With Essay 2 we hope to make progress towards those outcomes, of course, and we will make that progress by exploring a method of development that might seem more academic than other methods of development we have practiced so far. I say this because we have mostly done personal writing, but now we will be interacting with and responding to texts.

Analysis is the method of development we will be practicing with Essay 2. Note that our textbook uses Analysis and Division interchangeably. Either way you say it, Analysis/Division is a method of development central to college success—and a process at the heart of many career fields. What’s more, responsible civic life requires analysis because it helps us unpack election campaigns, prominent corporate marketing, and news coverage of domestic and global affairs.

Analysis helps us understand what others are trying to achieve with their writing and how meaning is produced in an object or text. Once you develop the skills, you would, with practice and experience, be able to analyze pictures, sculptures, novels, movies—but also futures markets, a baseball team’s projected win totals, advertisements, and so much more.

Analysis continues the process we began with our introduction to critical reading. We learned to ask questions about audience, purpose, and author background, which will still be important. Now, however, we are adding tools that will help us break some whole (an essay, an article, an image, an object) into its constitutive elements to understand how they work to produce meaning. It might be helpful to think of analysis as a process of examining the relationship between parts that make up a whole. The key is to figure out how to recognize and organize the parts.

Of course, with Essay 2 we continue to strive to a) produce essays that make a specific point about a topic based on a particular writing situation, b) determine our audience and purpose with precision, c) determine how best to increase the credibility of our argument by paying close attention to how our grammar, tone, and presentation influence our message, and d) write a clear, well-organized essay.

Assignment

Write a short essay—750 words—in which you analyze one cultural object or cultural production: a painting, a photo, a print advertisement, a television commercial, a short film, etc. Please use MLA or APA style and 12-point, Times New Roman font.

Essay 2 is worth 10 points, which is distributed over Draft 1 (5) and the Final Draft (5).

Tips

First and foremost, I think you should pick a topic that genuinely interests you. Cooperative extension offices provide material for an incredibly wide range of topics, including agriculture, horticulture, food insecurity, domestic violence, natural resources, community development, and so on. Also, since we are using University of Nevada’s Cooperative Extension, I suggest thinking about your topic in terms of Nevada issues you care about. If you have an interest, pursue it. In my experience, it’s easier to find a point of view if you care about what you are saying. That said, we want to make sure our interests and passions don’t bias our analysis. Analysis should be objective as possible.

Criteria for Evaluation

-You need a thesis that that makes a point; it should be arguable and significant

-You develop and/or support your thesis with specific textual evidence from the University of Nevada Cooperative extension web page or article you have selected

-You explain how the evidence develops and/or supports your thesis rather than expect quotations or other textual evidence to speak for itself

-Each paragraph needs to have topic sentence that tells your reader what the paragraph is about and the main idea of the paragraph.

-Each paragraph develops logically

-Each paragraph ends with a sentence that links it to the next paragraph

-The essay is organized logically

-You need to have varied sentence length and style.