This week, you’ll be accumulating evidence to help you make your argument and starting to frame out the logic of the argument you’ll make in your final inquiry project.
By Thursday, 11/5: SOURCES
Back in WEEK NINE, you were to locate three primary sources related to your final inquiry project and bookmark them in our Diigo group. This week, you should hone in on three additional sources, which you may or may not have already found. In other words, by the end of this week, you should have at least 6 good sources that will serve as evidence in framing your argument (at least 3 of those sources should be primary sources). This won’t necessarily be your entire corpus of evidence, but it’s a start.
By Thursday, you are to write a post entitled “Annotated Bibliography” wherein you do… an annotated bibliography of the 6 sources you’re working with at this point. The Cornell University Library guide to the annotated bibliography gives you sample annotated bibliography entries in both APA and MLA citation styles. I don’t care which one you use, as we’ll delve into citation styles in a week or two. Tag your post with “bibliography“.
By Friday, 11/6: PERSUASION MAP
Now it’s time to start putting those sources (the evidence) in conversation…
One way to think of organizing the evidence and framing the conversation in your final inquiry project is through concept mapping. We did that with the texts created by the dreamers back in WEEK NINE.
Another way to help you think through the logic of the argument is to create a persuasion map. This week, you are to create a persuasion map based on your current understanding of the conversation occurring amongst the six articles/sources you wrote up in your annotated bibliography.
Go to http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/interactives/persuasion_map/ and create a map to begin to frame the overall logic of the argument you’ll be making in your inquiry project. Enter your name and title (not important, you can just say “student” or something fun…) and complete the map for your inquiry project. Some quick notes here:
- The Introduction should be your main claim.
- The “Main Reasons” should be your sub-claims.
- When you get to the “Facts or Examples” part, you’ll want to include some actual references from your sources.. Space is limited, so do what you can to be concise; it doesn’t have to make perfect sense. So long as you know what the reference is, that’s fine.
When you are done, click on “Save Final” and it will create a pdf copy of your persuasion map. Then, embed your persuasion map into a blog post entitled “Persuasion Map.” Tag it with “persuasionmap“.
To get an idea of what your persuasion map might look like, I’m linking below to one I made based on a very important argument.
(NOTE: you are not bound by the persuasion map. This is mostly about giving you another way to think about framing the logic of your argument. It may very well be the case that as you start finding more sources, more pieces of evidence to support your argument, the logic of the argument will change a bit. That’s perfectly normal. )