ENG 1113 Common Assignment: Synthesis Essay

Assignment Objectives:

This assignment provides students the opportunity to demonstrate all of the skills emphasized in the course (as represented by the five Student Learning Outcomes): asserting and developing a thesis, accurately interpreting and appropriately addressing a specific rhetorical situation, effectively integrating sources with original writing, editing to eliminate errors, and applying the writing process.

The Rhetorical Situation:

The genre is essay, and the audience is academic.

To effectively respond to the assignment, your writing should follow the conventions and expectations for academic essays.

First of all, your overall point and your development of that point should be based in evidence that is clearly presented and documented.  The evidence you provide should favor appeals to reason over appeals to emotion. With this in mind, you should avoid long personal narratives, anecdotes, and abstract or hypothetical situations that are not convincing to an academic audience.

Secondly, your word choice and tone should be formal. This means that you should not use slang, jargon, and other informal expressions. Unless your instructor tells you otherwise, first person (“I, me, my”) and second person (“you, your”) should probably be avoided.

The purpose is to synthesize.

For the assignment, you will carefully read multiple texts on a common issue or topic. Your challenge is to synthesize them for your reader. The key goal of synthesis writing is to explain how the sources relate to one another, to make the connections and distinctions among them clear to the reader. Because synthesis requires this, complete and critical reading of each source is essential.

In other words, synthesis writing goes beyond using sources to support the writer’s point to explain how the sources relate to one another in terms of common ground, points of disagreement, angle of focus on the topic, attention given to various aspects of the topic, effectiveness of analysis or arguments, etc.

Basic Requirements

Required Length in Words: 800-1000

Number of Sources: 2-4 (provided by the instructor, all of which are text-based)

Documentation Style Required: Current MLA Style

For instructor-specific topics, sources, and additional requirements, see the section(s) below.

Options for Topics & Sources:

Assignment Details: For your synthesis, you will need to select one of the following two topics from the Librarys Opposing Viewpoints database: Social Media or Black Lives Matter.

-After you select one of those two topics, you will then need to read the background/context information for the topic that is available on the topic main page.

-Next, you will need to read the articles that are listed under Featured Viewpoints. These are the articles that you are allowed to use in your synthesis essay. You must include at least two of the Featured Viewpoints, or Viewpoints article articles in your synthesis. You may use up to three of the listed articles.

The Featured Viewpoints articles for “Black Lives Matter” are:

“Tiffany Cuban and the New Democrats”
“Black Lives Matter. Do Elections?”
“Empathize with your Political Foe”
“All Lives Matter” Disregards Race Bases Inequality”
-In addition, to the viewpoint articles that you select, you should include information from the background/introduction to the issue information that is available on the issue main page. This information will need to be cited and will not count towards your two source minimum.

-You may not use any other sources than what are listed on this assignment details page. This includes other information found on the Opposing Viewpoints database beyond the articles listed and background information page.

-You are required to use MLA format for your paper.

-The final draft must include a Works Cited list documenting the sources that were cited in the paper.

Citations from these sources should consist of a mixture of a direct quote, paraphrase, and/or short summary.
No more than 1 long block quote may be used; any block quote that is used may not exceed 6 lines in length.
The Works Cited page will not count as part of your word count. It is a required page in addition to the word requirement.

your essay should be written in this order:

1. Introductory paragraph employing the lead-in, tie-in and thesis statement model.
2. Background information paragraph.
3. Synthesis paragraph
4. Synthesis paragraph
5. Conclusion deciding which reading was able to get its point across better and why.