RSA–Strategies and Structures

The following offers an expanded explanation for all the elements included on the RSA Feedback Tool, which I will use to assess your work, and which you will use to assess the work of your peers on this second major project.

Introduction Strategies

A successful introduction both informs and entertains; that is, it tells the reader what she might need or like to know about the topic at hand and makes an effort to strategically engage their interest.

So, what might the reader need or like to know (audience, after all, is paramount)? And how can you really engage / entertain them?

  • Context–historical or cultural, academic or political–is often necessary to set up not only the broader issue at hand, but your argumentative engagement in relation to that issue. Indeed, in many ways, context is a key aspect of exigence as it describes the world in which your artifact exists, and to which it responds. Note that there there are multiple relevant contextual backgrounds for any given paper. You will have to simply ask yourself which are relevant for the task at hand in conveying the most crucial exigencies, and how can you bring them up in a way that grips the reader and clearly establishes the stakes both for the artifact and for your analysis of it.
  • Great introductions employ a number of strategies: including some statistic can help you fill in the context by helping the reader grasp the scope and scale of the issue at hand; clarifying important terminology will help give your readers the tools they need to navigate your argumentative story; relating a story by situating in the reader in the midst of a dynamic action, as many of you did so well in your SLNs, might also work. You might even begin, as odd as it might seem, with a piece of analysis as a way to introduce the artifact in a unique and more abrupt way. You could also wrestle with a difficult concept, running a sort of thought experiment, or as a pointed hypothetical question. Whatever you do, try to use details and feeling to connect with your reader. These strategies are not meant to be used in isolation; rather, the strongest introductions will employ a few overlapping and interconnected strategies.

Make sure you also briefly and sufficiently summarize the artifact before presenting your argument. Remember: you’re writing for an audience that has never seen or read what you’re writing about. And do your best to avoid abstractions, obvious statements, and other filler that often drags down even the most well-intended introduction. That is, don’t write stuff like “the environment has been important to human beings for millennia.” We already knew that!

Rhetorical and Sustainability Literacy

We have learned about the rhetorical situation–exigence, audience, constraints–and we have revisited the key rhetorical appeals related to emotional, logical, and character-based arguments. We have also explored foundational concepts in sustainability studies, including the triple bottom line (the famous 3 Es + education) and Edwards’s inward values of sustainability (the less-famous “3 Cs” + connection).

The argument you relate in your RSA should demonstrate a selective and sophisticated use of a strategically chosen subset of these grounding rhetorical and sustainability-related concepts. The RSA is not your inventory0–you already practiced that. It is often in the key tension points between the broader overlapping exigencies and constraints (including those related to the audience) and the specific rhetorical and sustainability-based appeals that you will find the heart of your own argumentative story.

While you are required to demonstrate a strong sense of the rhetorical situation, you need not touch on each rhetorical appeal, or each element of the triple bottom line–only those that are most relevant to your argument. Also, to help you navigate the overlap between areas of the rhetorical situation, don’t bracket them off artificially from one another. Instead, be aware of how exigence is, by definition, the major key constraint in the context of any rhetorical situation, as is the audience (what they believe, etc.). It might be just as useful to think of context rather than constraint to help you consider broader historical, emotional, generic, and other constraints at play.

Arguable and Focused Thesis

A successful thesis accomplishes the following:

  • Offers a glimpse of a compelling argumentative story; it promises analysis rather than mere description or summary.
  • Develops a pointed and specific argument by concentrating, implicitly or explicitly, on specific rhetorical and sustainability based concepts and how they interact.
  • Makes a claim about the success or failure–or, most often, a bit of both–of their chosen artifact that is informed as much by what is happening as what is not.

The thesis can be one or two, maybe even three sentences, depending on its complexity. Don’t feel constrained by a neat one-sentence formulation. And while a thesis most often appears in the first few paragraphs, it can be presented more subtly at first (more of a signpost than a full map of the argument) and articulated more fully and completely later in the paper. Think of the Slate piece that we read on the Nike campaign: the thesis appears most fully in the end, but a very pointed initial argumentative statement gets the analytical ball rolling. 

Wherever it appears, your first thesis will never be the final thesis: thesis statements are like maps or mirrors, and they should constantly reflect the substantial analytical work performed in the paper itself, much of which you will invent as you write. For this reason, introductions as well should continually evolve as your argument does.

Evidence & Analysis

Each paragraph needs a central idea, a reason for being. Most of the body paragraphs in your RSAs will be devoted to presenting a key piece of evidence via strategic summary, description, and quotation, coupled with analysis of that evidence. In that sense, well-selected units of strategically presented evidence and analysis will drive your paper in the form of paragraphs and paragraph-pairs.

Many paragraphs will carry an equal balance of analysis and summary.  There are, however, exceptions: sometimes an entire paragraph can present and summarize detailed evidence, and a subsequent paragraph will fill in the analysis and elaborate the core claim noted above. You might also incorporate some paragraphs that sketch out important matters of context that help us understand the evidence more fully. Sometimes, single paragraphs can’t accomplish all of this–especially in online writing, which tends to use paragraph breaks more frequently as a way of keeping audience attention.

When you are crafting your own argument or analyzing someone else’s, keep in mind the basic structure of argument: a main claim along with sub-claims, supporting evidence, and backing that connects the claims to the evidence (because evidence doesn’t speak for itself).

The real argumentative energy of your paper comes from the backing you provide. This will be the heart of your analysis. The most interesting evidence is not self-explanatory or self-evident; you need to explain it so that we come to a similar conclusion as you have in your own analysis. You might also consider including potent counter-arguments as a way to defuse them and sharpen your own critique.

Argumentative Story:

What do great stories share? A sense of conflict or tension; a sense of problem and resolution; a sense of character and place; a sense of order and development. Your paper can offer excellent moments of analysis without telling a successful argumentative story: the story is all about how your evidence and analysis is organized and directed towards the broader goal announced in the thesis.

Transitions:

Transitions should exemplify the movement from one thought/paragraph to the next, showing how ideas and paragraphs relate, how they build on one another. In this sense, transitions are the engine powering your argumentative story. You want your transitions to show growth and development, just as you did in your narrative. Think of a transition as a dynamic bridge connecting the two most important elements in each paragraph. A simple “also” simply won’t do.

Check out this useful resource, which includes a range of transition types and devices (note, please avoid over-use of transitions that that only “add”). Please also beware to crafting your transitions around the reader’s attention as it moves through your paper (what they might notice first, second, and third). While this can often be an engaging way to present information, you’re sacrificing transitions that might show crucial connections in the argument itself.

Evidence Integration: 

You will, of course, bring your artifact to life via summary and description throughout the paper, but as you move on to analysis, you will often use quotes as your primary mode of presenting evidence . When you integrate quotes, the most important rule is to take your time. Set up your quotations using sufficient summary to contextualize the evidence. Then make sure you use a signal phrase or, as we discussed in relation to the summary blog post, attributive tags.

Then, include the quoted evidence–preferably as its own sentence. Here, it is often nice to use the attributive tag to break up and control the pace of the quoted sentence. [e.g. “The cheese,” the chef declared, “is old and moldy.”] Then, begin your analysis and follow up with some sentences of your own that helps the reader connect the quoted evidence with the claim being made.

Conclusion

Go for it. Don’t repeat yourself. Your reader’s memory, one hopes, is not so bad that you need to repeat what you’ve literally just argued. The concluding paragraph might be the most notable casualty of the five paragraph essay. Yes, you can dynamically re-state the broader argument–but don’t let that be the final paragraph’s entire reason for being. Save a nugget of knowledge for the end; offer a smash-up piece of analysis. Describe what’s at stake and where you might turn your attention next if you only had space and time. Expand! Go Forth!

Concision, Clarity, Correctness–and Style

Remember these writing tips! Also, don’t forget the lessons you learned on our “Good Writing” activity a few weeks ago.

Multimodal Engagement

In your RSA final, which will be posted to the blog, you will will need to strategically link, tag, and, and insert relevant medial. The relevance of the media chosen and the attention to layout and design (using text-wrapping around smaller images, for example, and captioning where relevant) are especially important in this context.

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