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Overall Goals of the Assignment: In addition to the formal response you will turn in for a grade, you will be asked to write several brief responses as part of your class work. These responses will ask you to build on your exploration of language and literacy begun in the Personal Literacy Reflection. Sometimes, the goal of the response will be to indicate whether you agree or disagree with the perspective set forth by a given author. At other times, you will be asked to critically analyze the structure of an argument. At still other times, you will be asked to use an article as a starting point for your own exploration of an issue.

The responses we will ask you to write are designed to help you shift your perspective from the strictly personal stance you adopted in the Personal Literacy Reflection to the more public stance you will eventually adopt in the next assignment, the Public Literacy Essay.

As was the case in the previous assignment, there are also several key things we want you to be able to practice as a writer and as a reader. As a reader, we want you to be able to identify the main points made by other authors. We also want you to be able to identify the most important support that the other authors offer for their points.

As a writer, we want you to be able to make a clear point in your response and to be able to support your points by drawing on such things as personal experience, careful analysis, and textual evidence offered by the authors you have been reading. Effectived use of textual evidence will require that you be able to summarize, paraphrase, and quote from sources. We are also interested in your ability to organize your responses and to use effective transitions between sentences and paragraphs.


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