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Hi. I'm Sid Dobrin. This video is about the Research Project that asks students to read
one of the essays in the anthology chapter about "millenials" and to write a response
to the essay. If you are using the brief edition of Writing
Situations, which does not include the anthology, you can revise the assignment to ask students
to first locate online one of the many articles that have been published that address the
situation of the millennial generation. If you do this, I recommend that you set some
parameters as to where students can select articles from.
You can probably tell just from the brevity of the assignment that there is a large degree
of flexibility in this assignment, and, I'll say that when I make this assignment with
my classes, I try to provide a bit more guidance than just what the prompt suggests. For example,
you'll notice that I do not include any guidance as to what genre the assignment anticipates
a response. I like my students to write essays, generally for this assignment, but have also
had excellent responses in multimodal forms, as well.
The prompt also does not suggest a purpose for writing the response; the purpose is implied
only that the assignment asks students to practice writing a response. But, that's really
not a viable purpose for students to articulate. So, I try to offer a more focused approach
to the assignment based on the focus of the class: to use research, to make an argument,
to propose a solution, and so on. This also lets me work with students to think about
how different rhetorical purposes—like writing to respond and writing to argue—might be
synthesized to serve a single purpose. I should note, too, that I generally assign
students this prompt early in the semester and often the flexibility of the assignment
is useful as I adjust the assignment to the specific and emerging needs of the class.
The real key to assigning this prompt is showing students why simple "I agree" or "I disagree"
statements don't serve as appropriate responses within the situation. Rather, I encourage
students to conduct Critical Scholarly Investigation in order to best understand the situation
and the selected reading. That is, I try to emphasize the importance of learning about
the situation in which the essay participates as crucial for the formation of the individual
response. This, then, lets me focus on the role of research and situational analysis
in academic response. This also lets me push students away from uncritical, often emotionally-based,
not-thought-out responses. I want them to see that writing to respond is not an activity
of simply jotting down immediate reactions, but a carefully planned, researched, and crafted
rhetorical act. This is why the research component of this
assignment is so important. Students will need to con- duct research about the essay's
subject, the situation in which it participates, what other speakers in the situation have
already contributed, and so on in order to clearly situate their responses within the
situation. Part of what I want students to understand with this assignment is that "research"
doesn't just mean looking up facts to repeat; it also means learning about a situation in
which a writer wants or needs to participate. This kind of research encourages students
to be better versed in a situation, to understand its nuances, so that as participants in the
situation they can maneuver in ways to best be heard.
That's just a little bit to help you think about your approaches to this research assignment.
Thanks for using Writing Situations and thanks for watching.