Analysis Assignment
Analysis Assignment (Paper 2: 25/100 points)
I) For your analysis paper you can select any five (5) of the articles which we have read so far which address the literacy issue.
Base your selection of articles on their relevance to the issue, question, or problem you want to focus on.
II) The task for writing your analysis paper involves the following:
a) Identify a problem/question in the introduction and describe how: 1) the problem/question really exists; and 2) it is significant and deserves the attention of the community of writers addressing the literacy issue. Remember that your description of this problem/question will be used for analyzing the approaches and position in the literacy issue, and thus must be both broad enough that it has some connection to most of these positions, yet specific enough that you can carry out concrete analysis of these positions.
b) Based on your perspective on the literacy issue as presented in your problem/question, organize and synthesize the various authors into "approaches." Make sure that you present the various approaches in a way which clearly distinguishes them from each other, and such that they adequately cover all of the articles you have decided to include in your analysis. Be sure to introduce and define the approaches early on in your paper.
c) Identify the individual author's positions as they fit within one of the major approaches. Be sure to be accurate and concise in your presentation of the positions. Support your presentation with evidence (i.e., textual evidence that an author really holds a certain opinion or makes a claim which you judge to be strong or weak with respect to the issue you have identified).
d) Analyze the approaches and the individual positions in terms of how well they address your definition of the issue by stating their strengths and weaknesses.
e) Justify and support each strength and weakness with your own good reasons (i.e., explain why it is a strength or weakness). In analyzing an author's position, carefully consider the assumptions which you feel underlie his/her position and think of counterexamples (from your experience or from another author's argument) which would challenge a claim or conclusion made by a particular author which you find to be problematic.
f) Arrive at a conclusion about the literacy issue in terms a general position which you may want to explore and develop into a line of argument in your contribution paper.
III) In analyzing your seven articles you will rely on the strategies presented in Units I and II as well as those presented in Chapters 9-12. More specifically, you will:
* identify, explore, and summarize central problems, questions, and problem cases * examine and evaluate solutions to problem cases * explore, formulate, and test problem definitions * formulate conclusions
* practice and refine your critical reading and summarizing skills * practice and refine your skills in synthesizing major perspectives on an issue * continue increasing your knowledge and expertise on the literacy issue *begin formulating and stating your own approach to the literacy issueIV) Requirements
*Length: Plan on writing approximately 5-8 double-spaced pages with one inch margins. But keep in mind that your paper should be long enough so that it presents a thorough but concise presentation analysis of the authors.