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To submit to 605 Magazine: Review a handout from the magazine (posted below), where you'll find an e-mail address and submission guidelines. Instead of your essay's full text, this publication's editor asks for submissions of no more than 900 words. Before deciding to submit to 605, familiarize yourself with other essays in the magazine's back issues to determine whether your essay seems a good fit. Briefly introduce yourself as a local writer, mention the title of your attached essay, and describe its accompanying photo or artwork. If necessary, provide a caption for the editor to consider (with image credits in parentheses, e.g. Jane Doe via Flickr). Please see additional guidance regarding your Inquiry/Essay visual posted earlier. Avoid referencing ENGL 201 and "visual rhetoric," especially in your e-mail's attachments, as this can negatively affect your credibility as a writer. Afterwards, in preparation for your final period, follow submission guidance on page 4 of our assignment handout. It asks for a manila folder with printouts of (1) your full-length essay at close to 1,500 words; (2) your e-mail to the magazine; (3) the attached submission at fewer than 900 words; (4) the attached artwork (your visual rhetoric); and (5) your reflexive analysis. Recall that your essay's formatting should follow MLA guidelines but avoid a "Works Cited" page, since the essay genre calls for appropriately brief, in-text documentation rather than parenthetical references. Lastly, from the above list, remember to upload (1), (4), and (5) to MyCompLab by your final period. To submit to Vermillion Literary Project: Visit the journal's Web site, where you'll find an e-mail address and submission guidelines. Note that VLP uses a "blind" submission process, meaning that your name and contact information should appear on a separate title page, rather than on the first page of your text, which should only include the page number, the genre (creative nonfiction), the word count, and the essay's title. VLP will consider your essay at its full length of close to 1,500 words, but recall that as a literary journal, this publication looks for creative nonfiction that depends on storytelling or narration more than other publications listed here. And since the journal is published annually, essays focused on current events can become outdated. In your e-mail, briefly introduce yourself as a local writer, mention the title of your attached essay (with above title page), and describe its accompanying photo or artwork. If necessary, provide a caption for the editor to consider (with image credits in parentheses, e.g. Jane Doe via Flickr). Please see additional guidance regarding your Inquiry/Essay visual posted earlier. Avoid referencing ENGL 201 and "visual rhetoric," especially in your e-mail's attachments, as this can negatively affect your credibility as a writer. Afterwards, in preparation for your final period, follow submission guidance on page 4 of our assignment handout. It asks for a manila folder with printouts of (1) your essay at close to 1,500 words; (2) your e-mail to the journal; (3) not applicable; (4) the attached artwork (your visual rhetoric); and (5) your reflexive analysis. Recall that your essay's formatting should follow MLA guidelines but avoid a "Works Cited" page, since the essay genre calls for appropriately brief, in-text documentation rather than parenthetical references. Lastly, from the above list, remember to upload (1), (4), and (5) to MyCompLab by your final period. Locate the op-ed page, where you'll find e-mail addresses for the newspaper and/or its opinion editor (see an example posted below). Instead of your essay's full text, this kind of publication typically asks for "letters to the editor" of no more than 300 words. However, in reviewing the The Volante's archives, we also find guest columns of close to 500 words. Before deciding to submit to a newspaper's op-ed page, familiarize yourself with these and other columns to determine whether your essay seems a good fit. Briefly introduce yourself as a student writer, mention the title of your attached guest column, and describe its accompanying photo or artwork. If necessary, provide a caption for the editor to consider (with image credits in parentheses, e.g. Jane Doe via Flickr).
Please see additional guidance regarding your Inquiry/Essay visual posted earlier. Avoid referencing ENGL 201 and "visual rhetoric," especially in your e-mail's attachments, as this can negatively affect your credibility as a writer. Afterwards, in preparation for your final period, follow submission guidance on page 4 of our assignment handout. It asks for a manila folder with printouts of (1) your full-length essay at close to 1,500 words; (2) your e-mail to the newspaper; (3) the attached submission at about 500 words; (4) the attached artwork (your visual rhetoric); and (5) your reflexive analysis. Recall that your essay-as-column's formatting should follow MLA guidelines but avoid a "Works Cited" page, since the essay genre calls for appropriately brief, in-text documentation rather than parenthetical references. Lastly, from the above list, remember to upload (1), (4), and (5) to MyCompLab by your final period. Please note: Last semester's Inquiry/Essay FAQ page has some additional guidance on final period presentations. |
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Friday's office hours will run 12-3 p.m. in the Muenster University Center’s study hall. Please visit with any questions about our Inquiry/Essay assignment. |
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Friday's office hours will run 12-3 p.m. in Dakota 222 and/or Dakota 304. Please visit with any questions about our Inquiry/Essay assignment.
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Given the schedule, conferences take the place of our regular class sessions on April 3 and 5 |
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Question (7:08 p.m. on March 26): "My group's essay was submitted yesterday on the wiki page, and the only problem I had was my submission in mycomplab. The only option it gave me was the 'I have completed my work on this assignment' option, and no submission button. I assumed all the group would have to select this before we could submit. Both partners did, but I'm still not given the "submit" option. Is there something I'm not seeing?" Answer: The MyCompLab submission protocol for the Group Inquiry assignment does, as you describe, differ slightly from other assignments. That's because this is the only "Collaboration" assigned in MyCompLab (other assignments under "My Assignments" and "Type" get listed as "Composition"). Here's what the "Help" resource in MyCompLab provides under its "Collaboration assignment" link: When you have completed your work on the assignment, select the I have completed my work on this assignment check box (at the top of the composing space) and click the Submit button. Have all group members decide when the assignment is finished. Then each member needs to open the assignment and select I have completed my work on this assignment. When one group member flags his or her work as finished, [MyCompLab] makes the assignment available to the instructor for review and a grade. The instructor can see which members have or have not finished working and can choose to hold off grading the assignment until everyone has finished their work. In other words, one team member should "Submit" the text of the team's wiki page (see the following FAQ for more guidance) and the other team members should simply select the option you're now seeing. Question (11:58 a.m. on March 23): "I had a few questions concerning the transition of our bibliographic essay from the Wiki page to MyCompLab. The font settings are different on MyCompLab than on the Wiki page, and the 'Normal' 10-point and 16-point fonts are not available. Is there a different font you would prefer us to use? Also, is there a way to insert a horizontal line under subtitles in MyCompLab?" Answer: Here's a great question that gets to some of the differences between publishing for print and online media. MyCompLab is designed as a place to compose and revise documents for the printed page, so the pages we create at our Essays on Essays wiki don't "flow" or "translate" very well. Still, we need a password-protected place where I can provide feedback and scores on the Group Inquiry project. So the best workaround solution seems to be copying and pasting your wiki page's text into the "Group Inquiry: Final" composition space at MyCompLab. The "Insert Document" tool under the "File" drop-down menu may help preserve some of your wiki page's formatting, but if it doesn't match exactly or you don't see your page's horizontal lines, don't worry. As I evaluate your team's work I'll be reading the wiki and and then highlighting certain passages in MyCompLab for commentary, so it's most important to see the same content (rather than style). I would choose a standard font and make sure line breaks between paragraphs do "flow" into MyCompLab. Beyond that, I'll be checking the wiki as I score your page's reflection of our homepage's style guide. "Raul, ... As I am working on the annotated bibliography I am finding locating sources extremely difficult. I know you mentioned briefly in class where we could go to find good sources, but even the articles that I have found on those sites have been borderline academic. The topic that we have chosen to go with, in relation to [William Buckley's] 'Why We Don't Complain,' is the changing perception of the American. I was wondering if you could tell me a good place to go look for essays on this topic or if we should consider changing topics." Answer: The refinement of your team's focus, Memories of America, to changing perceptions of the American sounds like a good one. If I read that focus correctly, in looking for informal essays gathered under this theme, your team might be interested in writers asking "Who is an American?" And, "How has our understanding of the iconic or average American changed over time?" These are broad questions, but by organizing the search a bit, I think its broadness can help generate possibilities. (And I'm glad to hear that you're judging some essays to be too academic for our purposes.) As to organizing the search, you could go after essays addressing shifts in demographics, e.g. where we live, what kind of wealth constitutes a "normal" living (think Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed), or our changing attitudes toward marrying age (increasingly older) and politics (the Tea Party and Occupy movements). In the latter category, here's a profile by George Packer that recently appeared in The New Yorker: "All the Angry People." Or you could consider who is an America, i.e. influxes of immigrants, the aging "baby boom" generation, or the young, hyperconnected "Millenials." Yet another alternative might be to find essays that typify an average American in a certain decade, and here I'm thinking of Susan Orlean's "The American Male at Age 10," which originally appeared in Esquire. Your team's research should be driven by some broad principle of organization. But as each person pursues different lines of inquiry, given the above kinds of categories, I would narrow your search terms to more particular themes (beyond "the American," I mean) at places like Byliner.com and Longreads.com, as well as other outlets. Please note: additional dialogue about this assignment can be found in last semester's FAQ post. |
"Continuing the Conversation: (Local) Inquiry and the (Informal, Public) Essay" has been posted below. The handout includes an overview of field research methods such as participant observation that inform our capstone project. There's also a grading rubric for the essay, its visual rhetoric, and a reflexive analysis. Alongside another course's Inquiry/Essay post, you'll find examples of essays composed by former students and published online. These texts have strengths, but as with all examples, look too for weaknesses and differences. In some cases content requirements were different, but the examples can still familiarize you with this assignment. Related resources posted elsewhere as well as the following examples (see our File Cabinet) of writing with local, statewide, and national audiences should provide an orientation to essays and columns involving field research. In keeping with variety of options our assignment affords, these texts, which originally appeared in print, investigate military service, wildfire, the Midwest, taxidermy, and homelessness, among other issues.
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Friday's office hours will run 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Muenster University Center’s study hall. Please visit with any questions about our Group Inquiry or Inquiry/Essay assignments.
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"Group Inquiry: Writing an Essay About Other Essays, with a Wiki" has been posted below along with this assignment's research log. A supplemental overview of the bibliographic essay, by Beth Sheppard, can be found at the journal Theological Librarianship as a PDF.
A list of major magazines and journals that regularly publish nonfiction eligible for annotation can be found elsewhere on this Web site. In addition, Philip Lopate's The Art of the Personal Essay, with more than 75 classic works and a helpful introduction, is on reserve at the University of South Dakota Libraries. Like most team projects in today's workplace, this assignment happens online and can seem confusing. But by familiarizing yourself with the links below and asking questions in class, our workflow should become obvious. The Group Inquiry project is due in two stages within MyCompLab: Tuesday, March 13 (your own annotated bibliography) and Tuesday, March 27 (your team's bibliographic essay). Ahead of the collaborative deadline, each team will (1) merge its bibliographies and draft a single bibliographic essay within Google Docs. That collaboration gets (2) published as a single wiki page via Google Sites, and then (3) evaluated within MyCompLab. Please see upcoming guidance on our blog about establishing your team's Google Docs draft. There's another example of this project at Wikispaces.com that focuses on climate change rather than the essay genre. Below and in our File Cabinet you'll also find examples of (1) an annotated bibliography by a former student; and (2) a bibliographic essay by Rebecca Moore Howard. These texts have strengths, but as with all examples, look too for weaknesses and differences. In this case, Moore Howard reviews pedagogical research rather than a series of essays, but the example's content can still familiarize you with the bibliographic essay's form. It also provides helpful tips on the collaborative writing process.
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Today's office hours will run 2-5 p.m. in the Muenster University Center’s study hall. Please visit with any questions about our Group Inquiry assignment.
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Update: Feedback on second drafts of the annotated bibliography is available within MyCompLab. Please consider these comments as you revise, condense, or substitute existing annotations in preparation for submitting your final draft. Invitations to Google Docs drafts have also been distributed. Ahead of Tuesday's UMT 101 workshop, copy and paste your annotations into your team's draft so as to begin the collaborative writing process. Next, you can begin to alphabetize your team's annotations so as to create a single annotated bibliography that will inform your team's bibliographic essay. As you do so, you may realize that certain essays being annotated seem particularly credible, significant, substantive, comparable, or topical. And you may notice that others don't meet our project's criteria for informal essays (i.e. criteria from Phillip Lopate as well as Lynn Quitman Troyka and Douglas Hesse). |
Friday's office hours will run 1-4 p.m. in the Muenster University Center’s study hall. Please visit with any questions about our Group Inquiry assignment.
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Contact information for your team members can be found in address books at the bottom of our File Cabinet. To join our Essays on Essays wiki, please send a Gmail address to Raul.
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Today's office hours will
run 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. in the Muenster
University Center’s study hall (or by appointment). Please visit with
any questions about our Group Inquiry assignment. |
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Because of some professional writers visiting the English Department, this week's office hours will run 2:30 to 4 p.m. on Wednesday and again on Friday in the Muenster University Center’s study hall (or by appointment). Please visit with any questions about our Open Letter assignment.
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