Sources Develop Strong Eh108 Samford University

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Description, Purpose, and Relevance: A contextual analysis asks you to read and analyze a text within a particular context—an environment of different ideas, social and cultural forces, various beliefs and values, and other factors that shape our understanding of an issue. For this assignment, I am asking you to choose a topic within the subject areas of Media (social media, film, theater etc.), Education (college campus issues, funding, disparity etc.), Mental Health (issues related to mental health, illness, stigma etc.), and then conduct research on it in order to gather quality sources (4-5), extract useful information from them (note-taking), and then compose an argumentative research project. The context for your topic will be provided by a range of sources, which you will study in order to figure out your position. The purpose of this essay is to teach you essential skills for academic writing (argumentation, research, integration of sources, avoiding plagiarism), and provide a deeper understanding of a topic that you are interested in learning more about as well as helping your audience learn more about it.

Your process:

· Start by identifying your general area of interest within the context of scholarly research. You might want to skim through some sources in order to realize which specific issue you are most interested in. Your choice of a topic will depend on the availability of sources.

· Following that, you should do a thorough search (databases and online) to gather information which is reliable, relevant, and current.

· After collecting a variety of sources, you should annotate them, take notes and then identify a position based on the sources.

· You will develop this essay as an argumentative research paper, with clear claims that support your thesis and evidence gathered from your sources.

· Develop strong topic sentences that introduce the main idea of your paragraph and link to your thesis, draw on specific discussions from your sources that support this main idea in the body of the paragraph, and conclude each paragraph with a clear discussion of why the ideas in your paragraphs support your overall thesis.

· Provide both in-text citations and a works cited page.

Multi-Modal format: Instead of developing just a normal print essay for this assignment, I am asking you to develop a multi-modal genre. Multi-modal genres are genres that blend text, images, and elements of visual design to persuade readers. The choice of genre is up to you; there are many examples of these genres, and we will be looking at several in class: Power Point, Prezi, or Basic Website.

Basic genre requirements:

· You must utilize a genre that blends images, visual design, and text, or a multi-modal genre.

· You must have a minimum of 900 words of text in addition to your visual images.

· You must cite all of the images that you utilize from web sources.

· You must utilize a minimum of four sources to support your argument.

Locating images for your project: While it is possible to pull images from the web and copy and paste them into your project, doing so violates copyright law. You could, of course, write for permission to use the image, but this takes far too much time. Instead, I ask that you search for images that you are allowed to utilize without permission by using The Creative Commons Search Engine: http://search.creativecommons.org. Most of these images are available for you to use in your projects, but you still need to cite them. We will go over creative commons licensing and citation in class.

Visual Design: As we have learned in class, there are several elements to effective visual design, and I will be asking you to focus on the most important of these:

· Visual Function: A clear purpose for the text and design elements in your project. Each element will need to be “functional” rather than ornamental.

· Visual Impact: visual images work with the text to create a persuasive overall effect, one that engages the viewer/reader and moves them to consider the argument.

· Visual Coherence: clear and coherent connections between the visual elements of the text are connected by color, framing, font, shape, etc.

· Visual Organization: visuals and text are arranged in a way that makes them easy for viewers/readers to comprehend.

Grading criteria: organization and content development: 60, research and MLA: 25, multi-modal composition: 75, thesis/argument 15, grammar and mechanics: 15.