Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

Current Major Assignment

Next major paper: Library Research in Communication

Click through to download pdf or Word versions of the library research guides.

portfolio

What belongs in the Library Research Assignment portfolio?

HW Nov 13

[will these Sources Help You]

Due Dates (Major Assignments)

• September 20: Argument summary
  
• October 4: Evaluating Arguments
  
• October 18: Writing as Politics and Communication
  
• November 15: Library Research in Communication
  
• December 13: Research and Writing in a Communication sub-field
  

In sum, these are the 50% of your grade that you earn. The other 50% is the baseline that you can only lose.

Major Assignments

Argument summary 15%

This component of the course is designed to sharpen fundamental skills in critical reading and summation through instruction on how arguments are constructed. Students are taught basic strategies for critical reading, including: previewing, finding a thesis statement, paraphrasing, and summarizing. While this course of instruction may seem trivial, practicing these strategies is fundamental for critical reading and thinking. It is necessary for students to increase their confidence in engaging written arguments, as well as to prepare constructing arguments of their own. The writing exercises that correspond with this module can be undertaken in class (“low stakes”), thus easing students into the process of critical reading, thinking, and writing. There are many course books that present arguments for summary, however the course text suggested above is an excellent resource to follow for teaching and classroom exercises.

Due: in the CourseWiki, September 20.

Evaluating Arguments 15%

This component of the course is designed to sharpen skills in critical reading, summation, and evaluation of arguments, through instruction on effective strategies for interrogating the construction of arguments. Building on the reading and thinking strategies above (previewing, finding a thesis, summarizing), this section of the course then turns to the practice of evaluating arguments in terms of reasoning, evidence, assumptions, and logical fallacies. Students learn not only the mechanics of argument structure, but also that such arguments can be taken apart. Strategies for evaluating arguments are clearly presented in the suggested course text above, thus allowing for ease of instruction as well as learning. The writing exercises corresponding to this section can be done in class (“low stakes”) as well as outside of class (“high stakes”). These writing exercises will improve student confidence in thinking critically about arguments by strengthening their capacity to construct clear arguments of their own in written form.

Due: in-class and in the CourseWiki, October 4.

Writing as Politics and Communication 20%

This component of the course is designed to put into practice the skills students have learned in the previous two sections. Once students have sharpened their strategies for critical reading, thinking, and evaluating the construction of arguments, we then focus on writing as a political act. Readings on current issues in campus, local, regional, national, and global politics will be engaged with a view to engaging public discourse. Students will choose a political issue, debate, or current of discourse specifically interesting to them and engage with it by crafting formal letters.

The writing assignment that corresponds to this section of the course is designed to provide students with the opportunity to write a public official or engage the public through a letter to the Editor. Students are encouraged to write letters concerning actual political or social events that concern them, not fictional examples. To do this well requires that students research their topic to the degree necessary for articulate and judicious writing. At their discretion, instructors may assign that letters be sent, thereby increasing the stakes for student writing since instructors would not be the only audience.

Pedagogically, the point of this assignment is twofold. First, to demonstrate to students that writing such letters is not difficult, and is a significant contribution as a citizen. Take this into account as you design the assignment: the last thing you want is to discourage students from writing public discourse in the future. Second, to call student attention to these forms: to write a good letter will require them to study other examples and do whatever research necessary to construct a clear, cogent argument. Usually, these letters are brief, but instructors should use their judgment in assigning length (for example, a student who writes an email to a senator to support a particular bill technically accomplishes the goal, but not in the same manner as a thoughtful letter to an editor). Instructors may require, therefore, evidence of prior research that may or may not appear in the letter, but that would prove students have done their work (including, in many cases, finding out who their representatives are).

It is best not to limit students in range for this assignment. They may wish to write hometown politicians or the governor, or write letters to their local newspapers or the New York Times. For students at a loss for a topic, encourage them to read a magazine of a different political persuasion of their own—for example, The Nation for students on the right or The National Review for students on the left.

Due: in-class and in the CourseWiki, October 18.

Library Research in Communication 25%

This component of the course is designed to prepare students to undertake research in academic and professional contexts of Communication. The central aim is for students to become familiar with scholarly resources, both electronic and print, available through the W.E.B. DU Bois Library, and to provide the opportunity for students to practice using these resources rather than commerce-based resources such as “Google.”

Instructors are to formally introduce the process of research in the social sciences, including topic selection and narrowing, finding sources, organizing notes, quoting, and integrating data. Careful emphasis is to be placed on the technical details and importance of APA style documentation. Following this classroom instruction, students are to undertake a library workshop in the W.E.B Du Bois library with a Communication specialist. These workshops must be booked well in advance. Instructors can do so on-line through the library webpage (under “Instruction and Information Literacy”). A copy of your syllabus and set of objectives for the workshop are required for the Communication specialist.

Working at terminals in the library lab, students are to be introduced to electronic resources available through the library. They are to receive instruction from the Communication Librarian on how to navigate the library home page and catalogue; how to locate databases relevant to Communication; and how to properly work the database functions in order to perform effective searches of Communication journal holdings, indexes, and so on. These workshops are to be mandatory for all students enrolled in the course.

Students then undertake a short, collaborative research project into a topic area of their choosing. The specifics of the assignment will depend on the interests of the instructor, however, students should be required to use library resources to find documents relevant to their topic area, engage with the content of these documents, employ proper APA style documentation, and combine their findings into a written report. Since this assignment focuses on strategies for research in Communication, the research report may be as basic as a summary of found sources, that is, an annotated bibliography presented in APA style documentation. Further details of this kind of assignment are included below.

This course component draws from the skills learned in the first section of the course (summarizing arguments), and adds to it the skills of undertaking research and employing proper documentation. In so doing, students will be prepared to undertake the final research project. By practicing the fundamentals of academic research, data summation, and report writing, this course module is designed to prepare students for research in upper level courses, as well as for research in their careers after graduation.

Due: in the CourseWiki, November 15.

Research and Writing in a Communication sub-field 25%

Since it is not feasible to attempt to introduce students to all genres of writing in the discipline of Communication, this final section of the course should focus on a specific area or sub-field of Communication inquiry (for example, media and cultural studies, rhetoric and public culture studies, social interaction research, policy and globalization studies, film theory and visual studies, interpersonal/intercultural studies, etc.). Readings should be drawn from the sub-field about which the instructor is most knowledgeable, and the readings selected should be exemplars of this area of research. Instructors should spend time carefully working through the selected readings so that students become familiar with key terms, key concepts, and how they work in scholarly applications. Since the readings will be specialized, it is critical to outline the ways in which authors construct their arguments, demonstrating how the ideas fit together, and are animated in their contexts of application.

Since this will be the concluding module of COMM 375, students will have all the skills necessary to undertake scholarly research into a topic of their choosing. The writing assignment will therefore be a formal research essay. Students are to choose and narrow a topic within the sub-field by using resources available through the library including databases, journal and book holdings. They are to collect scholarly material, read and evaluate these with a view to their topical relevance. Finally, students are to work toward constructing an argument by integrating source material in order to substantiate it.

Since the skills for producing properly written research papers may vary among students, this process should include several (at least three) opportunities for peer review. Phases at which peer review has proven effective include: rough outlines (having students talk to each other more about how they are going to develop their topics), first rough draft (readers may respond by telling the author what they hear the argument to be, whether it is sufficiently substantiated), final rough draft (review for polish, grammar, and spelling).

This will strengthen student confidence with primary Communication literature, thus preparing them for the demands of reading, research, and writing in upper-level courses.

Due: in-class and in the CourseWiki, December 13.