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Synthesis Essay: Exploring a Problem in Your Culture Due: 07.19.20, before 11:59PM Length: 1000-1500 words Assessment feedback What is an exploratory essay? As the Purdue OWL website explains, exploratory essays do not make traditional arguments, but rather, they share a researcher-writer’s journey exploring a complicated problem. Given this purpose, exploratory essays often relate important information from different sources (the causes, the effects, the actors involved in the problem), as well as the writer’s evolving understanding of the problem as they encounter these new materials. Therefore, you will be paraphrasing, summarizing, and reflective a lot in this assignment. Ramage and Bean add that exploratory essays integrate a researcher-writer’s “strong responses” to the arguments they encounter. That is, writers of exploratory essays are encouraged to agree, disagree, and analyze the sources they encounter. They also share their reflections on their evolving understanding of the problem, too. It’s likely that you’ve never written an essay like this. Not to worry! The benefits come, not from the product, but from thoughtfully engaging with research. Becoming a careful and reflective reader and thinker, as this assignment requires, will serve you well in all your college course work and beyond. Prewriting tasks: You will complete the tasks as homework or as in-class work during the first few weeks of class. The more time and investment you put into these tasks, the easier it will be to write this narrative essay. Essay Writing Tasks: Compose a 4-5 page essay that synthesizes 3-4 academic and journalistic arguments about your chosen topic, a complex problem in your culture. Include a thesis that articulates an original idea that resulted from summarizing, analyzing, and responding these texts together (such as points of agreement or disagreement across the topic; thematic connections across arguments; articulations of different parts of and actors in a problem). Utilize the conventions of summary and paraphrase to present the relevant ideas from each source, as well as academic writing conventions to organize the essay (introductions, thesis statements, body paragraphs with transitions, and conclusions). Include reflection and narrative to relate your intellectual journey. Breaking down the exploratory essay: summarize: restate the major points and rhetorical moves of an author’s argument in your own words, using attribution. paraphrase: rephrase major ideas in your own words, using attribution. respond: talk back to a text; in this course, you will respond by agreeing or disagreeing with an author’s ideas and by noting how an author’s ideas affect your own ideas and beliefs. synthesize: articulating connections between multiple sources on a shared topic. reflect: describe how your thinking about an experience has changed by recounting the details and inferring your feelings, motivations, and lessons learned. Assignment Checklist: Your “Exploring a Problem in My Culture” essay should have the following elements: An introduction that defines the cultural problem, establishes why it is important to your culture, and describes the types of sources you will review. no formal thesis is necessary the introduction should briefly summarize the causes, the effects, and the people/institutions involved, as you understand them. this should be information you already know as a member of your cultural community -- do not use research in the introduction. Some body paragraphs that integrate sources by: introducing a specific source and why it was useful to you summarizing the important, relevant information from that source Some body paragraphs that explain any of the following: your agreement or disagreement with the source’s ideas how the summarized source changed or deepened your understanding of the cultural problem how the source affected your ideas or beliefs how the source led you to a different line of research A conclusion that does the following: restates the problem and its parts (causes, effects, people/institutions) briefly reviews what you learned about this problem, as well as how your understanding of the problem changed or deepened can propose possible solutions or new directions in research