Transcript: Week 4

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 your two body paragraphs of analysis, and this week’s 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, I encourage you to review carefully the highlighted tasks on the work schedule for your independent writing process. In addition to developing your two body paragraphs of analysis, you should also begin generating ideas for and drafting your essay’s introduction and preliminary thesis. We will go over thesis statements more in-depth next week, but I wanted to end this podcast with some tips for drafting your intro.

First, be sure to review the summary / analysis essay prompt. The first full paragraph under the Assignment Structure heading describes the content you must include in your intro. There you will read 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, 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 issues that were political, social, cultural, academic, 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.

A quick word of warning before I sign off. As you do some basic searching for information about your author, 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.

Good luck this week student writers! As always, be sure that you contact your instructor right away with any questions or concerns.