Overview
heres the assignment details below< i have also added a pdf of my argument plan essay, so you can use that to help find sources based on what i wrote:
Find ten sources you plan to use in your project, including books, scholarly articles, scientific reports, professional websites, newspapers, magazines, blogs, historical records, archives, etc.
At least five sources of these sources must be peer-reviewed, meaning they have undergone a more rigorous publication process. These can be books, journal articles, or reference sources.
- Summarize each source with 1-3 paragraphs (no more than 1 page) containing a clear and accurate description of the author’s purpose and the main argument being made in the source.
A good summary should replace my need to read the primary article or source; that is, your summary should be written well enough and substantively enough for me to understand your source without me having read it myself.
Having trouble writing a summary? These questions below should help you to write a summary that spells out the details and importance of a source.
Rhetorical Situation: Provide in a sentence or two the context of the occasion/issue at hand. To form a clear sense of occasion, you should answer for yourself these questions: What caused the author to write this article when they did? Did someone do something, or not do something, to inspire them to respond? Did someone say something? Did an event take place?
- Thesis: What does the author assert in response to the issue at hand? What, in other words, are they setting out to argue regarding the issue at hand? What are the main claims?
Support: How does the author support their thesis and achieve their rhetorical purpose? What kinds of claims, warrants, and evidence do they provide? How was the evidence they used collected? How reliable is the evidence for the claims being forwarded? What kind of rhetorical strategies do they use? Etc.
- Evaluate: How has this source been useful to your research? What was important about the information/argument? How would you describe the perspective it offers and why? Is it extremely biased? Seemingly objective? Well-informed? Very scholarly? Etc.
- Reflect: Has this source changed how you think about and/or research your topic? Also, see the list above. How might you put this source to work for you in your article, even if it is biased? How can it help you build or shape your argument? How can you use this source in your research project? Are there particular quotes you might extract and/or paraphrase? If so, why? What will that help you accomplish? (NOTE: Students most frequently forget to adequately reflect on what a source provides them, and how it relates to other sources you have collected).
Conclusion: Most scholarly writings end by spelling out the implications of one’s research and argument. This may be a call to action (a should, needs to, must, ought to statement). What does the author want certain stakeholders or audience members to do (think, act, feel) in response to their argument?
Here is an example of what an entry should look like:
Wu, T. (2011). The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. Manhattan, New York: Random House. In The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, legal scholar Tim Wu chronicles how through the force of law, information conglomerates in the 20th century used law to crush competitors in their infancy. A century ago, film and radio were professed to open society up and level various cultural hierarchies. Films in the 1910s and 1920s catered to a wide array of audiences and not exclusively to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Hollywood entrepreneurs, comprised mainly of Jewish theatre owners, were much more in touch with the cultural sensibilities of urban and ethnic audiences—from which they had recently risen. Radio, at this time, embodied similar qualities, with numerous local “radio clubs” springing up across the United States. This era of openness ended primarily because of regulatory shifts that were professed to be in the public interest, such as the Hayes Code and Radio Act of 1927. With a few notable exceptions (i.e., AT&T’s breakup in the 1980s), Wu documents that very rarely has a contemporary American information empire fallen because of a regulatory legal shift. In fact, it is often the case that corporations use the force of law to try and kill rival technologies in their infancy—with the telephone, cable television, and VHS all being litigated over early in their lives. This history informs my project by demonstrating that law is a significant force shaping media environments. The lesson that Wu wants the general public to take away from this book is that numerous debates surrounding internet regulation have antecedents in history. Other mediums have been professed as transformative yet ultimately came to reflect the qualities of the world around them. Those who control the master switch on technology—whether legal or mechanical—ultimately hold significant power over how it shapes our lives.