“Re-Mapping”

Anticipating counterarguments is essential to academic argumentation. Your audience always enters your writing with a set of expectations, not to mention their own beliefs and assumptions. As such, a complex argument weaves multiple perspectives into a single line of inquiry.

The goals for this paper are:

• To use peer review in the service of your own academic argument.
• To incorporate counterarguments into your claim, in particular, and your writing, in general.
• To develop and enrich the class archive for your first major paper.
• To return to your previous response papers, critique them, and build upon them.
• To think of your writing as a process.

For this paper, you will exchange “What’s Missing” with your peer from the previous assignment, “Capturing Evidence.” Then, you will carefully read, annotate, and analyze your peer’s paper.

After you have read the paper, write a two- to three-page letter to your peer that responds to her or his claim. In your letter, you should compose an argument about how your personal geography (or “autogeographical map”) influenced your evidence-gathering and analysis in “Capturing Evidence.” In so doing, you should use each of your last three papers as evidence.

Questions to consider include: How are your own perspectives present—implicitly or explicitly—how you gather evidence? What assumptions or beliefs from your autogeographical map did you bring to the evidence and critique table? And to what effects? In “What’s Missing,” what did your peer claim was missing from the virtual campus map?

Also, keep in mind that you are writing a letter, not an academic argument. How will your tone and language change? How do the conventions for letter-writing differ from academic writing? Finally, how will your audience impact your writing choices?

Your audience is your peer. While the letter need not be formal, like an academic argument, it should nevertheless be respectful.

All Example Writing Prompts:

Four prompts for short, “response” papers:

Writing Prompt 1: “The Autogeographical Map”

Writing Prompt 2: “Capturing Evidence”

Writing Prompt 3: “What’s Missing?”

Writing Prompt 4: “Re-Mapping”

And one prompt for a longer paper:

Writing Prompt 5: “This Map Matters”

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