Before you Draft:
Think Conversation: this assignment is about strategically selecting the 5+ sources that form the best conversation. This is a rhetorical choice: out of the 10+ sources that you may have documented thus far, there are almost endless ways that a select 4-5 will dynamically interact, and that a key 1-2 more will frame that conversation by way of introduction and conclusion.
The Draft Itself
Thesis: In the EAC essay, your thesis articulates how the sources you engage will advance, qualify, challenge and refine one another. Think of it as a conversational thesis as opposed to the argumentative thesis of your RSA. As with the RSA thesis, though, it should be an accurate map and mirror of your paper as a whole. The conversational thesis should capture the broad contours of the conversation as well as the kinds of characters (what discipline or discipline’s they represent, for example) who lead that conversation.
Overall Organization & TIC Fundamentals:
- Offer an introduction that frames the topic as an important problem or issue: you need to get us on board while giving us all the info we need to make sense of the conversation that follows. This portion can be 1 or 2–or even 3–paragraphs long (much more significant / expanded than the intro moves you used to set up your rhetorical analysis).
- Summarize your four or five sources that make up the central “conversation” using a fitting mix of summary and analysis. Introduce the individual authors, offer a big-picture thumbnail sketch of their work, and provide the most important and relevant details from their arguments. Include a mix of direct quoting and paraphrase with some analysis and engagement folded in. Make sure your quotes are well selected: choose to incorporate complex ideas that you can then frame and analyze for your reader. Don’t quote a bunch of statistics that could just as easily be paraphrased. Here’s an easy way think about quoting: quote knowledge, not information.
- Once you get beyond your first source, you should begin to synthesize your sources as well, placing them in conversation with one another. Show how one source contradicts, answers, extends, or helps to frame or contextualize another, for example. You are tracking an unfolding conversation so do your best to capture a sense of dynamism and development. As the EAC assignment sheet emphasizes, it’s all about moving beyond compare & contrast to more interesting and nuanced relationships amongst your sources. You might also be tempted to organize your EAC by clustering certain sources around a common theme, chronology, or methodology. These broader organizing principles often come into play when composing longer essays in this genre (see the “literature review“). In that case, clustering similar sources under specific categories (historical, thematic, methodological) makes more sense. That said, I am open to any rhetorical choices you make as long as they can be defended and appear successful.
- Transitions between paragraphs play a crucial role. They offer an opportunity to define the movement of your essay, to expertly guide the conversation. Refer to the OWL guide on transitional devices for more specific suggestions / strategies. Also note how the writers that we have read thus far (or those you’ve come across in your own research) keep their respective conversations moving paragraph by paragraph and sentence by sentence. Transitions are a key moment in any paper where you risk losing your reader: build carefully and strategically crafted transitions to help your reader over that gap between paragraphs.You have a lot to do near the start of any given body paragraph: transition effectively, introduce your source, provide a brief summary of the article under consideration. Don’t do it all at once! Authors will sometimes attempt to do all of those three things in a single sentence, and that rarely works well (or reads well).
- Quote and source integration will also be key. Remember to use critical summary to set up your quotes, include a range of signal phrases, and follow up after you’ve included the quote. Quotes don’t speak for themselves: it is up to you to control the conversation. Also, try to treat your sources as characters; give the reader a sense of who they are and what they do up front–it’s all about the ethos: both yours and theirs.Check out this resource on the four levels of quote integration. If you have multiple authors of a single source, feel free to develop more succinct ways of introducing them (e.g. “Marka and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania…” or “Jones and his team of researchers…”).Please also make sure that you include a page number for all quotes. Also note that in almost every case we should know the source that is “speaking” and so including last names in parentheses won’t be necessary. Our citation method is linking, but you need to link to a version of the article that is not behind a paywall–use the permalink for this, which you can find in the record. If you link well, you do not need to include a “works cited” page.
- As you work towards your conclusion, reflect on how these sources have influenced your thinking about your research question. As in all of your conclusions so far, do your best to take us somewhere new: show us what’s at stake, bring the conversation back to a pressing current issue. save some key anecdote for the end. Whatever you do, just don’t repeat yourself or offer a stale “recap” of what you just wrote.
- Your EAC should include a dynamic variety of paragraphs: some paragraphs offer mostly summary; others will blend summary and analysis; others will summarize and synthesize; still others might serve the sole purpose of synthesis as you weave two sources together. There is no set pattern: you must discover—and invent—what is most suitable for your topic and approach. Needless to say, this is not a five-paragraph essay!
Rubric Categories:
1) Beginnings and Endings: The opening paragraphs of the essay are highly effective in strategically informing and entertaining–establishing the necessary context and engaging the reader–while also clearly and succinctly introducing the essay’s topic. The conclusion is highly effective in the ways in which it moves beyond repetition to create a sense of urgency and relevance.
2) Conversational Thesis: The essay’s introduction includes a fully developed conversational thesis that is highly effective in broadly introducing the essay’s key “characters” and offering an accurate a compelling sense of the contours of the conversation.
3) Conversational Arc, Transitions, Synthesis: The essay offers a highly effective conversational arc, ordering the sources in a way that is sensible and dynamic. The essay also offers highly effective transitions between paragraphs and sources, as well highly effective moments of synthesis that keep the conversation connected at key moments.
4) Source Integrity, Source Development, and Quote Integration: The essay engage a suitable range well-chosen and relevant sources; is highly effective in offering a responsible summary of each main source’s larger argument as well as important information on methods and details; and the essay offers well-chosen and expertly-integrated and fully framed quotations.
5) Style, Function, and Design:
The essay avoids grammatical errors and the author is highly effective in varying sentence pacing (length) and structure (syntax), achieving concision by using active voice and vivid verbs (few “to be” verbs), and avoiding strings of prepositional phrases. The essay is polished on the level of multimodal document design, making use of effective paragraphing, images and/or videos, and links.