This semester, you’ve spent a lot of time reading and writing. Each week, you’ve read your textbooks and analyzed primary sources, completed outlines and submitted short writing assignments. You’ve also been doing a lot of reading and writing about a historical research topic of your choice. Over the course of the semester, you’ve been researching your topic, digging into primary and secondary to build your argument and support it with historical evidence. And then you wrote about it. And refined it. And wrote about it some more. And refined it yet again and wrote about it yet again. Well, you are done writing about your research topic but you are not done with your research topic.You have one last thing to do for it: Your Unessay.
As you should already know from completing your Unessay Proposal, your final project in history this semester is an “unessay” about the topic you have chosen to research and write about for Exams 1, 2, and 3. And, again, as you should already know, you’ve submitted your proposals and received my feedback with recommendations for your proposals. But, if you need a refresher, be sure to go back and look over your returned SWA 7.
Your Unessay is due by 3:00 pm on Wednesday, December 9 and is worth 100 points. So, if you have not already done so, now is the time to work on your Unessay. You will submit your Unessay to a Google Folder. Please be on the lookout for a link via email.
We already covered how your Unessay will be evaluated in SWA 7, but I think it’s worth going over again. So, how will your Unessay be evaluated? The short answer is that your Unessay must capture your thesis statement in a persuasive and effective medium and includes a statement of explanation. The long answer is this:
Persuasive means:
Effective means:
A statement of explanation means:
- A statement of explanation. It’s exactly what it sounds like. This will be the narrative portion of your Unessay. It will be your chance to remind us of your thesis and explain how your Unessay captures it. You will be able to tell us a little bit about the historical context and what the different parts of your Unessay represent. In short, you are giving us a guided tour of your Unessay.
Below is a description of A, B, C, D, and F Unessays. Be sure to check your project against this rubric before submitting to the Google folder:
An A unessay: This unessay constitutes a critical and active engagement with your research topic that shows insight and creativity and demonstrates time and effort devoted to creating something thoughtful. The chosen medium works clearly and effectively to represent your topic and research. The unessay reflects a convincing and nuanced thesis. An A unessay comes with a clearly stated explanation. This will include your thesis and an explanation of how your unessay represents your research.
A B unessay: This unessay meaningfully engages your research topic and shows an effort to creatively evaluate the information with some degree of clarity. It reflects some time, effort, and forethought. The chosen medium serves to represent your topic, thesis, and research, but some additional design forethought would have helped. It includes a statement of explanation that provides some clarity to the piece but not complete explanation.
A C unessay: This unessay shows some engagement with the research topic but it is unsustained, uncreative, and inconsequential. It fails to develop a critical and reflective perspective. The chosen medium doesn’t work to represent your topic, thesis, and research. The unessay fails to offer a clear thesis statement. Both it and the explanation appear to be thrown together at the last minute and/or include inaccurate information.
A D or F unessay: This unessay lacks any serious effort to accomplish the assigned task. The unessay idea and execution are ill-defined, lack focus and clarity, and contains no main argument.[1]
Works Cited
Clark, Emily Suzanne. “The Unessay.” 1 August 2019
https://emilysuzanneclark.wordpress.com/2016/08/01/the-unessay/. Accessed 29 Nov. 2020.
Cordell, Ryan. “Technologies of Text.” https://s18tot.ryancordell.org/assignments/unessay/. Accessed
29 Nov. 2020.
Denial, Cate. “The Unessay.” 26 April 2019.
https://catherinedenial.org/blog/uncategorized/the-unessay/. Accessed 29 Nov. 2020.
O’Donnell, Daniel Paul. “The Unessay.” 28 September 2018. odonnell/Teaching/the-unessay“>http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/Teaching/the-unessay. Accessed 29 Nov. 2020.
[1] I borrowed heavily and/or paraphrased from Daniel Paul O’Donnell’s “The Unessay” to develop the language for this assignment (http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/Teaching/the-unessay). I also borrowed heavily and/or paraphrased the rubric description from Suzanne Elizabeth Clark (https://emilysuzanneclark.wordpress.com/2016/08/01/the-unessay/)
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