By this point, you should have a pretty clear idea of what an informed argument should look like. You are producing an soundly-structured, rigorously supported argument that responds to and meaningfully furthers an ongoing academic, intellectual, or cultural conversation.
Please take the time to review the rubric below! One thing you will notice is that many of the criteria are exactly the same as the criteria by which I graded the “Entering the Conversation” Argument.
I often get the question, “How much should I include from my ‘Entering the Conversation’ argument and my Counterargument in my final IRA?” This is a difficult question to answer generally, as it is often based on the individual situation. However, the creation of the IRA essay is definitely not just a process of addition. It should not be the process of adding your “ETC” and your Counterargument together. As we’ve just learned this week, revision is literally a process of “re-seeing”, of looking back but also of looking forward. So, my general response to that “what should I keep” question, is that you should keep (and revise, strengthen, refine, etc.) those parts of your essays that do well to support your thesis, and frankly, that you think you’ve done well (hopefully, my feedback will help you determine that), and you should abandon any parts of your essay that seem “leftover” or like “dead-ends” that no longer support your possibly evolving thesis.
To be even more frank, if your “ETC” argument didn’t receive high marks for say, its “quantity and quality of evidence” or its “supporting its claims with evidence, reasoning, warrants, and backing” and you don’t make any changes to this aspect of your essay, you can, of course, expect that your IRA essay will also receive low (even lower, in fact, since you are expected to be refining your argument) marks for that criterion. In other words, if you received low marks for a criterion in your “ETC” argument, and you include unrevised parts of that argument wholesale into your IRA essay, you can expect even lower marks for that criterion.
Finally, you’ll notice that the one criteria that is new, is that you have included and considered a fair representation of your most likely counterargument. This is why we will spend this week looking at a few student samples and the way that they have resolved the tension introduced by their counterargument.
FORM: The final essay should be about 1700-2000 words (anywhere from 6-8 pages depending on font) formatted according to MLA conventions. This means including a works cited page, which does not count towards word count requirement. Like all of our previous assignments, I consider this to be a relatively short essay, so the challenge is not to make the word count, but, instead to build a well-supported and rigorously explicit argument.
NOTE: I included all of my previous drafts. Also a rubric for grading, if you follow the rubric you’ll be able to get a good paper written. Please this is a final essay, I will only accept a work that gets at least a B!
