This assignment asks you to write a thesis-driven and multimodal interpretationabout any story–fiction, film, television, etc.–dealing with climate change, guided byan analysis of key genre conventions and complemented by secondary sources.
Your argument should define your assigned text as an example of a work of climatefiction according to one or more key conventions present in this text, and analyzehow the text employs, reinterprets, or subverts those conventions in order to elicit acertain response from a particular discourse community, or address a relevant issuewithin that discourse community.
Because form and content are inextricable, your analysis should focus on the text’slanguage and stylistic choices, as well as its ideas or narrative. Secondary sourcesshould be used to provide context and background information, and/or to engagewith other people’s arguments about the text or genre.
Requirements
Rhetorical Situation: Your audience for this essay is the academic discoursecommunity including your instructor and your peers, with whom you will workshopand collaborate as you develop your ideas. Beyond demonstrating your criticalreading and academic writing skills to your instructor, your goal in writing this essayis to contribute meaningfully to the ongoing class discussion of genre, rhetoricalsituation, and your assigned texts.
Length: 1600 words, multimodal, and formatted in MLA style.
Sources: A minimum of 3 secondary sources, not including the primary text,must be used to develop the essay. At least one of these sources should present acomplex argument that contributes significantly to the essay’s thesis. Sources maybe academic or non-academic, and a works cited page is required as part of the finaldraft.
Process: Multiple drafts, peer review, and substantive revision are requiredelements of this assignment. Missing or incomplete drafts and other process workwill result in a grade penalty on the final draft, up to and including failure.
Knowledge Practices & Processes
By the time you complete this assignment, you should be able to:
● Situate a text within its generic context by identifying its key genreconventions, discourse communities, and purpose(s)
● Analyze how relationships between genre conventions and stylisticchoices in a given text achieve a specific purpose, elicit a specificaudience response, and/or address a specific context
● Develop arguable claims driven by textual analysis and substantiveengagement with secondary sources, in accordance with academic writingconventions
● Integrate primary and secondary sources according to their relevance andrhetorical efficacy within the essay
● Credit the original ideas of others through proper attribution and citation, inaccordance with academic writing conventions
● Give productive feedback on peers’ writing-in-progress; prioritize andimplement feedback received from instructor and peers to reviseeffectively over multiple drafts
