Naïve, Exploratory Draft + Mini Contextual Analysis
Assignment Goals
- Students should develop the ability to read and evaluate the writing of others with accuracy, understanding, and insight.
- Students should develop strategies of effective research and learn appropriate conventions for citation, documentation, summarizing, and paraphrasing.
- Students should learn to incorporate quotations and paraphrased passages into their writing and to document such material with standard scholarly apparatus.
- Students should reflect on and develop their own writing processes.
Assignment
Write a 3-5-page paper in which you explore the various angles and issues pertaining to your topic. If you don’t yet see your topic as having much of an issue, this assignment should help you tease one out. You should compose a mini contextual analysis as part of your naïve draft.
In contrast to a rhetorical analysis, which looks closely at a text for its rhetorical features, a contextual analysis is a different intellectual exercise altogether: by putting an issue into context, you will create a new kind of meaning; for our purposes, a phenomenon or an issue can only be properly understood within the context it occurred. A contextual analysis will tell us what that meaning is.[unique_solution]
A contextual analysis depends on a contextual framework to view your issue from a broader perspective in order to see things you wouldn’t notice if you analyze only textual or rhetorical features. The frameworks might derive from historical, theoretical, biographical, cultural, social, ideological or political-economic information. Research and analysis based on an identifiable contextual framework helps academic writers establish credibility because they are writing with a method, with perspective, and with analytic authority.
- A contextual analysis puts sources into conversation with each other, where we can compare and contrast writers’ values and rhetorical strategies.
- A contextual analysis has powerful explanatory features and capabilities because you are analyzing writers’ positions, rhetorical strategies, attitudes toward readers, and values; the sum of those inquiries should tell us something about the nature of the issue you choose to explore. Context and a point of view bring meaning to knowledge; your contextual analysis will tell us what that meaning is.
Please incorporate some of your research into this paper in the forms of quotations or paraphrases, for which you need to create an in-text citation and a Works Cited page. You may be able reuse some or all of these passages in your final research essay. Nonetheless, this paper is mainly for assessing ideas rather than for presenting evidence.
Purpose
This paper provides you with an opportunity to synthesize, take apart, assess, explore, and discover both what you have learned and what you want to say. This draft should resist coming to a conclusion. It should not have a thesis. Rather, use it to explore ideas, issues and opinions, evaluate them, examine contradictions, weigh contrasting views, and ultimately reveal the complexity of the issue.
Exploratory essays are effective precursors to the final draft because they help you complicate your topic so that you end up with a sophisticated, multi-layered, critical paper. They help you get around perceiving your topic in terms that are simplistic or simply black and white; rather, they force both you and ultimately your reader to acknowledge the complexity of the issues—and the fact that there are differing ways to understand it.
Audience
This paper is essentially for you, but others in the class will be reading it and responding to it to give you feedback on ways to examine your issue. Your paper, therefore, should be clear, readable, and organized.
Organization
While the direction of this paper is pretty fluid, it does need some sort of organizational format. The right format is the one that matches your topic. Early in the paper, you should include an “explorer statement” that tells the direction the paper will take and the questions it will raise. This would serve as your introduction.
Feel free to use headings in the body of the paper to indicate the different subtopics you’re examining. That way you don’t have to worry about creating transitions between subtopics. You may write in first person to describe reactions and personal experiences; however, you will not want to write the whole paper as a first-person narrative.
The ending should summarize where your thinking is at this stage of researching and writing, identify gaps in your thinking and/or research, and perhaps discuss next steps.
You should still use proper grammar and mechanics as well as in-text citations for quoting work.