Grading Rubric

Your grades will determined based, tentatively, on the following criteria. Please use this blog and the previous posts to help you in your revision.

Requirements :
• Paper is 8-15 pages,
• Typed and double-spaced.
• Normal formatting.
• 12-pt font.
• Source material is cited according to MLA/APA standards.
• A Work’s Cited page is included.

Argument: You take a stand on an issue upon which reasonable people disagree. As Hacker notes, you are not trying to get the last word in, you are not simply trying to win a fight, but to “explain your understanding of the truth about a subject or to propose the best solution available for solving a problem—without being needlessly combative” (67). To do this, as another textbook, Writing: A College Handbook explains, you:
[...] do not simply quote, paraphrase, and summarize. You interpret, question, compare, and judge the statements you cite. You explain why one opinion is sound and another is not, why one fact is relevant and another is not, why one writer is correct and another is mistaken. Your purpose may vary with your topic; you may seek to show why something happened, to recommend a course of action, to solve a problem, or present and defend a particular interpretation of a historical event or a work of art. But whether the topic is space travel or Shakespeare's Hamlet, an argumentative research paper deals actively with the statements it cites. It makes them work together in an argument that you create -- an argument that leads to a conclusion of your own. (Hefferman 495-496)

Organization: Is evident. Attention has been paid to where each paragraph is located in the paper and what each paragraph is doing. Each paragraph, too, is ordered logically so that the reader can easily access your argument. For assistance, please refer to previous blog posts.

Research: You cannot write or argue about a topic you have not developed some expertise in (You don’t take a dentists advice on how to perform brain surgery). To build your expertise, adequate research has been done—both to give you a better understanding of the topic’s background. As the Stanford writing website says, “all decent writing is the product of an involved process, a decent research paper will have behind it, in addition and invisibly, a many-layered research process.”
• You should have and cite 10-20 sources in this paper
• Those sources should consist of expert opinion, coming primarily of journal articles, book chapters, etc. depending on your topic
• If you use a website (and you should only use them in the most extreme cases. Trying to avoid them at all costs) it comes from a credible source, ie. Government agencies and the websites of well known institutions.
• Mostly, you have done enough work in the library to be successful.
• The paper should not rely on telling your audience your opinions, but showing, through evidence and reason, the supporting framework of those opinions/ideas.

Audience: Also, strides have been made to write in a way—through using warrants, academic voice/language, etc—that make it appealing to someone other than you (audience awareness).
• Notably, you have taken into consideration what opponents of your position would say in response.
• The paper is not written is such a manner that it is only persuasive to one that already agrees with your point of view. In other words, it doesn’t rely on bandwagon appeals.
• Academic voice—no you’s or I’s—are used. Instead of “I suggest that the farm bill be reexamined, “you write “Due to the consequences of cheap food on our economy, one can argue that it is time for the Farm Bill to be overturned.”

Insight : The paper shows insight into the topic. The author explores this subject in all its complexity and reveals and examines the nature of that complexity in his/her essay. Such insights should not be implied but revealed and developed through good examples from the texts.

Revision: It is evident that revision has been employed to improve upon previous drafts.

Language: Is free of typos and grammatical errors and reads in such a way that it is clear what you are trying to say.

Benchmark : quality of this work in relation to what I expect you to be able to do in this class at this time on such an assignment.