Transcript: Week 3 Overview and Advice – 12WK
Last week, you began the first two stages of your writing process for the summary / analysis essay; and if you completed last week’s independent work schedule for the writing process, which I sincerely hope you did, you should have ended the week with a drafted paragraph of summery and a pretty good idea of the two rhetorical features you would like to analyze in your two body paragraphs of analysis. This week our focus will be on those two body paragraphs of analysis and your thesis statement.
Our first video lesson explains four steps for writing a paragraph of analysis. The video also describes and goes over a sample for each of the required components within an analysis paragraph. Please, do not skip that video lesson! It is only 7 minutes long, and I promise it will not be a waste of your time.
After you complete this week’s practice writing assignment and you have drafted your first paragraph of analysis, your focus will move to your thesis statement. You definitely won’t want to miss this week’s content on crafting a thesis. In it, you will find that we have provided you with thesis statement templates that you can actually use in your essay. Just remember, the last sentence of your introduction should be your thesis statement.
I encourage you to review carefully the highlighted tasks on the work schedule for your independent writing process. In addition to developing your paragraphs of analysis and preliminary thesis, you should also begin generating ideas for and drafting your essay’s introduction. If you review the summary / analysis essay prompt, you will see that the first full paragraph under the “Assignment Structure” heading describes the content required in your intro and that your intro must include some background information on the author of the essay you have chosen to write about. We haven't given you that information, nor is it provided in our course reader. This means that you are going to have to do some basic Google searching to find out who the author was. As you do this basic research, try to find out what types of publications the author typically wrote for. Were they popular publications, news related, academic, or do they fall into some other category? Also, try to figure out the type of topics and issues the author was most often concerned with in his or her writing. Did the author tend to write about ideas that were political, social, cultural, academic, or business-related? I think you get the idea. Whatever the case, your answers to those questions will not only help you draft your introduction; they will also help you determine who the intended audience for the essay you are analyzing might be. If, for example, the essay you are analyzing was originally published in a magazine for educators (and one of them was), it would be logical to suggest that the author’s intended audience might be teachers. This information will be especially important to recognize as you draft your paragraphs of analysis. You may need to dig deep to find this information, but I am confident you can do it!
A quick word of warning before I sign off. As you do some basic searching for information about your author and the essay’s original place (and time-frame) of publication, be sure that you do not plagiarize any of the phrasing or sentencing of the information you find online. Any information you add about the author to your essay’s introduction must be written using your own phrasing, or it must be quoted from a source, as appropriate. Ask questions about this if you have them. You do not want to be cited for plagiarism!
Good luck this week, my fearless student writers! And, as always, I am just an email or Teams chat away if you need me.