Writing Workshop

Academic Writing Tips: Straight

Forward is Better
1.  Your reader should always know why you’re talking about something and how it connects back to your
topic, thesis, or research question. Think: “But what does this have to do with my specific topic?” Then
explain. Use topic sentences and headings to keep yourself in line.

2.  Connect as many paragraphs as you can with transition sentences and words.

3.  Avoid: x and synonym: “Nostalgia defends and guards identity.”

4.  Up-front the action, avoid long prepositional openings to sentences: “Responding to such cultural
observations, and they needed a definite long-term response, over the past decade in university and
colleges, nostalgia research has become increasingly scientific, again, focusing on the emotion’s
homeostatic function.”

5.  Avoid verb strings: “New Materialism advances inquiry into the nature of how Youtube was not only
immaterially digital but a physical place as well.”

6.  Don’t introduce key terms the first time without defining them (especially intros and lit reviews).

7.  Cue note taking with signposts: “I argue,” “I define,” “three main points 1.2.3.” clear topic sentences

8.  Your most important sentences should be your shortest.

10 Words a Piece

¤  1.  What is your topic?

¤  2.  What is your research question?

¤  3.  What is is your theoretical focus? (what tools,

concepts, theories are you engaging)

¤  4.  What is your gap? (tip—invent a new term, even if you

don’t end up using it in the paper it will center you.)

¤  5.  What is your method and justification?

 Introductions
¤  By the end of your intro I should
have a thesis, questions, know
your lens/key terms defined, Common Errors
know the examples topics you’ll
analyze, and know your ¤  Get to your thesis, argument, or
structure. research question faster.

¤  Show me your problem/topic— ¤  Illustrate your thesis, topic, or

demonstrate it with an exigent research question faster.
example.
¤  TLDR: 2-3 pages.
¤  Pose your research question or
puzzle in relation to that ¤  Starting too broad.
demonstration.

¤  Clearly signpost (numbers are

always good—especially if they
relate to headings).
¤  Questions, Topics, Specifics: Research questions...To answer this question I’ll be
exploring this topic through the lens of blank, specifically, I’ll be looking for it in
these texts. This also sets up lit review (topic) and your special contribution.
¤  “What female bodies are encouraged or allowed to participate in the pageant?
Whose construction of beauty and the beautiful defines America and its national
identity? And what happens with the female bodies that are premarked with
nonnational and nonrepresentational beauty? Bearing these questions in mind, this
chapter draws on the growing body of research on pageants, beauty, race theory,
and feminist critiques and examines the racial dynamic of the Miss America
pageant and how this dynamic affects public understanding of what constitutes
the American ideal of female beauty. This chapter focuses on black bodies
competing in a traditionally white event that has disenfranchised black people form
the pageant’s inception in 1921 to the tumultuous 1960s…

¤  Introduce lens: “We entangle the flourishing of salmon and the flourishing of
humans through a salmon-centric approach to rhetoric, focusing on homing as a
biotrope that heightens our awareness of a condition philosopher Glenn Albrecht
calls “solastalgia.” Solastalgia, Albrecht explains, is “the pain or sickness caused by
the ongoing loss of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present
state of one’s home and territory” (227). Acknowledging that place and
landscape define us, solastalgia captures a feeling and experience of dislocation,
and is a condition Albrecht associates, not exclusively, with climate change.

¤  Exigence (why now?): “Concurrently, in the midst of impending ecological

catastrophe, evidenced by global climate change and biodiversity loss, rhetoric
manifests itself in the survival instincts of animals1 who face ravaged ecosystems
and the existential threat of mass extinction.”
 What does your thesis and
research question commit you to
doing?
What literature does it presume that you’ll engage?

In this article we offer a rhetoric of nostalgia: a route to probing what people are nostalgic
for, why, and to which ends, without being condescending to citizens who feel the
emotion or excising nostalgics from definitions of a critical citizenry. To do so, we first lay
out our rhetoric and then complicate it through studies of (1) nostalgia’s historical role in
preparing Appalachia for industrial paternalism and (2) how the psychology of nostalgic
self-sacrifice is rhetorically primed by industry advocates to keep longing for coal fresh
today. We’ve chosen Appalachia, and specifically West Virginian coal fields, as the site of
our study because of how often the rest of the nation has concurrently longed for the
simplicity of the region, dismissed it as backward, and attempted to capitalize on, distort,
and sell back a nostalgic ideal to its citizens. But within our analysis, we also consider how
critical nostalgia can uncover gaps in yearning, seek divergent traditional identities, and
build emancipatory futures. That is, we’ll argue that though theorists like Jenny Rice
suggest “critical regionalism obviously risks confusion or an unfortunate conflation with
nostalgia,” critical regional movements are often powered by the emotion (2).
¤  In turning to the CIW, I aim not only to contribute to growing scholarship on situated
accounts of community rhetoric in community literacy studies but also to show how the
focus on land and environmental issues in farm worker activism contributes to place-
based studies in environmental rhetorics. In doing so, I look beyond the notion of text
entirely in order to better listen to and account for the arguments farm workers make
about literacy and about how their labor and organizing practices are interconnected. I
find that farm workers build a theory of social change through what I call land-based
literacies and rhetorics. These literacies (acts of interpretation and communication) and
rhetorics (organizational and community-building practices) ultimately build a theory that
1) recognizes the ways in which land can produce relations and 2) recognizes the value
of embodied ways of knowing.

¤  A scientific controversy is 'manufactured' in the public sphere when an arguer announces

that there is an ongoing scientific debate in the technical sphere about a matter for
which there is actually an overwhelming scientific consensus. The manufactured scientific
controversy can be seen as a special type of 'public scientific controversy' in which
'strategically distorted communication' works to corrode the democratic process. This
article will explore the argumentative dynamics of three cases that have been identified
by scholars of rhetoric as ',manufactured 'scientific controversies.

¤  This analysis traces Hayhoe and Farley’s rhetorical strategies for talking about climate
change with skeptical audiences, beginning with their non-academic book for religious
audiences, A Climate for Change, then following their rhetoric through newspaper
articles, interviews, and other media described above. The main goal of this essay is to
ask, what can we learn from Hayhoe and Farley’s efforts? What might rhetoric that
bridges scienti c and faith-based identities look like? Hayhoe and Farley model three
rhetorical moves for talking about climate change with skeptical audiences: 1) they pivot
toward shared values to minimize difference 2) they use local evidence to make climate
change rhetorically present; and, 3) they disparage “tree-hugger” environmentalists.
 Lit Reviews: Set Up For the
Knockdown of Your Analysis

¤  I don’t know why I’m reading this lit review—it

¤  Here’s what people have already said
on this topic. Here’s the history of
academic research: key terms, theories,
or lenses you need to know before we
get into my argument.
¤  Make sure you aren’t just listing sources
in isolation—introduce the concept in a
cohesive way.
¤  The lit review is also an argument—It’s
important to understand my topic
through this lens because new things
appear.
should always be directly related to your topic/
thesis/argument.
¤  I don’t need 5 surface level theories or a full
review of everything on your topic. I just need to
know the lenses you’re going to use to read your
topic. What ways has this been talked about.
What terms have they used?
¤  Make sure you are giving examples to illustrate
your theories and connecting it back to your
topic. No theory without illustration. Ideally, your
examples come from your topic.
¤  TLDR: 2-3 pages.
 Lit Review Examples

¤  See Rios pp. 62-63

¤  See Green washing 461-

What literature are you going to have
to review for us? What key terms/
concepts will you need to define?
What’s your gap/contribution?
Hint: Usually it’s using a unique combination of these theories to
read your subject. It often is housed in a key term of your inventing.
 The Body
¤  Too easy

¤  Get to this ASAP ¤  Assuming that your claim is so clear it doesn’t

need an example to substantiate it.
¤  Point, evidence, analysis
¤  Assuming your example is so obvious that it
¤  Let your paper be driven by interesting examples doesn’t need analysis/theory applied to it.
and quotes from your primary sources. They’re
what are unique to you; they’re the most
interesting thing; they’re always the clearest way ¤  Not differentiating your sections enough.
to illustrate your theory.

¤  Make me understand your topic’s nuances as
compared to the literature.
¤  Don’t simply impose order from your lit review—let
your subject and examples break your tools and
break your readers’ guessing machines.
¤  Not weaving your sections back together.
¤  Having sections and claims that don’t answer
your research question or prove your thesis.
Does this connect to my topic?

¤  Use citations that explain your subject in nuanced

ways, not the other way around.
Move #1: Pivoting Toward SHARED Values To Minimize Difference

¤  Hayhoe and Farley self-consciously emphasize shared values when they talk
sustainability with religious audiences. At the core of their strategy seems to be the
assumption that religious people balk at climate science arguments not because of
religion per se but rather because some faiths correlate with political conservatism. This is
why they appeal to shared values that de-emphasize the liberal reputation of
environmental politics.

¤  PEA: Hayhoe and Farley insist repeatedly that evidence of climate change is “in our own
backyards.” They give climate change presence in the sense in which Chaïm Perelman
and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca use the term. They select locally observable impacts to
bring climate change out of the abstract and “make present, by verbal magic alone,
what is actually absent but what [they consider] important to [their] argument...” (117).
Their rhetoric encourages us to be direct observers of climate change, as in this example
from their 2009 book: “In the United States, warmer temperatures have shifted the
geographical ranges of many of our native plant and animal species, altering the timing
of lowering and breeding. Ice on lakes and rivers is forming later in the year, and melting
earlier. In the dry Western states, more winter precipitation is falling as rain, and less as
snow. The snow they do get is now melting three weeks earlier in the spring. Warmer
temperatures and earlier springs are increasing wild re activity.” (8)
Describe to me the three
sections.
First I’m going to talk about x, then y, then z.
Why is your topic important to
the world?
 What does a conclusion do?

1.  A conclusion is short: half of the intro

2.  A conclusion quickly summarized key takeaways

3.  A conclusion tells me why what I read was important

4.  A conclusion suggests room for future research

5.  A conclusion suggests a plan of action (what do you

want me to do with this? Pedagogy? Protest?)
¤  Large scale meaning: Salmon thus reveal ways of seeing and being in the world that offer
possibilities for flourishing. Soliphilia offers a flourishing enabled by the melding of the human
will and natural world through ecological humility and the practice of prudent mindfulness….
As the tailpiece poem suggests, it’s time for us to earn our deaths by confronting the
conundrum of this intertwined and entangled life. Taking a salmon- centric approach to
rhetoric, and taking seriously the biotrope of homing, we may yet have a chance at the good
life.

¤  Summarizing and highlighting key contributions to changing the field/applications: In offering

a situated account of CIW rhetoric, I have first shown how farm workers reframe literacy in
order to account for the ways in which ideologies of literacy have been used to construct
them as a-rhetorical. In order to account for their rhetorical agility, I have listened to how farm
workers create a theory of social change through and with land-based literacies and rhetorics
that recognizes the productive potential of nature and of embodied ways of knowing. As
Wan argues, much scholarship (and by extension classroom practice) in community literacy,
rhetoric, and civic engagement has not been able to account for the contradictoriness of
literacy as a universal tool of empowerment due to the uncritical uptake of citizenship
production in these courses. What’s more, as Blake Scott has shown, models of corporate
responsibility influencing service learning in rhetoric and civic engagement courses similarly
should give us pause to consider what kinds of “citizens” we are producing in relation to
literacy and civic engagement. If part of what farm workers want is for folks to value their
forms of knowledge, and if, as Wan compels us, how we teach literacy matters, then we might
start by incorporating farm worker (and other) critiques of literacy into our curricular design.
Additionally, we should think beyond our disciplinary norms to account for the repertoire of
embodied meaning-making practices that the CIW argues is vital to creating and sustaining
social change.

¤  Prescriptive suggestions: “In short, students of rhetoric and science who face what they
believe to be a manufactured scientific controversy can be encouraged to: (1) engage the
opponent’s claims but then explicitly shift the stasis from questions of fact, definition, and
cause to the questions of value and policy that are the driving force behind the public
debate, (2) counter the charge that dissent is being silenced by characterizing science as a
process of open debate among experts, and process that is ongoing but that has been fairly
settled…”
 Final Presentations

¤  Twelve minutes: ~4-5 double spaced pages. Time yourself

¤  Required Q&A: ~Five Minutes

¤  PowerPoint

¤  Intro, two-three topics/examples, conclusions

¤  Should be highly example driven

¤  1-page handout

¤  Highly Sign-Posted