Article Explication

Learning outcome

• explain the structure of academic arguments in published scholarship (comprehend)

In this assignment, your job is to engage with published literature and expand your knowledge of the moves made in academic prose. Moves is an idea borrowed from John Swales and Ken Hyland about academic discourse, and understand the moves will help learn how to make them yourself. And hopefully, do them better.

Your task

This assignment has two parts. One part is rather annoying and will be time consuming so plan accordingly. The second part is more thinking and reflecting about what you did in the first part.

First part:

Find an article in your area that may be useful for your project this term (see create) or for another course’s project.

• read the article. don’t skim. read it.
• write what you believe is the
  • methodology, method, and practice and any questions that may arise (this worksheet may help in some ways
• go through the essay and for each paragraph (yup, each paragraph) write down in your own words
  • what the paragraph says, which is its content
  • what the paragraph does, which is its role or function in the article (and if the doing is unclear that’s ok)
• explain the goal of each section including how (or not) the author connected the pieces together
  Truly look for words that connect the pieces of the articles/book chapter together.

Second part

In a short separate document, tell me what you learned from this assignment. In other words, did it help you to understand the structure of academic research arguments better? what did it show you about things you may want to do yourself? or things that you will avoid? were you convinced of the argument after such a close reading or not? where do think the piece could be improved? what worked or didn’t?

These are simply guiding questions to give you a sense of what I am hoping you can talk about after this assignment is done.

Due Date

Email your assignment to me.  Name your file starting with your last name. (e.g., meloncon-explain.docx)

January 26, 2023  (anytime today is fine, but we’re gonna talk about them in class so you may wanna get them mostly done before that)