First Year Composition Program

University of Oklahoma
Fall 2016
English 1113: Principles of Composition I
Project 1
Project Description: Have you thought about why you believe what you believe or why you
hold dear those things that are most important to you? What values lie underneath those
beliefs, what values make some things dear, and where do these values come from? For this
project, we are going to think and write about these questions, although well be doing so
within a critical framework that pushes us to identify the causal relationship between our
personal experiences and values. In other words, you will critically reflect on how your
personal experiences have shaped your values, making you the person you are today. Our
personal histories and experiences have a huge affect on how we understand ourselves and
make sense of the world around us, because they are the source of the values that define us.
Your initial task will be to engage in reflection about the ways in which your personal history
and experiences have created and shaped some of your most important values. You may choose
to focus on a single experience or analyze a collection of experiences. From there, you will
construct a critical narrative that informs your audience about a value that is important to you
and demonstrates an intricate understanding of how your personal history or experiences
contributed to its creation and evolution.
Sample Example: For instance, if a student wrote about valuing loyalty, she could define what
it means to be loyal in her own words and ask why she defines loyalty in that way. Answering
this question may involve reflecting on specific experiences, relationships, personal belongings,
or something she read that led her to define loyalty the way she does. Likewise, that student
could also investigate her feelings about loyalty, working to identify and describe in detail
experiences that led her to view loyalty in specific ways.
Learning Goals: The purpose of this assignment is to engage in critical thinking and writing
about how external experiences mediate, to a certain extent, how you see the world. The goal is
to dig deep in your analysis of your personal value so as to gain a greater understanding of both
the value itself and your relationship to it. Most importantly, you will learn to avoid surfacelevel observations and commit yourself to an in-depth process of reflection and investigation
that considers the relevance of your personal experiences, relationships, belongings, and
activities. Such a commitment will help you construct an informative narrative that provides
your reader with a glimpse of how your past has contributed to the formation of your values
and how your values have contributed to who you are. Such an understanding of yourself will
be necessary as we progress through this semester and turn our attention to the ways in which
external and material factors influence what communities value.
Requirements: A successful essay will:
Clearly identify a personal value of importance to the writer and
critically reflect on that value, using specific details in order to demonstrate how the
writers personal history contributed to the creation and/or evolution of this value
Organize the essay as a personal narrative anchored to a generative
claim or line of inquiry
Cite all sources in MLA style

 Be at least 1000-1250 words in length

Avoid grammatical mistakes and unclear prose

English 1113: Principles of Composition I

Project 2
Project Description: In the last unit, you explored a personal value. For this unit, were
still interested in values; however, were turning our attention from personal values to
shared values enacted by groups in the university or local communities. We can learn a lot
about how values are distributed and shared by observing and researching how groups
endeavor to contribute to the public good by engaging with social/political issues. For this
project, you will focus on a group in the local or university community engaged with a
social/political issue important to you. You are tasked with constructing an essay that
informs your audience about how your groups engagement with a social/political issue
enacts or implies a meaningful value.
Preparing to Write:
Identify a local group of interest to you. There are several
approaches you might take in constructing this essay, but however you choose to do
so, your essay should draw on three things: the organization you choose, a
meaningful value that connects the individual members of the organization, and a
social/political issue the group is involved in that enacts that value. You might first
choose a local group of interest and investigate what values and issues they are
involved in. You might choose a social/political issue that is important to you and
research a social organization involved with the issue, seeking to understand what
values inform their involvement. Perhaps you would like to continue researching
your value from the last project, and you would then consider what political/social
issues are connected to that value and which organizations are engaged with that
issue. Regardless, the group you choose must be new to you, meaning that you
cannot be counted as one of its members. The purpose of this requirement is to help
you find a group you might join.
Draft an effective research question that propels you to
investigate the way your group engages with a social/political issue. Your
research question my lead you to examine a wide range of sources, including
artifacts found in archives, articles gathered from digital databases or newspapers,
personal interviews or observations, flyers, posters, organization charters, official
newsletters designed by the group, or even information available on the groups
website or blog.
Evaluate and analyze your research in order to understand how
the group enacts a shared value when engaging with the social/political issue.
Assessing your research, what value is particularly powerful in motivating and
influencing how the group engages with the social/political issue? What evidence
have you discovered that indicates the presence of that value in the activities of the
group (including their communications)?

Your paper should use your research and evaluation of that research to demonstrate to your
audience an understanding of how their engagement with a social/political issue enacts or
implies a meaningful shared value. Your audience will expect you to be specific and go
into precise detail.
Sample Example: For instance, a student with a personal value of equal access to
opportunities (or inclusivity) might be interested in making sure the OU campus is
accessible to all students, including those with learning or physical disabilities. After doing
some research on the OU Student Life website, he discovers the student organization,
Disability Inclusion and Awareness (DiNA), that actively promotes campus safety and
accessibility, organizing campus activities for students with disabilities. The student
constructs the following research question: How does DiNA promote campus safety and
accessibility? He can research this question by going to the organizations website, setting
up an interview (either in person or via email) with a member of the organization, analyzing
texts (posters, flyers, Facebook announcement) the group produces, and finding out about
the history of this group on campus, perhaps by looking into how DiNA is part of a history
of groups trying to make the OU campus more accessible for students with disabilities.
Learning Goals: One of the driving motivations behind this unit is to engage you in indepth primary and secondary research. As such, a large part of your grade will come from
the degree to which you demonstrate that you have thoroughly researched the organization
of your choosing, the values that inform that group, and the social issue that engages the
group in meaningful activities. It is only through in-depth research that you can come to
understand and convey this information. Therefore, this assignment offers you the
opportunity to demonstrate the understanding that comes from actively and thoroughly
knowing your subject matter.
Requirements A successful essay will:
Clearly demonstrate how a local groups engagement with a
social/political issue enacts or implies a meaningful value.
Be informative, detailed and well-researched
Be organized around a generative claim or line of inquiry
Include a strategic selection of primary and/or secondary research
from credible sources
Cite all sources in MLA style
Be at least 1250-1750 words in length
Avoid grammatical mistakes and unclear prose

English 1113: Principles of Composition I

Project 3
Project Description: You have now written about personal values as well as how groups
enact shared values. For this assignment, you will explore the underlying values of a person
or group whose values you think differ from your own through a close reading of a text. As
we have seen throughout this semester, we all have reasons for believing the things we
believe and thinking the things we think. The task for this essay is to gain understanding of
a belief system that is (perhaps only seemingly) different from your own, and to present
that perspective in a manner that acknowledges the validity of it. In order to organize and
frame your research, you should choose a specific social/political issue of interest to you,
considering how your personal values determine your view. You should then identify a text
or texts containing a view that conflicts with your own. Engaging in a close reading of the
text, begin by tracking moments of agreement and divergence between your stance and that
which is presented. You will then identify the values the text enacts or implies, putting
those values into conversation with your own, differing values. Because the focus is on
demonstrating an understanding of the conflicting viewpoint, you should avoid a simple
compare-and-contrast of the differing viewpoints; instead seek to understand your own
values as a means to better understand and approach the perspective presented in the text.
Points of Clarification: This paper should not be an argument or an attempt to persuade an
audience about whether the conflicting stance is right or wrong. Rather, the goal of the
assignment is to take the first step toward facilitating a respectful dialogue between two
seemingly disparate points of view in which the values and opinions found in the text are
presented fairly and comprehensively. In order for such a dialogue to take place, you must
demonstratewithout prejudicethat you understand where the person or group you are
writing about is coming from. It might be useful to consider one goal of the research
process to become so familiar with the stance of the text as to be able to present the validity
of it convincingly. Adopting this mindset will encourage you to be careful in your
presentation of how or why the author of the text adopts certain values and holds certain
beliefs.
Sample Example: A student who has explored her value for hard work may want to write
about the issue of welfare. She will be responsible for finding a text crafted by a person or
group who believes welfare can be beneficial to society. She will then analyze the text in
order to identify the values the text enacts or implies, staying attuned to ways in which the
text challenges or conflicts with her assumptions. To do so, she will need to examine how
she has come to define hard work, expanding her understanding of the issue at hand, and
exploring how hard work might very well be a value for those with whom she disagrees.

Rather than seeking to establish why either viewpoint is superior to the other, the task is to
demonstrate an understanding of the alternative viewpoint and the values upon which it is
built.
Requirements A successful essay will:
Present an informative, detailed and well-researched analysis of a
text depicting a point of view different from your own
Demonstrate an understanding of the values that inform the beliefs or
stance of the text
Express the validity of the other side through an understanding of
their perspective
Avoid emotionally-charged rhetoric
Be organized around a thesis that either advances a generative claim
or line of inquiry
Cite all sources in MLA style
Be at least 1250-1500 words in length
Avoid grammatical mistakes and unclear prose

English 1113: Principles of Composition I

Project 4
Project Description: For this project, you will review the work youve completed thus far
in the semester and prepare a five-minute formal speech designed to inform your
classmates about an aspect of your work from our class that you found particularly
meaningful. First and foremost, what makes a speech effective? Like well-written written
essays, effective speeches connect with their audience and use concrete evidence and
specific examples to support major claims. However, a public speech cannot be re-read, so
good speakers clearly state their intended purpose and use an overt organizational structure
so that the audience can follow their central claim or point. Good speeches are given, not
read, meaning you should engage with the audience, using notecards only to remind
yourself of key points. You should not read a speech verbatim from a piece of paper. Your
speech may also make use of visual aids, but the visual aids should clarify or enhance the
speech itself, not distract from it.
As long as you use your work from the semester to develop your speech, you may approach
your topic in a variety of ways. You could design it to inform your audience of the history
of a local group, developing and supporting a claim about how that groups history impacts
their shared values or participation in a social/political issue. You might consider using your
speech to inform your audience about the different valuesor different interpretations of
the same valuesthat lead to disagreement and conflict in the local community on a
particular issue. You could even build on such an approach and evaluate potential ways of
taking action and resolving the conflict. You may locate areas where your newfound
understanding of a differing opinion might allow you to persuade those who do not share
your opinion, or you may even locate ways in which your own opinion has been challenged
or changed by the text you analyzed. You might find a common thread that emerged
throughout your various projects and present on it. Conversely, you might zoom in on one
particular point of interest from one of your essays and explain its development. Or, you
may simply develop a speech that explains why a particular value is important to you and
how your personal thoughts about this value have been shaped by specific experiences,
texts, and/or relationships. In short, as long as you use your work from the semester to
develop your speech, you can choose the aspect of your work you want to present.
Why am I doing this in a writing class? One goal of this project is for you to reflect on
what youve learned this semester as you prepare to make the transition for English 1213.
But in addition, it is likely that you will need to prepare and execute presentations or
speeches at some point, whether you do so in your career, in community contexts, or in
future classes at OU. In short, producing and delivering formal speeches gives you the
opportunity to develop and practice valuable rhetorical skills.
What makes a speech successful? This assignment asks you to design a speech that
informs your audience about a meaningful aspect of your work this semester. A successful
speech will:
Clearly describe the topic of the speech or the argument being made

 Demonstrate purposeful rhetorical decisions in the organization and

presentation style
Integrate compelling examples from the work and research you
completed this semester
Account for the expectations of your intended audience
Have an organizing principle, claim, or line of inquiry that guides
audiences experience of the speech
Use visual aids to augment the speech, not to distract from it
Be 5-7 minutes in length, as well as clear, organized, and edited