Unit 2: Essay #1: Rhetorical Analysis

• Due Sunday by 11:59pm
• Points 50
• Submitting a file upload
• File Types doc, docx, and pdf
• Available Jan 20 at 12am – Feb 9 at 11:59pm 21 days

Essay #1: Rhetorical Analysis

For Essay #1, please write a summary and analysis of any of the articles from Chapter 14 assigned by your instructor. Your audience is educated peers who have read the article and who are wondering what you think about it.

Your rhetorical analysis must include a summary of what the article argues, and also an analysis and evaluation of how well the article makes its points.

Your essay should include the following elements of summary that Greene and Lidinsky recommend:

• the context of the article
• a clear statement of what you feel to be “the gist” of the article
• a description of the key claims of the article
• 1-2 relevant examples (direct quotations or paraphrases) from the article

As no summary is neutral, you must weave an analytical thread throughout your summary that suggests to the reader your judgment of the value of the article. You might consider including the following:

• examine how well the article appeals to its intended audience
• evaluate the author’s use of evidence
• identify the author’s purpose or motivation for writing
• point out the gaps and flaws in the article’s argument

Do not attempt to summarize every last detail of the article. Instead, focus on the gist of the article and your analysis of the how well the article supports its points.

Remember to avoid using first-person pronouns/perspective in this essay.  Use third-person perspective only.

Guidelines for Essay #1

Length/Due Date: A minimum of 600 words, due Sunday by 11:59 p.m. CT.

Style/Format: This, as all essays in EN106, should be formatted according to MLA guidelines. As a reminder, the following document formatting guidelines are required:

• Use 12 point, Times New Roman font, double-spaced.
• Use 1-inch margins top, bottom, and sides.

References: Essay #1 should either quote or paraphrase the article you are analyzing at least three times. In each instance, include in-text citations that follow MLA style.

File format: Please submit your essay as a .doc, .docx, or .rtf file. These formats are available in most word processors, including Google Docs and Open Office, and will ensure that your instructor is able to comment on your work.

Works Cited: Create an appropriate works cited page with one entry for the article you are analyzing. Use Easy Writer to learn how to format a works cited citation for a work in an anthology or selection in a book with an editor.

Titles: Include a descriptive title at the beginning of your essay that tips your readers off to your central message. Do not format your title with quotation marks, boldface, underlining or italics. Quotation marks or underlining are only appropriate if the title borrows words from another source.

Deadline: Submit your final draft essay no later than Sunday by 11:59 p.m. CT at the end of this unit.

Use of essays for future courses: Please understand that your essay may be used— anonymously—as a sample for future EN106 students and instructors unless you expressly request that it not be used. Your work, of  course, will only be used for educational purposes.

Assessment: See the Grading and Assessment content item under Course Home to see the criteria and rubric I will use to grade your essay.

Why Is This Assignment Important?

A very common type of writing you will produce in your academic career is a source analysis. The ability to engage in close reading of a text, identify salient arguments and evidence, present the text’s ideas in your own words, and evaluate that source’s effectiveness is foundational to entering academic conversations. Summaries also serve an important role in helping other readers make sense of a difficult text. You might think of analysis as the job of a tour guide: you are offering your readers a brief glimpse into another world.

As you learned from Greene and Lidinsky’s chapter, writing a rhetorical analysis involves a great deal of critical thinking and evaluation on the part of the writer. You must identify the author’s thesis (what Greene and Lidinsky call “the gist”), uncover how the key claims of that thesis are supported and developed, evaluate the conversational contexts of the author’s work, and, at all points, consider how your perspective affects your interpretation of the text.

A Word about Plagiarism

Rhetorical analysis is a common type of writing assignments in first-year writing courses. Because of this, you can find countless Internet sites, free and proprietary summaries, and term papers that respond to assignments similar to this one. Any undocumented use of another writer’s words or ideas constitutes plagiarism and is a violation of Park’s Student Conduct CodeLinks to an external site.. Plagiarism may result in failure of the assignment. Multiple instances of plagiarism may result in automatic failure of the course or other penalties outside of this course.

You are the HR manager for a hyper-growth startup. You support the marketing division of this organization. The department head approached you about designing a compensation model for the entire department of 25 people and growing. Starting with his position and mapping down to his direct reports and their direct reports, use SHRM’s compensation design model (job analysis, job documentation, job evaluation, and pay structure) to reconstruct the compensation design process for this department.

Prepare a narrated PowerPoint presentation for an upcoming meeting with the department head. Be sure your presentation includes a step-by-step illustration of each part of the process.

Incorporate appropriate animations, transitions, and graphics as well as speaker notes for each slide. The speaker notes may be comprised of brief paragraphs or bulleted lists and should cite material appropriately. Add audio to each slide using the Media section of the Insert tab in the top menu bar for each slide.

Support your presentation with at least three scholarly resources. In addition to these specified resources, other appropriate scholarly resources may be included. 

Length: 12-15 slides (with a separate reference slide)
Notes Length: 100-150 words for each slide

Be sure to include citations for quotations and paraphrases with references in APA format and style where appropriate. 

Week Five Assignment: Sociology and Mental Health

Purpose:

The sociology of mental health examines our approach to diagnosing and treating mental illnesses as extensions of culture and social structure. To supplement medically-based neurological explanations for our emotional experiences, sociologists account for these social conditions in determining the existence of mental illnesses. The below assignment asks you to adopt the sociological perspective in your analysis of mental health in society.

Instructions:

Write an 8-10 page paper (not including the title and reference pages) that addresses these four areas:

1. Giving specific reference to our reading material for the week, define in your own words the sociological viewpoint toward mental health in society.
2. Based upon your own independent research, cite at least three separate journal articles that are no more than five years old that demonstrate the difference between a sociological viewpoint toward mental health and a strictly clinical viewpoint.
3. In offering a critique of the clinical viewpoint toward mental health, please explain the rise and impact of the United States’ pharmaceutical industry. For example, has this industry influenced the rates of mental health diagnoses and treatment? Has it helped shape whether or not we think our emotional distress might necessitate psychiatric treatment?
4. Provide at least three important examples in which the “feeling rules” for women and men are different. Next, explain how differences in these feeling rules may result in a mental illness diagnosis for one gender but not the other. Be sure to cite your sources to validate your arguments. The sources should be more than five years old.
5. Evaluate whether or not the increase in psychiatric medications is beneficial, neutral, or detrimental to society. Please ground this evaluation from a sociological perspective. Be sure to cite at least one source no more than five years old to validate your argument.  

General requirements:

• Submissions should be typed, double-spaced, 1″ margins, times new roman 12 pt font, and saved as .doc, .docx, .pdf.
•  Include subheadings to identify each section. 

Background: We have seen how simple data analysis and simple graphs assist us with telling the story of raw datasets. Now we will learn how the use of advanced graphs play a major “drilling down” deep into the meaning of the data.

Assignment:

Use RStudio to generate advanced graphs (using the ggplot2 package) using the dataset below.

Use the following videos to learn the commands to produce advanced graphs in RStudio: RStudio – Advanced Graphs – Part1.mp4 | RStudio – Advanced Graphs – Part2.mp4 

Graphs to Produce:

ggplot2 – Bar Plot: (Use dataset_student_survey_data.csv)

• x=Smoke
• fill=Exer
• position=dodge
• facet=Sex
• x-label=Smoker
• y-label=Counts
• title=The Exercise habits of Male and Female students that smoke

ggplot2 – Histogram: (Use dataset_us_car_price_data.csv)

• x=Price
• fill=Type
• facet=Type
• x-label=Price
• y-label=Freq
• title=Car Price Distribution based on Car Type

ggplot2 – Box Plot: (Use dataset_production_of_rice_in_india.csv)

• x=varieties
• y=price
• fill=bimas
• facet=status
• x-label=Rice Varieties
• x-label=Price
• title=India Rice Prices based on Varieties, Land Status, and Bimas Program

ggplot2 – Scatter Plot: (Use dataset_production_of_rice_in_india.csv)

• x=price
• y=wage
• shape=bimas
• col=bimas
• facet=status
• method=lm
• se=F
• x-label=Rice Price
• y=Wage
• title=India Rice Prices vs Wage broken down by Land Status and Bimas Program

Please put all screen shots in a MS Word (other word processors are fine to use but save it in MS Word format). Don’t upload the screen shots individually in the assignment folder! 

Submit your assignment on or before the due date.