Assignment:s 17-23 March

I hope you all had a restful break. I hope, if you needed it, you had a chance to get caught up, and you return ready for a productive second half. To get us back in the routine of writing and reading for 111, here's your assignment for this week:

1. Read chapter six, "Writing to Inform."
2. Writing assignment: Scenario 1, page 193-4. This writing scenario has you taking a topic about which your are curious and writing about it for an academic audience. Academic audiences are fairly formal audiences. They expect a high degree of analysis and critical thinking. In other words, they look for an your ability to take a subject and look at it from several different angles. As in most of life, in most academic situations, one assumes your audience knows less about your subject than you do, and one of the reasons they're reading you is to learn about your subject from you.

This writing scenario also has you doing active research, that is, using outside resources to discover the different viewpoints on your subject about which you'll write. Students tend to panic when they hear the word research. You shouldn't. You do research all the time. Every time you go to others to try to figure out what they know on a topic, you are doing research. Reading _Consumer Reports_ and talking to friends about what to look for in a car or in a TV is doing research. In short, research is just learning about and taking advantage of other people's knowledge on a subject which concerns you.

One thing you should remember about academic audiences is that they expect from you what you expect from every research source, that is, full and unbiased information. They expect you to be objective and informative. As you write this short paper, which you will send to the class listserv, eng241spring2008reynolds@googlegroups.com, try to be informative.

Remember, you aren't trying to solve the topic about which you write, you are trying to: 1) describe it in detail, and 2) inform your reader about your topic as fully as possible. The reading your do in chapter six will help you better understand how to accomplish these goals.

Limit your paper to under 500 words.

3. Update your writing inventory with the information you learn while reading and writing this week, and send me a new invitation to read/share your updated writing inventory.

4. Write a short, two page cover letter in which you inform me about your performance in this class to date. Make special note of areas in which you can improve. Remember the class is all about improvement.