific elements of “the environment” they want to address! 

“more effort to control overconsumption” = How much more effort? What is a reasonable level of effort? If consumption is controlled, is it still overconsumption? Who will be in charge of these “control” efforts, and how will they be enforced? 

IS THE GOAL REALLY TO CONTROL “OVERCONSUMPTION” OR DO YOU ACTUALLY WANT TO STOP IT??!!?!?!?! 

^that was the best gif I could find for “Aaaaaaah so many thoughts!!!!!” –– the selection kind of makes me question whether Giphy users are actually having all that many thoughts. 

Anyway. 

Very importantly, the paragraph I quoted above contains no errors. I literally just opened up the assignments from Friday and picked the first paragraph I saw that didn’t have any grammar or mechanical errors in it. The student who submitted that paragraph isn’t a “bad” student or even a “bad” writer. Rather, the reason I pulled the paragraph and questioned the word choices is because precision and clarity often make the difference between proofreading and meaningful revision, between an error-free paragraph and a strong argument.

 You want to make sure your writing is not just free of grammatical errors, misplaced punctuation, and “typos,” but as sharp and precise as you can possibly make it. And, as we saw at the beginning of the semester with George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” learning to refuse the easy, familiar phrases and seeking sharp images that cut through the noise and reach our readers with our exact meaning requires an intellectual effort and an ethical commitment. 

This task is not easy: on the contrary, it is one of the hardest things you will ever do. But it is important –– and never more so than with a Rogerian argument, in which your success or failure depends on reaching your readers where they are and persuading them to come toward your position. 

THEREFORE: 

PART TWO: MAKE IT A LETTER

1. Take your paragraphs from last Wednesday and Friday and put them together into a letter, addressed to the person or organization you named in the first step from Wednesday. 

2. REVISE CAREFULLY: That was the point of my whole long ramble in the first part of this post. 

3. ADD EVIDENCE: Lots of it! You will probably need a lot of “hard” data in order to convince your reader to move toward your position. 

4. As a reminder, this is what your essay, structured as a Rogerian argument, should look like: 

5. Your letter should be roughly 2-3 pages in length; if it is any shorter than two full pages, go back and look for places where you could include additional evidence. If your letter is longer than three full pages, then either you are belatedly discovering you’ve chosen a topic that’s more complicated than you realized (whoops), or you may be getting a little longwinded. 

6. Take a time-out to read over your letter and make sure it says exactly what you mean, in the clearest terms possible and with evidence chosen carefully with your specific reader(s) in mind. If you have any questions, this would be a good time to send a message to your English instructor! 

7. Submit! 

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Rogerian Preparation: Next Steps

Normally I do these all in one go, but this time we are breaking the essay drafting process into (hopefully) easy stages. You did the first part already, on Wednesday. 

Sidenote: I added a page to the course Tumblr with a bunch of our stuff on Rogerian arguments collected in one place. If you can think of something else that would be handy to have there, let me know! 

Good times. 

Sooooo today you are going to take your answers from Wednesday and build an essay from them. If you have forgotten what you said on Wednesday (it was so long ago), go back and look at the three small assignments. If you have forgotten what the prompts were, here’s a reminder: 

1. Identify a problem that is susceptible to compromise.

2. Identify a specific person or organization that

is currently on the other side of the issue from you

and

can plausibly take action to effectively address the situation, if you convince them to do so

3. Spell out their position (if you look back to page 194 of your PA textbook, this is what the authors call “the reader’s position”) in favorable (not critical) terms.

Yeah. 

If you think back to your Practical Argument textbook’s summary of how a Rogerian argument is typically organized, you may remember that it works something like this: 

So, today you are going to: 

1. Present the writer’s view (YOUR view) of the problem, and you will use evidence to support your viewpoint. 

2. Explain, using clear and specific examples, how the reader (the person you identified in #2 on Wednesday) would benefit from moving toward your position. 

3. Suggest at least one possible compromise that would benefit both you and the reader. 

For Monday, you will organize all of these steps (the ones from Wednesday and the ones from today) into a single letter addressed to the person in Step #2 from Wednesday, and you will give your letter a careful revision to make it as strong as possible before submitting (due in Canvas on Monday). BUT we don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves here, so these are the only parts I am asking you to tackle today (see above: easy stages). 

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Migraines Are the Worst

Soooo I had hoped to have instructions for Phase Two of your research essay revisions ready to go by this morning, but then I lost most of yesterday to a migraine. 

If you have never had a migraine: 

a) lucky you 

and 

b) one of the things you are definitely supposed to NOT do is continue to stare at a computer screen 

Spoiler: I definitely continued to stare at a computer screen for way longer than was wise. 

This morning I am no longer seeing flashing lights (I tried to find a gif for that, but my brain immediately sounded a Red Alert, so nope), BUT I am still feeling kinda seasick ... so, I am going to take things in small steps today. (If all goes well, I may even be able to find my sunglasses and escape my downstairs neighbors’ EXTREMELY NOISY breakup by heading out for a jog –– let’s hear it for that Work From Home life!!!!!) And I hope that by this afternoon I will be able to get back into the swing of reading and commenting on your research essay rough drafts –– for the record, until the migraine descended and threw me off track, I was really enjoying reading your work!! 

While I’m downing Excedrin and getting back up to speed, here’s what we’re doing today: 

I’m moving this week’s Virtual Office Hours (which would normally be today) to Friday, basically just so I can leave the computer screen for a little while if I need to. (That said, if you need to reach out to me about something in particular, don’t hesitate to use email/Canvas messaging.) The hours on Friday will be the same: 11-1. 

I have posted instructions for today to help you get ready for Rogerian essays. 

I will be commenting (as soon as I can) on Monday’s discussion post submissions. 

I really want to hold a second virtual conference with each of you, specifically to walk through your research essays and discuss ways to strengthen your arguments and tighten up your use of evidence. Ideally, we would be doing those through the afternoon this Thursday & Friday. If anybody is willing to volunteer to hold a virtual conference over the weekend (say, Saturday or Sunday afternoon????), that would really help me out. 

I’ll post a schedule for potential conferences no later than this evening –– but if you already know you’re up for having one, and you’d like to claim a time (especially a weekend time!!), please go ahead and reach out, and I will do my best to accommodate your schedule. 

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Preparing to Write a Rogerian Essay

Today you will begin working toward your own Rogerian arguments. Follow the steps below carefully, and if there is anything you don’t understand, reach out and let me know. 

1. Identify a problem that is susceptible to compromise. 

Remember that the “susceptible to compromise” bit is important because, if the issue does not admit of compromise –– say, if it is unavoidably an either/or question, or if the ethical demands of the situation mean that compromise would require you to violate an important principle –– then the problem at hand probably needs to be addressed by some other form of argument. 

2. Identify a specific person or organization that

is currently on the other side of the issue from you 

and

can plausibly take action to effectively address the situation, if you convince them to do so 

I am quite serious when I say “a specific person or organization.” I do not mean “university administrators,” or “lawmakers” or “community groups”: I mean “The Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost” or “Senator Richard Shelby,” or “The Tuscumbia Civitan Club.” These have to be real people (or organizations –– say, the Board of Directors for your local public library) with real opinions whose real positions on a real problem are actually known, and you must NAME THEM. Don’t speculate or “guess” about their positions, either; if you don’t know what the person or organization’s actual position is, find out.

The reason for this is that, unlike most of your other essays in this class, when you write your Rogerian argument you will be crafting it as a letter, just as King does in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” –– and you will use knowledge of your actual audience to determine the evidence you use and the compromises you offer along the way to negotiation. 

3. Spell out their position (if you look back to page 194 of your PA textbook, this is what the authors call “the reader’s position”) in favorable (not critical) terms. 

Part of establishing your rapport with the reader consists in demonstrating that you understand where they are coming from and appreciate the value of the position they hold on a particular issue, and their reasons for doing so. The best way to demonstrate these things is to frame their position in terms that they themselves might use –– not the terms that you would use if you were attacking. Remember that the tone of a Rogerian essay is collegial and cooperative, not combative. 

On Friday, you’ll outline your own position and we’ll work on how to structure a Rogerian argument as an invitation to negotiation ... but that is then, and this is now! 

[en-112-spring2020]

“Letter from Birmingham Jail”: More on Rogerian Argument

Last week, I asked you to identify some key elements of a Rogerian essay within Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Today, we are going to (hopefully) reinforce and deepen our understanding of both Rogerian argument and Dr. King’s essay by approaching the same material in a slightly different way. That is to say: If you feel like you’ve already examined some of what I’m asking you to look for, that’s because you probably have. Most people, however, don’t fully master the concepts the first time around –– even if they succeed in responding to the assignment. Like practicing a new piece of music, or learning to run a new play on the football field, recognizing elements of argument and identifying them within a complex piece of writing –– in preparation for learning to deploy them effectively yourselves –– takes a lot of repetition and reinforcement. 

If we were in the classroom, I’d be doing this in little bits and pieces all this week: throwing out questions to get you thinking, putting ideas up on the board, working back and forth between your own developing essays and the new skills you are trying to learn from the textbook and in King’s letter. That strategy obviously isn’t going to work under our current circumstances –– so what we are doing today is attempting to get to the same place via an alternate route! 

Take a look at the section (page 194 if you have the 4th edition) of your Practical Argument text that outlines a Rogerian essay. It starts with “In general, a Rogerian argument can be structured in the following way” (Kirszner and Mandell 194). You should see labels for Introduction, Body, and Conclusion. 

I want you to outline King’s essay according to the labels WITHIN just the “Body” category (never mind about the introduction and conclusion for now). Here, Kirszner and Mandell list the following elements: 

Presents the reader’s view of the problem 

Presents the writer’s view of the problem (includes evidence to support the writer’s viewpoint)

Shows how the reader would benefit from moving toward the writer’s position (includes evidence to support the writer’s viewpoint) 

Lays out possible compromises that would benefit both reader and writer (includes evidence to support the writer’s viewpoint) (Kirszner and Mandell 194)

Your answer on each point should include examples of King’s evidence. This is particularly important because learning to accurately identify the use of evidence in other people’s writing is a major step forward in learning to effectively deploy evidence in building your own arguments ... which is a big part of the OTHER project we’ll all be working on this week: revising your research essays!

I am going to walk you through the revision process for those research essay rough drafts, and Phase One is already up, so once you’ve got a handle on King’s use of evidence, check out the Phase One instructions and let’s get started! 

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Revising Your Rough Drafts: Phase One

1. Run a search of your document and get rid of any instance of you/your/yourself/yourselves/me/my/our/mine/I/we.

2. TELL ME WHY I have just asked you to do this.

3. If your document contains ANY VERSION OF THE FOLLOWING:

“since the beginning of time”

“since the dawn of time”

“throughout human history”

“for as long as people have existed”

“throughout the ages”

GET RID OF THAT, and begin your claims somewhere closer to the present. Unless you are actually using texts from before the rise of the Roman Empire for some obviously justifiable reason, you should probably start within your own lifetime.

There are exceptions to the “your own lifetime” rule! 

For example, at least one student is writing about light pollution. Light pollution, in the contemporary sense, dates back to at least the widespread use of electric lighting in urban areas (I think you could probably make a case for something similar with a medieval city in Spain called “the city of a thousand lights,” but PLEASE DO NOT DO THAT; it needlessly complicates an argument that is about contemporary, electric-powered lighting and not about CANDLES, okay). The widespread use of electric lighting in cities dates aback to the early 20th century; given that the SCALE of that particular kind of light pollution increased dramatically after WWII, somewhere in the 1950s or ‘60s seems like a reasonable place to begin that timeline. 

Another student is working on the social/cultural effects of global cuisine; if the ingredients used turn out to be an important part of that essay, she might want to mention how tomatoes (native to the Americas) ended up being important in Italian cooking. And so on and so forth. The main point here is to limit the (temporal) scope of your claim to something that makes sense for your topic — and for most topics, that scope is NOT going to include all of human history.

4. Please stop putting the names and/or ADDRESSES of websites in your parenthetical citations. 

This is not how you cite sources in MLA style. (As far as I am aware, this is not how you cite sources in ANY formal academic style.) We covered ALLLLLLLL OF THIS on the board, multiple times, before the pandemic ever descended upon our heads. I realize that this was a long time ago and that a lot of things may have slipped … but formatting the citations correctly is only kind of tedious, not actually difficult. You can totally do this. Also, mastering the basics of research and citation are among the core aims of EN 112, so … this part is not really optional. 

Probably the easiest way to check your parenthetical citations is to run a document search (if you don’t know how to do this, message me & I will walk you through it) and just keeping repeating the search for “(“ until you reach the end of the document. If you see anything in parentheses that is not actually a parenthetical remark (like this one) OR an author’s last name, take the time NOW to fix it.

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Quick Recap, Pt. 2

Read Part One

I also asked you to find places wherein King establishes the shared nature of the problem at hand, in order to invite readers to participate with him in seeking a solution. 

So here are some examples from your responses: 

Presents the problem he is writing about as a shared problem

“Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates.”

This is why figuring out who the “affiliates” are matters; if the “affiliates” are not his readers (they aren’t), then this particular passage isn’t an instance of sharing the problem with them. Getting confused about “who’s who” leads to getting confused about “what’s what.” Hopefully my previous post cleared that up. 

Similarly, in this example the concern is shared among African Americans, not shared with the “eight white clergymen” who are King’s immediate readers: 

Martin shares an expressed concern for black nationalist groups and their acts against America and god. Martin knew that this movement was a danger to United States as a whole because it would only further divide them. He says “This movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely reputed Christianity, and have concluded that white man is an incorrigible devil.” 

It’s the same kind of confusion at work in both examples; I’m not here to make you feel bad about it, but I do want to clarify what’s going on so that you can a) make sense of the reading and b) get a better handle on how the letter as a whole functions as a good example of Rogerian argument. 

(Also, if you want another explanation of what Rogerian argument is and how it works, I found this handy breakdown on the Colorado State website: it says the same things as your textbook, but it says them in a slightly different way. YMMV.) 

Here is a better answer: 

3. Dr. King presents the problem shared by everyone when he says, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

So, like ... this affects y’all, too. 

This is an important point that King is making, and I think it gets understudied in general: If we accept the basic premise that racial segregation and racial disparities are examples of injustice, then the claim that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” means that no one is safe. I’m making an “arguable claim” here, but I am inclined to think that we (the big “we” of collective discourse) tend to treat “racial injustice” as a problem of race rather than a problem of justice ... and I started to draw some conclusions about the implications of that paradigm, but in fact I think I want YOU to draw those implications. 

Ponder it for a couple of minutes, and then offer up a paragraph to share! 

[en-112-spring2020]

Quick Recap: Your Discussion Posts on “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” Pt. 1

Okay, so for the most part these went pretty well. There are a few items I want to pull out and address before we move on. I teach two sections of EN 112 and both sections are doing pretty much the same things this week, so I’m compiling this list of Issues to Address from both sections together –– that gives us a broader cross-section of student writing to work with, and also simplifies the organization of Tumblr posts (a big plus in my book). So if you’re reading along and thinking “Gosh, I don’t remember this comment AT ALL,” it’s probably from the other section. 

You’ll see what I mean in a second (I hope)! 

I asked you to identify places where King’s letter demonstrates the elements of a Rogerian essay, along with at least one instance where he maintains contact with his readers by reinforcing that element. Here are some samples from your responses:

Addresses his readers as colleagues, instead of opponents

“Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates.” “I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies.”

Identify at least one instance in which King reinforces that element

Yes and no. The “affiliates” are not the same group of people as the “white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South,” and they are also not the same as the readers King is addressing. 

There are a number of distinct groups at work here, and none of you had even been born yet (heck, I hadn’t even been born yet), so even if you have a general idea of the Civil Rights movement and the protests in Birmingham, without context it’s easy to get confused. 

The affiliates King is referring to are local organizations with ties to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as King explains in the second paragraph of his letter: 

“I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program ...” 

Meanwhile, the “white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South” are only sort of tangentially related to his readers. I mean, technically, his readers are the eight white clergymen who penned the initial statement rebuking the “nonviolent direct-action program” for participation in which King is currently in jail, so these guys do fit the bill. But when King says “I felt that the white ministers, priests, and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies,” he isn’t expressing solidarity or common ground with his readers (who are, in fact, white ministers in the South) in that moment; although King does that elsewhere, in the passage quoted King is expressing his disappointment at not receiving more support from the white religious community in the South: 

“When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.” 

There are a number of good answers here, so I am just picking one from each section, pretty much at random: 

2. Dr. King addresses his readers as colleagues, instead of opponents when he started the letter off with "My dear fellow clergymen."

Or here’s one from the other section:

Addresses his readers as colleagues instead of opponents:

- He addresses them as "fellow clergymen" and tries to clearly explain what he is doing to counteract the influence of "outsiders coming in" instead of telling them how their views are wrong

-Reinforces this by saying they are right to support negotiation as a tactic to solve the problem, calls them "friends" frequently

AND, last but not least, pretty much everybody got that the opening lines of the letter, in which King directly addresses his readers as “My Dear Fellow Clergymen,” constitute a good example of establishing the general “tone” of a Rogerian-style argument –– good for you! 

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Still on those Rogerian essays ...

From your Practical Argument textbook (page 192 if you've got the 4th edition):

 "Rogerian argument begins with the assumption that people of good will can find solutions to problems that they have in common. Rogers recommends that you consider those with whom you disagree as colleagues, not opponents. Instead of entering into the adversarial relationship that is assumed in classical argument, Rogerian argument encourages you to enter into a cooperative relationship in which both you and your readers search for common ground––points of agreement about a problem. By taking this approach, you are more likely to find a solution that will satisfy everyone" (Kirszner and Mandell 192).

 This assignment is going to take a bit longer than the first couple of questions I asked you; I want you to take your time about it and submit it by tomorrow (4/16) afternoon, say 3pm. Then part of your homework for Friday will be to come back and read your classmates’ answers before moving on to Friday’s module in Canvas. 

Reading through “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” carefully, find where King: 

- sets up the expectation of sincerity & goodwill 

- addresses his readers as colleagues, instead of opponents

- presents the problem he is writing about as a shared problem

- establishes common ground with his readers 

- invites his readers to participate with him in finding “a solution that will satisfy everyone” (Kirszner and Mandell 192)

Like any good writer, Dr. King maintains contact with his readers throughout the essay; he doesn’t just drop these elements of Rogerian argument into his letter as a one-and-done; rather, he threads them throughout the piece. So I want you to find the first example of each element, and then identify at least one instance in which King reinforces that element (sincerity & goodwill; colleagues not opponents; shared problem; common ground; participatory problem-solving). Provide us with direct quotes from King’s text as your examples. 

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This Week in EN 112

We’ll be working on: 

Research Essay Rough Drafts

These are not due until Friday (April 17th), but I think it’s important to keep them on your radar because

a) That is a “firm” deadline. What this means is that I cannot reasonably hope to read your rough drafts and get them back to you in time for you to take advantage of my feedback in revising unless you turn them in by the April 17th deadline. 

b) Many of you are doing a truly terrible job of getting your assignments turned in, just in general. For example, only about half of you actually submitted a proposal essay. I get that this has been a tough semester in all kinds of unsettling and unpredictable ways, and I don’t think it necessarily says anything about you even as a student, much less as a person, if you lose track of a few things along the way. I am committed to being as flexible as possible in helping you find ways to succeed. That said, it’s kind of hard for me to grade essays you haven’t turned in –– so I want to make extra sure you remember the rough draft of the research essay and stay on top of it! 

c) The rough drafts do tend to take longer to finish than many of the other assignments you complete in this course –– not so much because of the length as because of the complexity of thinking that goes into them. If you finished your “Preparing for the Rough Draft” assignment last Monday, you should be in pretty good shape –– but the rough drafts still take time and thought, and it’s a good idea to keep them in view all this week. 

Rogerian Essays

This is the last type of expository essay we will be tackling this semester. We won’t actually draft it until next week, but we will be talking about it all week, so this is your orientation, so to speak. This is also the essay type that is most directly applicable to informal, non-academic writing contexts, so many people find it’s a nice change of pace to round out the semester with a return to the “real” world. 

As with previous essays, we will begin by reading an explanation of what Rogerian essays are, and a guide to writing them, from your Practical Argument textbook. We will then read an example of a Rogerian essay and discuss how it works –– how the writer constructs the argument –– before attempting to write individual Rogerian essays in accordance with instructions specific to this course (which I will provide, but not until we are ready to write the drafts next week). 

Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Originally written by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in –– as the title suggests –– a jail in Birmingham, AL, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is one of King’s most enduring and influential pieces of writing. It is also one of the very few intended to be read –– not listened to –– by its immediate audience. 

A friend of mine, who is old enough to remember listening to Dr. King’s televised speeches as a child, tells me that there is no comparison between reading Dr. King’s work and hearing him speak live. (I like to remind him that no comparison would be useful, since unless my friend wants to invent a time machine and give me a trip I will never have the chance to make such a comparison for myself.) 

Perhaps because it is not intended as a speech, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” makes extensive use of intertextuality, particularly in King’s deployment of Biblical imagery and references to early church history –– not just to support his argument, but to emotionally connect with his audience. When we read discuss King’s essay (beginning Wednesday 4/15), we will pay particular attention to how King tailors his use of “prior texts” (I’m citing my own dissertation here; can you tell I’m enormously proud? :D) to his audience. 

One important note that may help you as you begin to work your way through King’s text: In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” –– as in many other Rogerian essays –– King actually knows exactly who his audience is, and can address his readers directly: he doesn’t have to guess or imagine. This makes a difference to the essay’s style and tone, as you may imagine! 

Conferences

Last but not least: A few of you, for xyz reasons, either missed your scheduled (virtual) conference, or never got a round to signing up. Attending your individual conference is a core requirement of the course, so it’s important for you to take care of this item on the agenda. If you are one of the people who has not yet “met” with me individually, take a look at your schedule and reach out via email or Canvas messaging so that we can find a time. 

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Background Info + “Common Knowledge”

I just wrote this in the comments on a student essay. I think the point applies to many more students besides the one whose essay I happened to be reading, so I’m sharing the idea here: 

Don't think of this in terms of "you're doing it wrong," but in terms of "Okay, my audience includes a middle-aged English professor who literally knows about video games only from reading scholarly articles about them. What am I leaving out that she would probably need to know to appreciate my points here?" :D

The particular student essay I was reading happened to be about video games, but the same point could apply to really any topic. Of course I’m grading your work, and assessing how well you accounted for knowing your audience is a part of that. At a deeper level, though, “knowing your audience” is about being a considerate writer -- as we discussed at the beginning of the semester -- and about thinking through not just how to bolster your own argument, but how to communicate with your readers by reaching them where they are. It’s about giving them the information they need to understand where you’re coming from. 

When that works well, it isn’t just convincing -- it can be transformative. 

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Why does it feel like the workload has increased? I feel like I am falling behind in this class. Will we continue with online courses as well?

This is a good question! I can think of a couple of reasons why it might feel like workload has increased: 

1. We started the semester gently, easing in via rhetorical analysis essays and then shifting gears into definition essays and working our way into increasingly argument-oriented, evidence-based writing with the cause and effect essays. We are now working on proposal arguments, which do require you to keep a lot of conceptual balls in the air at once (for yourself) but organize them into a linear pattern and connect the “dots” (for your reader). So from that perspective, although I wouldn’t say there has been a dramatic increase, it’s definitely true that we are tackling increasingly complex work as the semester goes on, and it’s totally reasonable that this would feel like a heavier workload. We are also beginning to thread in pieces of the argumentative research essay, which is due near the end of April, and of course all of that DOES legitimately constitute more work. 

2. It may also feel like an increased workload because of the way the last couple of weeks have shifted around, and especially with the way we have moved to an all-digital format starting this Monday (3/16). You are used to having 2-3 class meetings per week (depending on which 112 section you’re in), and while hopefully you take in a lot of information and get in a lot of practice during those 50-minute sessions, sitting in a desk while I write things on the board probably doesn’t feel like “work” in the same way as logging into Canvas. Logging into Canvas and scrolling through a list of to-dos, for most people, is going to feel like an interruption in the day: you were doing something else, and now you have to stop that and do this. Time set aside for being in the classroom, for a lot of people, isn’t perceived as an interruption in the “flow” of the day in the same way: that time was already blocked off, so you don’t (I’m guessing) feel like you are “losing” an hour by walking in and sitting down and taking out your books. This is a problem a lot of people (not just students) experience when working from home. 

3. If you still feel like you are falling behind, here is a checklist to help you make sure you are on schedule: 

-Have you submitted three essays? 

- Have you submitted a hard-copy of your journal at some point? 

- Did you submit your research proposal, and have you read my feedback? 

- Have you drafted a tentative thesis statement for your research essay, and revised it at least once? 

- Have you completed the work for Wednesday’s (3/18) online module? 

- Today, have you looked at the chart I posted with instructions/tips & tricks for developing a successful annotated bibliography, and did you understand the assignment? 

If you have done these things, and you understand the information in the following graphic (because proposal essays are coming next), then chances are you’re in good shape - but don’t hesitate to also send a message through Canvas to discuss any concerns you might have related to specific assignments! 

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This is how you select for scholarly/peer-reviewed articles when searching using Collier Library’s Discovery function. 

NOTE: If you are following “social distancing” protocols and working off-campus (and you should be!), then when you first enter your term/keyword and click “search,” you will be prompted to log in using your UNA Portal/Canvas username and password. From there, searching is pretty easy - I recommend erring on the side of “the more the merrier” when it comes to downloading full-text PDFs. 

Jstor is a particularly good resource, and they have a Tumblr, too. 

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Very rarely, a proposal argument will actually start by describing (and debunking) an alternative proposal; you see this a lot in political debates and campaign “stump” speeches: Candidate X starts out by saying “My Opponent wants to blah, blah, blah. Well, I say bleep bloop! Here’s a better way to fix yadda yadda ...”

EVERY NOW AND THEN, a student will get stumped (hey, it happens!) and ask me:

The best answer I have for this is: Then stop arguing for it.

The world is too full of good ideas — and so are you — for you to be arguing in favor of bad ones. If you have to struggle to come up with some reason why the solution you are proposing is any better than the solutions already out there, then you probably need to improve your proposal.

The “Problem-Solving Strategies” chart in your textbook (page 565 if you are using the 4th edition) is a good place to start on that — and a good place to return to whenever you get stuck.

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Hopefully you can see why these requirements might lend themselves to one particular organizational strategy. If a proposal argument has to identify a problem and propose a solution, it makes sense that in most cases you would need to tell readers what the problem is before explaining how you intend to fix it. By the same logic, readers aren’t likely to care much about how you intend to fix whatever the problem is unless they’re already convinced that:

a) the problem is real (it exists, and it’s a problem)

and

b) they should care (often but not always because it affects them directly/indirectly)

On the other end of things, nobody is going to buy into your proposal unless they can see that:

a) sure, we can do the thing

and

b) doing the thing will fix the problem

FOR ALL OF THESE REASONS, the components in a proposal argument tend to be organized pretty much the same way they are in the graphic I just gave you. There are always exceptions — but when in doubt, it’s hard to go wrong with organizing your essay according to the basic logic of “What will my reader already need to know/be convinced of in order to understand the point I’m about to make?”