Final Paper Topic

Rhetoric 1B, Final Essay

First draft of the paper is due by 8pm on Friday, May 8, e-mailed to the members of your group and to Ben. Drafts should be a minimum of 5 pages long. Final papers are due by 3pm on Friday, May 15 in either Ben’s or Hui-Hui’s mailbox in 7408 Dwinelle. Your essay should be 8-10 pages long, and should employ standard formatting (double-spaced, 12pt Times New Roman or equivalent, standard margins, etc).

For this paper you should write an essay that engages two texts we’ve read in class, at least one of which comes from the final third of the semester (since nobody wrote their second paper about either the John Coltrane or the Nina Simone musical pieces, I’ll count the final third as starting there). This text (“text” here includes music and film) needn’t be the primary focus of your essay; it may be the secondary piece or counterweight to the text on which you focus more. The other text may be anything we’ve read this semester, with the one caveat that it cannot be a text about which you’ve written one of your earlier papers. We may be open to exceptions, however, if you come to office hours and demonstrate to us how the angle from which you’ll be investigating a text that you’ve already written about will be completely different on your final paper. Needless to say, both texts in the paper may also come from the final third of the semester.

As with our second paper, you’re free to choose and develop your own topic. Importantly, what you should be shooting for is not a simple compare/contrast paper. Rather, you want your paper to read one text in terms of the other, to illustrate how a given text recasts the terms or argument or conclusions of another, to show how understanding one text properly requires the use of another, to prove that one text raises problems another text hasn’t foreseen, to trace how a given term gains complexity or sophistication in its passage from one text to another and why that matters (you needn’t do all of these things; they’re just examples of relations between texts you may want to highlight). Put differently, you want to take a stand on whatever relation you’re demonstrating, to show why that particular relation matters and to make about claim about what it means for us to be comparing two texts along the axis you’ve chosen. This paper may therefore require a certain amount of comparing and contrasting, but it should be sure to lay out the stakes of that comparison/contrast and demonstrate how that particular mode of comparison or contrast is important.

As usual, we encourage you to come to office hours and discuss your ideas with us as you develop them. Good luck!