This was the final paper for a special topics in rhetoric course which I took in the fall of 2018 with Professor Erin Branch. For this assignment, I was asked to research a topic from the history of rhetoric. I chose to research the rhetorical strategies employed by female rhetoricians in America who participated in the various activist movements of the nineteenth century, particularly how they were limited and informed by the gender norms of the period. In doing so, I also performed an analysis of works by Sarah Grimké, Ann Plato, and Charlotte Forten. With this assignment, I was able to incorporate my research much more naturally than I had been wont to do in prior research papers. Other markers of my increasingly successful performance of this genre include my usage of first person and my organization of the paper into subsections instead of one long, flowing argument. My improved understanding of writing research papers was gained predominantly through a more in-depth engagement with discipline-specific texts and with rigorous drafting processes.
|
|
This writing guide was written for the writing minor capstone course, which I took in the spring of 2021 with Professor Zak Lancaster. For this assignment, I was asked to write an instructive guide for students who wanted to become English majors which would give them advice on writing a foundational type of paper for the major, a literary analysis. In writing my guide, I interviewed two professors to find out what they expected from students’ writing. I also consulted and synthesized advise from guides written by the Wake Forest Writing Center as well as the writing centers at UNC Chapel Hill and Harvard University. I included examples of important parts of literary analyses, such as thesis statements and textual evidence, gathered from my own papers written as an English major and from papers in the MICUSP database. My goal with this guide was to provide insight into the process of writing a literary analysis and to make this assignment less intimidating to new majors.
|
|
I wrote this paper for a course titled Writing Outside of the Ivory Tower on public and professional writing, which I took in the spring of 2021 with Professor Keri Epps. For this assignment, I was asked to write approximately two thousand words identifying a genre of my course. I chose to focus on book reviews published in The New York Times Book Review and defined these texts as a genre based on the criteria provided by John Frow. My argument centered primarily on the situation of address, thematic structure, and rhetorical function of these book reviews. In addition to my discussion of Frow’s work, I also analyzed several examples of book reviews published in the NYTBR and applied the ideas of genre theory to this small corpus. I continued working with the genre of book reviews throughout this course by writing a genre history paper on the development of book reviews from the seventeenth century to their present form and then doing a case study in which I wrote my own book review.
|
|