Assignment #2: Analyzing a Document Set

Length: 4-6 pages
Due Date: October 29, 2003

The articles Lakoff produced in The Language War employ (generally) rhetorical and linguistic analysis of texts from a variety of media–newspapers, radio, and television texts, court and Congressional documents. For this project, I want you to analyze a set of documents of your choice. (I use the term documents very loosely–and want you to think about a variety of kinds of texts in a variety of media.) Your research must examine an issue of language bias–but this doesn’t mean you need to examine the issues of gender or sexuality we have been considering in our class. You may certainly examine other kinds of language bias–and this might be a nice break from these issues for you. Here are some examples:

• how North Dakota and North Dakotans are represented in a year’s worth of the New York Times
• how fraternity and sorority members are depicted in the Spectrum
• how Native Americans are depicted in the Fargo Forum
• how overweight women are depicted in Jay Leno’s monologues (or Letterman’s, or both)
• how promotion and tenure guidelines might benefit single or childless employees
• how women are depicted by the Twins "color" commentators on KFGO
• how racial diversity is depicted in Tri-college recruitment materials
• how gender (or age) impacts TA comments on student papers

Purpose: This paper will serve several purposes, it:

• introduces you to a research method often used in composition and linguistics.
• gives you a chance to extend the skills you developed in the last paper through a different data gathering method.
• familiarizes you with the components of the genre of the academic paper.

Planning and Drafting

1.Find a set of documents that:

• allow you to examine some aspect of language about which you can make a claim about bias
• you are actually interested in
• you have access to through an archive, a library, an online source, a taped media source

2.Undertake research on published work on related topics so that you can position your argument in terms of the already published research on the topic.

3.Once you have located appropriate research, with peers, brainstorm ideas for extending or refuting the argument of an article that interests you. What research questions would help you refine the areas you wish to explore?

4. Develop a research question and a method of data collection that will help you collect the data you need to respond to the question.

5.Begin collecting data from the documents/texts you have located in the manner you have laid out.

6. Write up your research following the genre of the academic paper:

• Introduction and research question
• Review of relevant literature–you situate your research within the context of previously published work–even if only to say there has been little done on the specific topic.
• Research methods–how you collected your data
• Findings–reporting your raw data. You will outline what you found; you will want to use tables and/or transcriptions so that your reader can examine the data him/herself.
• Analysis–what your data mean, usually in close relation to the research you are attempting to extend. You will need to spin out what you’ve found to respond to your research question and extend scholarly understanding of the area you are researching. This requires a high level of synthesis–pulling together all the ideas you have introduced so far and making sense of them for your reader.
• Conclusions and directions for future research. Here you outline the extent to which you think your research has extended our understanding of your topic, and questions that arose through undertaking this research project.

Remember–for this and every paper you write for this class, you will be filling out and turning in a grading rubric. Read the rubric thoughtfully so that you can decide if you have adequately met the assignment’s requirements.

Rubric for this assignment

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