Overview
Essay Three grows out of readings in Chapters Nine and Ten of Reading Culture, "History" and "Living in a Transnational World." The longest and most challenging assignment of the semester, this essay provides an opportunity to use skills you've been practicing--reading rhetorically, coming to terms with texts, forwarding, countering, and documenting your use of sources. In addition, you'll add new ones: finding and evaluating sources and creating a text in which your voice is dominant but one of many.
"History is the collective memory of a culture which seeks to come to terms with the past," write George and Trimbur, in their introduction to Chapter Nine. But historians in different eras, with different backgrounds and perspectives, make very different sense of the past. As the authors observe, "Over the past quarter-century, [the dominant] version of American history, which had prevailed in schools and textbooks since the nineteenth century, has been called into question. . . . The presence of Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, women, gays and lesbians, working people of all sorts, rural and urban, adds forms of consciousness to America's collective memory, ways of seeing and experiencing the past" not represented in previous histories (437-438).
Anchoring Chapter Nine are two speeches on race, the first by African American political activist, writer, publisher, and orator Frederick Douglass, the second by the President of the United States, Barack Obama, delivered when he was a candidate for office in 2008.
Continuing, Chapter Ten shines light on "Living in a Transnational World." "From its inception," the authors point out, "the United States has been part of a transnational circulation of people, wealth, and power. Starting with the earliest European settlers crossing the Atlantic to establish colonies along the eastern seaboard and the African diaspora to slave plantations throughout the Americas, the story has been one of border crossings that go in both directions: the inflow of people (whether African slaves or Chinese contract workers, the inhabitants of Louisiana and the Mexican territories annexed through purchase and conquest, the millions of Europeans who settled in the United States between 1840 and 1920, or recent migrants, documented and undocumented, from all corners of the world in the wake of war and globalization); and the outflow that sends American capital, products, media, outsourced jobs, and military interventions around the world." In Chapter Ten, we focus on essays by Jamaica Kincaid and George Orwell, paired under the rubric "Colonized and Colonizer."
The issues brought forward by writers in these chapters are interrelated in complicated ways. "Reading culture" in these voices, we confront powerful legacies of racism and colonialism--and struggles to overturn them. As George and Trimbur write, "The interpenetration of cultures has been complicated, often conflictual, and absolutely crucial to understanding what life in a transnational world means."
What does this mean to us, in Boston, Massachusetts, today? How do you make sense of these readings? How do they intersect with your own experience and observation? What are the implications for who we are now and the way we live now? As with the second essay, Essay Three begins with your questions. You'll write an essay in which you attempt to answer a research question you've crafted in response to an issue brought forward in our readings.
Learning Objectives
The sequence of assignments in Essay Three calls you to reflect on your own place in the American mosaic. In the process, you'll be working on some familiar skills and adding new ones to your writer's toolkit:
- Coming to terms with multiple texts, pointing out similarities and differences
- Comparing the writers' experience with your own
- Making note of questions brought forward by the texts.
- Formulating and answering your own research question
- Using the skills Harris describes as coming to terms, forwarding, and countering to establish your line of thinking
- Calling on the voices of multiple texts while maintaining your own voice and line of thought as dominant
- Documenting your use of other writers' ideas, using MLA in-text citation
Such skills, knowledge, and habits of mind are important to success in the kinds of intellectual work you'll encounter throughout the academic curriculum--and beyond the classroom as you engage in work and the civic life of the community.
Required Sources - At least five sources are required.
- Three different sources from Chapters Nine or Ten in Reading Culture must be included. (As many as two of these may be texts in Chapters Nine and Ten which were not assigned on the Course Calendar, but which shed light on your research question. You may use readings from earlier chapters with approval of instructor.)
- At least two sources must be found outside Reading Culture. These must be from an edited and/or peer-reviewed magazine or scholarly journal you've found using Healy Library's search links to access data bases like Academic Search Premier or JSTOR.
- Begin your writing process by reviewing the highlighting, annotation, and exploratory writing you've already done on the assigned texts in Chapters Nine and Ten.
- Complete Exercise A and Exercise B for Essay Three.
- As you do this work, make note of questions these texts provoke. Select one or more of these questions to answer in your essay.
- Write a rough draft.
- Give and receive feedback from classmates.
- Complete Exercise C for Essay Three.
- Revise, edit, and submit your final draft.
- Write a reflective letter about what you learned in writing this essay (Exercise D)
- You're done!
- The final draft of your essay should be between 1,250 and 1,750 words long
- Use the manuscript format laid out on pp. 197-199 of Easy Writer. To see how the final draft should look on the page, see the sample paper starting on p. 226.
- When you use ideas from other writers, document your use of sources, using signal phrases, in-text citations, and a works cited page, as discussed in class and described Section 42 of Easy Writer.
Be sure to save all the writing you do (including exploratory writings and exercises) leading up to your final draft. When you turn in your essay for grading the following exercises and drafts must be included:
- Exercises A, B, and C
- Rough draft with feedback from classmates and instructor
- Final draft
Arrange these materials neatly in the order listed above, with the earliest drafts on the bottom and the final draft on top. Be sure each exercise and draft is clearly labeled in the last line of the heading ("Exercise B," for example, or “Rough Draft”).
Grading
- I will use a scoring guide to grade the essay on a 100-point scale.
- Essay Three will count for 35% of your final grade in the course.
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