For this assignment, you will write an essay (750-1250 words) for a general academic audience that evaluates a professional disciplinary science article from your field of study (i.e., your major).
In evaluating the article, you should consider its rhetorical effectiveness. That means your essay should work to answer the question, “How persuasive is this article for members in my field? Why?”
To make this claim you’ll need to consider the expectations of your focusing article’s audience:
• What do they want to see in a piece of writing? What are the field’s unique conventions?
• What kinds of evidence and analysis must be included, and what form must it take, for a scientific audience to recognize an article’s value? Have the authors provided enough such evidence?
• How well does the article satisfy generic conventions? In other words, is it structured in a way that appeals to its specialized readership?
• Does the article “tell a compelling story”? Does it include clear characters, a plot, and so on?To complete this assignment, you will:
• Introduce your article by summarizing its main claims and methods to provide your audience with a baseline for understanding your evaluation.
• Lay out clear criteria for judging the effectiveness of your chosen article and show that your article meets those criteria by analyzing direct quotations from it.
• quote and draw explicitly on our rhetorical and theoretical course reading attached Value Arguments in Science by Carter.
• Presume your readers are familiar with the terminology we’ve taken up in class; your audience consists of your class peers.
1. Make sure your main claim is clearly stated at the beginning of your paper as a thesis.
2. Organize your paper coherently with focused paragraphs, clear topic sentences and transitions.
3. Provide evidence in the form of quotations and paraphrases from the text you are evaluating.
4. Identify the major claims of your focus article in the process of articulating the fitness of its persuasive strategies.
