Journal 2: Organizing Essay 2 Connecting Through Investigation

For this journal, first study the outlines from Writing Matters (Chapter 4: Planning and Drafting your Project). Outlining may help organize your ideas further before drafting your project.



Also, in Writing Matters, study Ch. 16: Using Information Responsibly: Taking Notes and Avoiding Plagiarism. Specifically, focus on how to paraphrase, summarize, and quote. These skills will be needed to write a successful informative essay.



In this journal, accomplish the following tasks:



1. Create one of the following kinds of outlines: informal outline, topic outline, or sentence outline. Please write the outline. Consider the following information when creating the outline:



For your introduction, how do you plan to grab the reader's attention? What is your working thesis? Here is an example of a working thesis from Writing Matters: "While far less known than their superhero counterparts, underground comics offer an innovative and sophisticated alternative to mainstream titles."

Next, in the first body paragraphs, you need to provide background information to your reader and/or define terms the reader may not understand. Therefore, what is the history or background information of your issue? (Consider using Journalist Questions or Stasis Theory to arrive at good questions for this section of the essay.) You might consider spending two strong paragraphs for this section. You also should focus no more than a decade of background information. If you return to one thousand years and trace the history of the issue, you will lose your audience!

The next section of the paper asks you to analyze and evaluate the data. This section may include one or more of the following questions: What are the causes and/or effects of this issue on an audience? What are the advantages and/or disadvantages of the issue? What are the positive or negative attributes? What are the benefits and/or solutions?

After analyzing and evaluating the data, the next section should make recommendations to an audience. Recommendations may be solutions, tips, or improvements as it relates to your topic idea.

Finally, your conclusion should create a "call to action" for your audience to react and accomplish something. For example, if your paper focuses on reading non-mainstream comics, then your call to action should ask or urge your reader to begin introducing these comic books to friends and family or provide them as alternative gifts for birthdays and other holidays.

2. Write a basic draft of one body paragraph. In the paragraph, use the skills of quoting, summarizing, and/or paraphrasing. Show the reader that you understand how to use author tags and in-text citation successfully. You might want to review the Video: Integrating Quotations as well before accomplishing this assignment segment.



Requirements:



Submit the outline and body paragraph draft as an DOCX (Microsoft Word Default) file.

When quoting or paraphrasing from a source, please use in-text citation and signal phrases (also called author tags). The journal is your opportunity to learn how to accomplish these skills, so take advantage of the practice.

There is no length requirement for this topic, but your outline and body paragraph should be thorough. Consider a body paragraph of at least 6-8 sentences (although paragraphs, in real-world writing, may be shorter or longer).