Description
Assignment Expectations & Requirements
Intended Audience: Academic Audience (Students, Professors)
Paper Length: typed, 6-7 pages (about 1500 – 1800 words), double-spaced, with 1-inch margins Research: Must include five essays from Disability Visibility and at least two additional non-scholarly sources
Style Guidelines: You may choose whether to follow
APA or MLA formatting guidelines
A Successful Synthesis Essay:
Includes a clear topic or issue as the focus of the synthesis.
Accurately reports information about your topic/issue in your own words and effectively incorporates credible sources and examples to highlight and support your synthesis.
3. Is organized in such a way that readers can
immediately see where the information from the sources overlap and relate in meaningful ways. It should seem like a linked conversation rather than a listing of separate, unrelated points or a summary of various sources vaguely related by topic.
Helps readers make sense of the topic/issue by examining and evaluating a variety of relevant, credible sources that explore different perspectives or that explore the topic in different ways.
Remains objective in tone and presentation of information and source material.
Provides a thoughtful, informed conclusion that is supported by the source material and information you have examined.
Start by reviewing the Synthesis Final Draft instructions and rubric so you know what we are working toward.
Next, review what you previously read in Disability Visibility. Choose five essays to explain one
“conversation” about the visibility of disabilities. You should approach this task as an objective, fair-minded reporter or analyst whose job it is to carefully and thoughtfully explore and account for the critical conversation surrounding your topic. Your goal is to help your readers better understand the complexity of the issue and the variety of voices weighing in on the topic.
For this assignment, create a detailed outline that shows the relationships you found. You don’t need complete sentences in your outline, but you do need complete thoughts. For example,
Point #1 about Topic
Description of Essay #1
Description of Essay #2
Compare/contrast how essays discuss or relate to Point #1
You do not need to plan your introduction or conclusion yet. In fact, I would prefer that you wait to plan them out so you can make sure you don’t inadvertently introduce bias into your synthesis because you are trying to squeeze your synthesis into a predetermined thesis.
Evaluation Criteria
This is not an argumentative research paper. You can subtly influence readers in how you structure your essay or in your choice of sources, but your goal is not to push your own opinion or to take a firm position or stand on the issue. Instead, you should approach this assignment as an objective, fair-minded reporter or analyst whose job it is to carefully and thoughtfully explore and account for the critical conversation surrounding your topic. You are using sources to explain a “conversation” and your goal is to help your readers better understand the complexity of the issue and the variety of voices weighing in on the topic. Make sure that your tone, language, or treatment of source material does not work to undermine your objectivity or damage your ethos. Treat each source fairly and accurately; avoid judgmental language as you attempt to synthesize and explain each perspective and source.
As a writer and researcher, you will always be working to understand the ideas, perspectives, and information you find in your research. Successful writers recognize that they are also striving to connect – or synthesize – the data, opinions, and information gathered. A synthesis essay asks you to combine information from multiple sources to form a unified, organized examination of an issue.
For this project, you will synthesize what you have read in Disability Visibility. In the Introduction to Disability Visibility, Wong states,
Disabled people have always existed, whether the word disability is used or not. To me, disability is not a monolith, nor is it a clear-cut binary of disabled and nondisabled. Disability is mutable and ever-evolving. Disability is both apparent and nonapparent. Disability is pain, struggle, brilliance, abundance, and joy.
Disability is socio-political cultural, and biological. Being visible and claiming a disabled identity brings risk as much as it brings pride.
Using the essays from the book, you will structure a synthesis essay that accurately and effectively accounts for the “conversation” surrounding your topic. Your essay will show various authors’ viewpoints on disability visibility and how they agree and disagree with each other.
Your ability to write an effective synthesis essay depends on your ability to infer relationships and make connections among sources. In an academic synthesis essay, your primary goal is to make explicit the relationships and connections that you have inferred among separate sources-to blend those various sources, perspectives, and kinds of information into a unified, cohesive examination of the issue.
The most successful synthesis essay is one that examines multiple perspectives and uses many sources to support a logical conclusion. This requires more than simply summarizing passages of source material; it means drawing connections between the sources and using these connections to make sense of the research in a way that sheds new light on the issue. The point is to bring together various perspectives and sources to account for the critical conversation surrounding your topic and to lead readers to an informed, satisfactory conclusion based on the information you have found.
Much like an investigative reporter, whose job it is to collect information and then to organize, analyze, and present this information to an audience, your job is to walk your audience through a thoughtful examination of the issue by carefully organizing, explaining, and analyzing the research and source material. It is up to you to find important connections between sources and to blend them into a coherent, unified whole; Synthesis Draft #1
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Criteria
Ratings
Pts
Length
2 pts
1.5 pts
Proficient
Needs Improvement
At least four double-spaced pages were submitted.
The draft has fewer than four double-spaced pages.
2 pts
Sources
2 to > 1.5 pts
Proficient
References at least 3 essays from Disability
Visibility and 1 additional non-scholarly source.
1.5 to >0 pts
Needs Improvement
There are fewer than 3 essays from Disability Visibility and 1 additional non-scholarly source referenced.
2 pts
Tone
1 to >0.6 pts
Proficient
Remains objective in tone and presentation of information and source material.
0.6 to > 0 pts
Needs Improvement
There are opinions or biases in how the author presents information and source material.
1 pts
Thesis
1 to >0.6 pts
0.6 to >0 pts
Proficient
Needs Improvement
The thesis is a defensible argument
The intended thesis is not an argument; it may provide a
about how the sources relate.
summary of the sources with no apparent or coherent claim.
1 pts
Argument
& Context
1 to > 0.6 pts
0.6 to >0 pts
Proficient
Needs Improvement
Tone
Thesis
Argument
& Context
Support
1 to >0.6 pts
Proficient
Remains objective in tone and presentation of information and source material.
0.6 to >0 pts
Needs Improvement
There are opinions or biases in how the author presents information and source material.
1 to >0.6 pts
Proficient
The thesis is a defensible argument about how the sources relate.
0.6 to >0 pts
Needs Improvement
The intended thesis is not an argument; it may provide a summary of the sources with no apparent or coherent claim.
1 to > 0.6 pts
Proficient
The argument is organized as a line of reasoning composed of multiple supporting claims. The writer contextualizes the argument, but there may be broad generalities.
0.6 to > 0 pts
Needs Improvement
The argument is not composed of multiple supporting claims. There may be sweeping generalizations or only hints of the context of the fargument.
3 to > 1.8 pts
Proficient
Adequately offers evidence to support claims. Most paragraphs show how the sources overlap or relate in meaningful ways.
Mostly explains how the evidence supports the claim in each paragraph and relates to the thesis, but may fail to integrate some evidence or support key claims.
1.8 to >0 pts
Needs Improvement
There is not adequate support for all claims. It is not clear how each main point supports the thesis. Few paragraphs show how the sources overlap or relate in meaningful ways. Does not adequately explain how the evidence supports the thesis. May contain simplistic, inaccurate, or repetitive explanations that don’t strengthen the argument. May focus on summary or description of sources.
1 pts
1 pts
1 pts
3 pts
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