We’ll be meeting individually next week to go over your paragraph-level outline.  If you have more of a draft written, please reduce this to an outline of ~1 sentence per paragraph.  Many papers of this length might contain 10-15 paragraphs, although there could be reasons why yours differs from this average.

In order to accommodate everyone in class, we’ll meet in my office (245 Sparks) for 10 minutes.  If you’d like to discuss things further, we can meet early the following week during regular office hours, or (if schedules permit) at another time.

Please sign up for a time by the end of the night Sunday, March 30.

Sign up for a time on April 2 to 4 (Wednesday to Friday) 

Here’s the website for the program, which includes both an online and an in-country course.  The official announcement is below the pic.

Want to venture to Vienna for two weeks this summer?  The new online course CAS
271 INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION makes this possible by including an affordable
option to broaden your horizon while earning additional credits:

CAS 271 INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION (online, May-August 2014) offers an
optional embedded 12-day trip to Vienna, Austria: CAS 297A Austria in Action
(August 4-15, 2014). The embedded trip provides formal and informal
opportunities for students to engage in dialogue with Austrians from a variety
of backgrounds. The objective is for students to develop sensitivity and
flexibility in intercultural communication settings to benefit their personal
and professional lives.

Enroll by May15: The first 15 students receive 1/2 off program costs!

Link to course website: http://austriainaction.wordpress.com/

Interested? Contact Lead Faculty: Ines Meyer-Hoess, iah2@psu.edu

Catherine Prendergast, over at the blog First Year Comp, has a number of great posts designed to help students through their first college writing course.  I encourage you to check out some of the articles from the main page, but I wanted to draw particular attention to two posts, as we begin the process of constructing the policy essays in the coming weeks:

How to Write an Outline is especially germane to our task, as we’ll be meeting to work through your outline in early April.  As Catherine explains, outlines can work for some people, but others need to actually write out their ideas first, and only then can they construct a “reverse outline.”  Either way, examining an outline of your ideas lets you see the function of each paragraph from your reader’s perspective; it’s then a bit easier to figure out how your argument needs to change.

You Don’t Need to Make Your Paper Longer is a great way to consider a page/word count requirement from your instructor’s perspective:

[T]he page length is completely generic, probably one of the last things the instructor considered when creating the assignment. If you look at the grading breakdown for the paper (where given) it likely doesn’t give a percentage for what you would earn by writing the exact number of pages requested. And yet, I often find that students nearing the end of composing their drafts are more concerned about the length of a paper than anything else. They treat every assignment as if it presented them exactly the same riddle as the one before: How can I write more?

She then provides some succinct advice on what to focus on instead.  Worth a read!

We’ll be talking in class about how to format/structure your policy paper.  I’m posting some general information on them here, as well as a few samples to give you an idea of the variety of routes you could take to argue for a policy.

How longer policy papers tend to be constructed – a couple of samples at the end

Checklist for preparing mid-length to long policy papers

A quick overview, plus a lot of links to samples (some dead links, though)

Sample paper on combatting antibiotic resistance

Argumentation – Types and Fallacies

Here’s the PowerPoint for today’s discussion of Weaver’s argument hierarchy and his discussion of ultimate terms, as well as the exploration of a couple argumentative fallacies.  Enjoy!

It’s been four years since Pew released its first big study of the Millennial generation.  This week, they released a comprehensive report comparing generational attitudes, affiliations, and preferences.  Some pretty interesting ramifications for civic life as Millennials become the dominant cultural force over the next 20 years.

A quick report on 6 key differences between Millennials and others.

The full report.  (Skimming the overview and/or just checking out the graphs could be a quick way to process this report.)

Here’s one finding of note for our ongoing discussion of civic engagement:

Yep, it turns out that there are organizations whose job is to come up with well researched policy proposals for addressing a variety of the world’s problems.  At last count the US has 1,984 think tanks–almost a third of the world’s total.  Lots of decisions, at the federal, state, and local levels, are based off of research and arguments developed by these organizations.

Some examples: The center-left Brookings Institution is typically ranked by those in Washington as the most influential general public policy institute, regardless of the means for measuring performance.  Cato Institute is the most frequently cited online, and comes from a libertarian perspective (fiscally conservative, socially liberal).  Heritage Foundation is the dominant conservative think tank out there, and continues to be the number two source in media citations–just behind Brookings.  (Here’s a great list of think tanks organized by political leaning, with a brief description of their stance.  Also, here is left-leaning media watchdog FAIR.org’s perspective of bias for the 25 think tanks most cited in the media.)

It can be really useful to look to these sources not only because of the well developed research they provide, but because they can provide arguments you could appropriate (with citation!) as you present your own recommendation in the policy essay.  You might use Harvard’s Think Tank Search to explore what has been discussed on your particular issue.  For instance, I typed in “Crimea,” the portion of Ukraine that Russia seems intent on “annexing” in the next 48 hours.  (Seriously.  Check out the news.)  I found this policy brief from 2009 that warned of the likelihood of the current situation and provided recommendations that could potentially have headed off the brewing conflict between Russia and the West.

After the jump, I’ve copied the list of top 55 US think tanks, as compiled by U Penn’s Think Tanks and Civil Society Program, as well as a link to an alternate ranking system from the Center for Global Development.  (You can also review U Penn’s full report, which ranks think tanks by issue; I could see this being especially important for some topics you might explore.)

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