Writing Assignments

Part One: A Personal Essay -- How do you "Do Gender?"

Many people find it hard to believe that gender is constantly created and recreated out of human interaction, out of social life, and is the texture and order of that social life. Yet gender, like culture, is a human production that depends on everyone constantly "doing gender."  And everyone "goes gender" without thinking about it.

--Judith Lorber, Night to His Day (19)

So far this semester, we’ve talked about what social constructs are as they relate to gender and feminism, why we form them, and what they can mean about our understandings of ourselves. We’ve also explored that, once held up to close scrutiny, these constructs, these misconceptions, often begin to unravel. 

In this assignment, I want you to think about how YOU "do gender." How do you define your own gender, and where have these conceptions come from? Write a personal essay that analyzes your own conceptions of gender, either your own or maybe a specific groups. Below are a list of questions that are there to get you thinking.

• Where do your ideas about your gender come from? How did you learn about gender?
• How has your definition of gender or your gendered identity changed over the years?
• How does your gendered identity compare to others? In your family? Your community?
• What have other people experienced about gender and identity -- your friends, family, teachers, professors, people in your major, people in your profession,  your community? Here, you’ll need to engage in a little primary research (which can be, of course, as simple as texting your mom or posing a discussion on Facebook) 
• How does your gendered identity change in different contexts? You might think of how settings/other people influence your gender. For example, are you a "different" kind of person at school vs. at home?
• Is your conception of gender harmful or limiting in any way?

Now, these questions are just designed to get you thinking. They’re not a template for your essay’s organization, nor should you feel compelled to write about each one, though some are more important than others. However, they are a good guide for what it means to do analysis.

When you write your essay, you’ll need to make sure you have a claim you’re trying to make. Perhaps you’re dispelling a myth, supporting it, creating a new one. You’re building a theory here, a way of seeing this construct, hopefully, in a more meaningful or useful (or healthier) way.


Need a bit more direction? Here a some prompts you might want to use: 


Write about the impact of a person in your life on your sense of your masculinity/femininity/gender. You might think of specific experiences or interactions that helped shape who you are today. For example, what did you mom teach you about women? What did your dad teach you about what it means to be a man? 

How has the media shaped your perception of gender? You might think about specific books, movies, icons of pop culture that you look up to/look down at in terms of gender.

How has sexuality shaped your perception of gender? 

If you interact a lot with children, you might choose to write about how you see them forming their gendered identity. 

Take a construct or label and analyze it. What does it mean to be feminist, machista, gay, straight, queer? How have these labels shaped how you see yourself/how others treat you? 



Length: Gwah! If you know me, you know I hate to give you a number. But let’s say three pages is a good ball park figure for this type of analysis. Of course, you can feel free to write more or less, and you’ll be getting feedback along the way. 

Part 2-Question & Proposal: Asking Questions, Looking for Answers

Introduction

The idea of inquiry (asking questions to arrive at answers) seems logical and perhaps even commonplace. Yet, we don’t always think to ask questions or to ask the difficult questions. We don’t always think to ask in order to find (especially when we’re told to conduct research). My hope is that you’ll leave this course exploiting this idea of inquiry, and, thus, you will gradually master the idea of rhetorical awareness. I hope you’ll begin using inquiry to find answers for all the questions you face over the course of your life. I also hope that this approach to research will give you greater confidence in your reading, writing, and communication skills.

For Stage 2, I want you to think about how your interests connect to the fields of gender and writing studies we've been reading, talking, writing, and thinking about. What I want you to do is to develop a question you have related to gender feminism and writing as we are coming to understand it through our work so far in this class. Once we've discussed that question in several ways—class discussion, peer review, blog postings and comments—you'll investigate that question, and then write a report of your investigation.

You will live and work with this inquiry for the rest of the semester, so it's important that we work together to find a question that you care about, one that will challenge both you and me, and one that you will be able to satisfactorily investigate in the time left with immediately available resources. Our aim is to arrive at a question worth exploring, conduct secondary and empirical primary research, evaluate our results, and turn them into an argument worth making while using our secondary and primary research results as evidence to support us. But, first thing’s first. Start with a question and a plan of action.

The Question

You might be asking yourself how to come up with a question that is specific and interesting enough to work with for the rest of the semester. So, let’s start slow.

1. Find an interest in a broad subject area.
2. Narrow the interest to a plausible topic.
3. Question that topic from several points of view.
4. Consider the who, what, when, where, why, and how of your topic.
5. What are the parts of your topic and what larger whole is it a part of?
6. What is its history and what larger history is it a part of?
7. What kinds of categories can you find in it and to what larger categories does it belong?
8. What good is it? What can you use it for?

They could involve:
•       Questions about feminism, gender, sexuality and how it intersects with writing theory/pedagogy, literacy, literacy practices, academic discourse/conversations, rhetorical awareness, rhetorical reading, rhetorical writing, audience, arguments, peer workshops, revision/editing, grammar, content vs. context, cultural and social funds of knowledge, or anything else we’ve discussed in class so far.
•       Questions one of the readings has left you wondering


The Proposal
After you’ve discussed your question with your peers and gotten it approved by me, it is time to develop a logical plan of action to tackle this question. This plan is a very particular type of document, “the proposal.” And yet not all are the same. For other classes and teachers, you may find yourself writing something that looks an awful lot like an essay with mandatory subheadings. For this project in this course, you will have four parts taking up probably no more than two double spaced pages. How you choose to organize it is completely up to you. You may choose to address the four things as a synthetic piece of writing OR divide your proposal up into four sections divided by four subheadings. Just make sure it addresses the following information:

·  Interest, in which you explain what has piqued your interest, a small part of feminism that you are curious about;

·  Question, in which you draft a version of the question you would like to answer about feminism and gender studies

·  Hypothesis, in which you tell me your best guess for an answer to the question right now, what you think you will find to be true; and

·  Annotated Bibliography and Primary Research Plans, in which you list the readings, people, and things you will tap and/or create to learn about your question and try and answer it. For this part, you need to do two things --  you'll need 3 secondary sources and either a set of interview questions, a survey, a document analysis, or an observation.
  ^{Part 3: The Big Shebang -- Synthesizing  Your Research (And Communicating Them, Of Course!)} 

<sup>We’ve reached the point in your research where I now have to ask you to write a formal draft of your final essay. You may be asking: How do I synthesize all my research and thoughts into a formal draft?! Do not freak out just yet. This prompt will help guide the organization of your essay.

This essay is not your average essay. It is a far reach from the thesis at the end of your first of five paragraph style essay. You should consider yourselves scholars now who are making contributions to the discipline of gender studies. Therefore, this essay will look a lot more like the articles we’ve read in class (refer back to their structure as examples) than the essays you’ve written in previous composition courses.
This essay is a synthetic piece of writing. You’ll need to explain the research you did, the different ideas you learned, try to make sense of your research question, your research process, and your conclusions for someone who didn’t go through the same experience.

Your paper should therefore include the following:</sup>

1. explain how you came to your question, why it is important and what it involves
2. describe how you investigated, both in terms of the strengths of your design an its limitations
3. discuss your findings and their significance for one or more invested stakeholders
4. brainstorm about possible ways to adapt what you’ve learned in your investigation into a public project that puts your findings and theories to work in the “real” world

You are free to present your sections the way you want, either like a report (with subheadings) or something more elaborate. When writing, bear in mind that each section should transition from one to the next cohesively and cogently and always be mindful of your overall purpose, your research question, and the conclusion(s) you’ve reached through your research. More importantly, make sure your essay meets all of the requirements of this project [they are at the bottom of this prompt]. Please keep in mind that you’re writing for an academic audience (your peers and your instructor). And, remember it has to be 6 to 8 pages long.

So, how should you organize your draft?

Part 1. Interest & Context - Your first part requires you to provide the context for your research project: It’s a bit like your proposal, but more elaborate. Remember that you are entering conversations that other scholars have started. But, your readers may not be aware of this conversation, its importance, or the problems it poses and attempts to solve. You will need to explain to your readers how you came to your research question, why your question matters, and what this question involves. Further, answer the big-picture question that plagues so many writers… “So what?” (1-2 pgs double spaced)

Part 2. Methodology - The second part is the section in which you will describe for readers how you investigated your question. You need to help us understand why you chose to conduct one kind of primary research over another (e.g. why you conducted surveys rather than interviews or vice versa); how you determined the questions you would/would not ask, why you selected a particular subject population. You will also need to consider the strengths and limitations of your design, and think about changes you would make if you were to undertake the project again. (2-3 pgs double spaced)

Part 3. Findings - The third part is the findings discussion. Here, you will tell your readers what you learned from your research and explain the significance of these findings for one or more investigated stakeholders (high school teachers, college composition instructors, parents, students etc.). Here, your goal is to put your information in direct conversation with the sources in your annotated bibliography and use the results of your primary research to formulate and sustain an original claim. (2-3 pgs double spaced)

Part 4. Application - Your last part will be about thinking about how your findings could benefit real people in real situations. You will have to imagine an audience (outside of this class and/or outside of UTPA) for which you will design a “thing” (a workshop, YouTube video, website, lesson plan, or conference presentation to name a few examples) informing them of the results of your research and how things could be changed, according to your conclusions. (1-2 pgs double spaced)

Requirements

• Include all four required sections (Interest & Context, Methods, Findings, & Application)
• Incorporate empirical primary research in addition to secondary source research in order to sustain an original claim
• Follow MLA guidelines
• Include a Works Cited (no fewer than 3 sources)
• 2000+ words (6-8 pages double-spaced) for the “final” draft.
• Failure to complete any of the above requirements will significantly lower your grade.

Part 4: Reflecting on Reading, Writing, Research and Gender in Your Portfolio

A Reminder of My English 1302 Goals
Through your work in this class, you should begin doing the following things:

• Develop and build confidence in your abilities to create, interpret, and evaluate texts in all types of media.
• Develop knowledge and inspire new ideas through writing.
• Become a rhetorically effective writer who can respond credibly and accurately to a variety of writing situations.
• Learn to write with a purpose.
• Develop an awareness of how and why you revise your writing.
• Develop an understanding of the importance of getting feedback from others when writing.
• Develop habits for thoughtful and effective questioning.
• Develop reading strategies for analyzing texts (your peers’ papers as well as the readings you’ll be working with).
• Learn how to work constructively with each other through group work.
• Learn how to creatively take risks.
• Become familiar with appropriate style guidelines for class projects.

Epithets


Human beings are far more likely to move to higher learning if they understand what they’ve already learned; that is, if they know what they know.

--Elbow & Belanoff

Introduction

The purpose of this final project is to give you the opportunity to reflect on what you’ve learned about yourself as a reader, writer, student, and gendered person living in a complex world. Use your experiences in class this semester to tell about yourself as a writer, as a feminist, or not. How do you see yourself as a writer? Is that self-perception helping you be the best writer you can be? The purpose of this assignment is for you to apply what you have learned this semester to help you better understand why and how you write and think in order to produce an insightful reflection of yourself as a writer, thinker, and gendered person now.

Brainstorming

Try the following to generate material for your assignment:

• Go back to your stage drafts, group discussions, in class writings, etc. What did you learn about yourself and your writing processes there?
• Consider what you write and don't write currently.
• Consider how you prepare—or don't prepare—to write a paper.
• Consider what you learned about preparing a research project and conducting research.
• Consider what you learned about gender, about how you see yourself, about how it shapes the world we live in.
• You should spend a substantial amount of time reflecting on yourself as a writer using the concepts and ideas that you learned this semester. Even if some or most of your brainstorming doesn't end up in your paper, the act of reflecting should be useful to you as a writer.

Planning

Look at all the notes and free-writing that you did during the brain-storming, and consider:

• What's interesting here?
• What catches your interest the most?
• What is new or surprising to you?
• Settle on a few of these surprises or "aha!" moments as the core of what you will write for this assignment. For each of these core elements of your essay, brain storm examples, details, and explanations that would help your reader understand what you are trying to explain about yourself.

Drafting

Write a three- to five-page essay in which you describe your view of yourself as a writer, using examples and explanations to strengthen your description. As appropriate, you might refer to the authors of texts you’ve read this semester to help explain your experiences, processes, or feelings. Conclude the essay by considering how or whether the things you have learned this semester might change your conception of yourself as a writer or your writing behaviors.

Audience

The audience for this project is your instructor and yourself.

What Makes It Good?

The purpose of this assignment is for you to step back and consider yourself as a writer, applying what you learned this semester to help you better understand why and how you write—and how you might write differently, or perhaps even understand yourself differently.

When you've finished it, ask yourself:

• Does your paper demonstrate that this purpose was achieved?
• Were you able to apply what you learned this semester to understand yourself better as writer? (If not, that will likely show up in the depth of your writing.)

A Caveat

Some students just "go through the motions" when they complete this assignment, and don't make an attempt to learn some thing about themselves as writers. When those students write their papers, they have very little to say about results or insights. They tend to say pretty clichéd things like "I am distracted when I write. I should try to write with fewer distractions." In general, if the insights of the paper were obvious to you before you ever sat down to reflect on your experience this semester, then you have not fully engaged in the project and are unlikely to receive a good grade on it.

Conclusion

Good luck, good writing, and kick some...well, you know how that one plays out.

Requirements

• Incorporate personal experiences, readings, writing assignments, and course goals from this course in order to say something about how you view yourself as a writer and gendered person now.
• Follow MLA guidelines. 
• Include a Works Cited.
• 900+ words (3-5 pages double-spaced) for the “final” draft