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Overall Goals of the Assignment: The Public Literacy Essay asks you to build on your exploration of literacy and language that you carried out in your previous assignments. In the Personal Literacy Reflection, you focused solely on an event from your life. In the Response Essay, you focused on a single text at a time. In this essay, you will focus on the larger discussion among authors -- including yourself -- who are exploring language and literacy.

Typically, in a classroom, you are asked to read and discuss a variety of texts. At some point in the course, you need to step back and look for common threads among those texts and at the issues that they raise. Essentially, in this assignment, we're asking you to take the next step beyond focusing on single events or texts. That is, we're asking you to explore issues that emerge from your reading of multiple texts and experiences.

As was the case in previous assignments, 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 make connections across texts and to see relationships among ideas. We also want you to be able to identify key passages in the texts that you read that directly or indirectly relate to those connections and relationships.

As a writer, we want you to be able to make a clear point in your essay 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. Effective 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 arguments and to use effective transitions between sentences and paragraphs.


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