Project : Your Exploratory Essay (3)

The final product of this project, a 1000-1500-word essay, will explore and analyze a problem concerned with a food issue. You do not need to offer a solution to the problem.

Audience: You will be the most important audience for your journal entries, which will record the nut-and-bolts of your discoveries and insights. However, those reading your essay, other FIU composition students and instructors, comprise a relatively sophisticated audience and will expect to learn something they don’t already know or to gain new insights.

Topic Range:  To write an exploratory essay, you should start with a problem (one without an easy answer or, perhaps, with no answer).

The fact that everyone has to eat creates many unresolved problems – globally, locally, and individually. For example: Can the problem of world hunger be solved? What laws, if any, are needed to keep food safe? How can ordinary people learn about what’s in their food? What role should the federal government have in regulating agribusiness? What are the ethics involved with killing animals for food? How should FIU determine which franchises to allow in the Graham Center? How does the fact that many families have lost the custom of gathering even once a day around the dining table affect the function and happiness of the American family and what, if anything, should be done to bring families back to the table?

Your Essay: Using the “retrospective” strategy, as described in A & B Guide on pages 151 and 152, your writing will describe the process of grappling with your problem. You should include your research efforts and the various angles of vision you discover. You’ll articulate thought processes involved in finding and analyzing. Cite sources using MLA.

Homework/Preparation:

Read: A & B Guide: Chapter 6

            Earth: Michael Pollan’s “Behind the Organic Industrial Complex”

            * expect a quiz

Stage One:

Your Research Log: Feb. 21 Begin keeping your record in Section Three of your class journal. This section of your journal should include your search for a problem and your encounters with and considerations of multiple solutions to the problem or multiple points of view on the issue. See A & B Guide pages 155 – 175.

Gathering Thoughts:  After class discussion and a quiz or two over Chapter 6 and Pollan’s writing, your group will meet during class to share ideas and help each other in finding a problem. Before that class, read ingredients on packages in the grocery store, find advertisements, or consider your family’s dining traditions. Think about how you will approach your problem. If your approach is empirical, you may want to enlist group members, for example, as taste testers. (Do the organic carrots have a different taste than the one grown with chemical fertilizers?)

Stage Two:

Log of Your Research and Analyses, Feb 26 – Mar. 5.

Consult: A & B Guide, Chapters 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12  and 14

              Everyday Writer, Chapters 16 –18..

Use the library databases and other avenues to find materials that offer answers to your research question. (If you find an interview is appropriate and useful, you may get credit for your required interview.)

Continue to record everything in your journal’s log. You should record your search for and formulation of your problem by writing down useful (and borderline) ideas from yourself and your group.

·          Record your early expectations and feelings about your problem and its possible solution.

• Keep a complete record of the sources you will need to document using MLA style. In the end not all may be cited, but you should keep a record of all that are consulted.
• Think on the paper. Document your analyses of your sources, your recognition of fallacies, your sources’ uses of ethos, pathos, and logos,
• Write about your sources’ background and possible biases.

Dialectic: Group will play believing and doubting game.

In-class:  You’ll write a 500-word skeleton-essay.

Stage Three, First Draft and Global Editing. Due March 7. Provide two photocopies of your draft (minimum 850 words) for your group member’s reaction and editing. You will review and edit two essays from your group. Use the checklist in A & B Guide, p. 176. Be sure to include your group’s editing in your journal.

Write a 100-word reflective commentary on your draft. A & B Guide, pp373-74.

Stage Four, Revising and Polishing.

Everyday Writer, Chapters 19- 35 (for reference)

There’s no magic number of drafts that apply to everyone all the time. Much depends on the quality you strive for.  Once you’re satisfied with your content and the overall form of your essay, you’ll need to work on it at a sentence level.

Be sure to proofread: The most efficient way is to make a list of the kinds of errors you know you frequently make. Then go over the essay looking specifically for those. Usually it’s best to go through it looking for one at a time.

Due Date:  March 19 -- Hand In  section three of your journal.  Submit the project materials in a file folder. The polished draft should be on top..

            Checklist for Project 3:

·          Research Log (10)*

·          Other Materials Generated from the Group

·          500-Word Skeleton Essay (05)*

·          100-Word Reflective Commentary (05)*

·          Your First Draft Editing from Group Members

·          Your First Draft

·          Your Polished Draft (80)*

* Grade percentages are in parentheses.

NOTE: All scheduled dates are subject to change.