Historic Joshua Tree sites blighted by city's ills - latimes.com

Historic Joshua Tree sites blighted by city's ills - latimes.com

The Annotated Bibliography

It is the goal of the annotated bibliography first to establish your control over your sources and then to show me (and yourself) how you intend to employ their information. A good annotation provides a succinct summary of the article, and it should give some insight into the articles relevance to your own agenda. This is the first step in establishing the “because” explanation (warrant) upon which the Toulmin supportive approach turns. The more relevant information you pack into the annotation, the more your own argument is going to take form before you start writing. You will also find that beyond helping to sculpt the contours of your own analysis and approach, the annotated bibliography easily becomes your works cited page (bonus!).

Example:

Grant, Barry Keith (1996). Rich and Strange: The Yuppie Horror Film [Electronic Version]. Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 48, No. ½ (Spring-Summer 1996): pp. 4-16. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20688090

Grant examines a subgenre of the contemporary horror film, the “Yuppie Horror film,” focusing on the way that this subgenre employs the same elements of traditional horror films but shifted to exploit the 1980’s-early-1990’s social and cultural preoccupation with material success. Using a wide variety of films as his support, Grant demonstrates the way that Yuppie horror replaces monsters and the supernatural with financial horrors such as losing one’s livelihood, social standing and/or material possessions. This essay will provide material for my analysis of the salient economic anxieties and cultural tropes that motivate the affluent villains in Bret Easton Ellis’ short stories, the Devil Wears Prada (1989) and Let Them Eat Stake (1990).

Introductions: Notes and Goals

 

In the kind of essays we are writing in this course, your introductions must offer the following:

THESIS: a succinct statement of the central claim that the rest of the essay will explain/expand upon.

CONTEXT: a brief statement of the information that your reader needs to understand in order for your thesis to make sense.  The context should include the following:

A preliminary statement or implication of the STAKES inherent in your argument/issue.  In other words, WHY should the reader care about this topic?  What will it cost her not to understand your argument?  

An indication of the state of play of the conversation about the topic of your thesis, i.e. the conventional wisdom, the conventional ignorance, or the most salient elements of the ongoing dispute.

If at all possible, your introduction should also include a HOOK, an opening sentence or two that startles or charms your reader into reading further.

You may also want to include a ROAD MAP in or near your introduction.  This series of claims will lay out HOW you will be proving your argument.  This often includes a terse statement of your primary supportive claims and especially the LOGIC of their organization.

EXAMPLE:

Stephanie Solis did not know that she was an illegal immigrant until she was eighteen.  Until then, her parents had been able to hide the fact that they had broken the law when they brought their infant daughter to the United States.  Solis’ discovery of her illegal status may be unusual, but her predicament is not.  This year alone about 70,000 undocumented students will graduate from American high schools.  Immigration excites powerful emotions on both sides of the debate; livelihoods, ways of life, and lives all seem to be at stake.  However, the very importance of the topic tends to lead people to get emotionally attached to their positions and to avoid confronting the complexities of the issue.  For example, the immigration debate in this country tends to focus on adult immigrants; it often fails to account for the millions of children brought into the country by their parents.  It is true that these children’s very presence in this country is a crime.  However, many, if not most of the children illegally in the United States came here when they were too young to have deliberately done anything wrong.  Many people oppose “rewarding” adult immigrants by giving their children citizenship.  But like it or not, those  millions of children are already here and something must be done to allow them to become fully productive residents.  Therefore, for both moral and practical reasons, Congress must pass a law creating a pathway to citizenship for all people brought to the United States before they turned eighteen.

(h/t J. Enfield)

Tom Zeller Jr.: Clean Power Collateral Damage: Of Birds, Tortoises And The Transition From Fossil Fuels

Tom Zeller Jr.: Clean Power Collateral Damage: Of Birds, Tortoises And The Transition From Fossil Fuels

Population growth is threat to other species, poll respondents say - latimes.com

Population growth is threat to other species, poll respondents say - latimes.com

Should We Cease to Build in Harm's Way - To the Point on KCRW

Should We Cease to Build in Harm's Way - To the Point on KCRW

A2 Reading Response/Heuristic

Please follow the instructions and provide your responses as a comment to this blog post.

After our in-class discussions and the application of "The Pentad," the next step in answering this prompt is to find a main claim from the Bookchin and/or Bradford that will become the central criteria by which you evaluate in what ways Davis and/or Didion's portrayal of life in Malibu reflects the Deep Ecology vs. Social Ecology debate.  So:

Pick three (3) central claims from the Bookchin and/or Bradford and explain how they relate to the depiction of the Malibu fires in the Davis and/or Didion.

Examples:

Bookchin's criticism of our hierarchical social organization finds clear support in the way that Davis explains the class distinctions he believes have given rise to the unequal allocation of  emergency resources in Los Angeles.

Or

Didion's emotional connection to the beauty and tranquility of Malibu represents a vital connection between identity and place that Bookchin's critique disregards too quickly and with too little attention to the inescapable ways in which people create a sense of dwelling.  Home is, after all, as much an emotional state as it is a social construct. 

As always, there are no right answers at this stage of the game.  We are just trying to start putting some ideas in relation to each other.  So don't let self-consiousness edit your responses.  Just make some claims that we can talk about and which might ultimately find their way into your essay either as a thesis claim or a supportive assertion.

Have a good weekend.