“This Map Matters”

By the time you begin the first major paper, you will have written four short papers, revised one of those papers, geo-located multiple compositions on the class map, and considered – through a number of genres – the importance of spatial practices in the creation of representational spaces. You should have a pretty good idea of how your individual choices and everyday decisions are influenced by context, representations of space, and personal geography.

The goals of the first major paper are:

• To compose a sustained and persuasive academic argument that is based in a risky, arguable, and complex claim.
• To use the course material, class archive, and ideas from sequence one in the service of writing and researching.
• To demonstrate the skills that you developed in sequence one response papers, geoblog entries, and in-class workshops.
• To contribute to academic discourse and everyday life at the University of Washington.

The critical question for your first major paper is: What spatial practices are missing from current representations of the UW?

To answer this question, you will write a five- to seven-page formal, academic argument for a new UW campus map, and through your argument you will articulate what, exactly, the map will look like and how, exactly, it will function and circulate throughout the campus.

Ultimately, your first major paper should:

• Make a complex claim about why your new campus map matters and how it intersects with important—and presumably underrepresented—spatial practices at the UW.
• Be supported by intertextualized evidence from the virtual campus archive that you, your peers, and I have composed thus far this quarter, in addition to quotations and/or paraphrases from at least one peer-reviewed journal article or academic text.
• Apply spatial analysis as a methodology to unpack your map’s appearance, medium, location(s), audience, and intended purpose.
• Demonstrate an awareness of your map’s rhetorical strategies.
• Use rhetorical strategies that are proper to academic writing to argue why your map matters.

Your audience is academia, which includes me, your classmates, and UW staff and faculty. Keep in mind that your audience is varied in many ways. As such, be sure to consider what information each reader requires to follow your argument. What terms need defining? And what does your audience probably already know prior to reading your paper?

Please note that the first major paper is not about the virtual campus archive (no matter how cool it is). Instead, your paper should draw from the virtual campus archive in order to compose your own argument, map, and ideas.

Optional: You are more than welcome to actually design your new campus map in the service of your argument.

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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