Johnson County Community College -- Composition II -- Spring Semester 1999

This sheet offers brief descriptions of the remaining assignments and explanations on using SearchBank, the Internet and the reference collection that you may be able to use in one or more of the remaining writing assignments in this course. You have four major writing assignments still to complete. Below are the approximate due dates and a brief description of each assignment. Don't lose the sources you find for your assignments. When you turn in an essay with outside sources, you must provide me with copies of those sources.  When you search for essays, you want to first find opinionated pieces.

• Explanatory Synthesis Essay: The goal of this essay is to describe a specific topic (some aspect of family, economics, media, science, technology, education, gender, or race) by synthesizing at least three written sources into your essay. It would be a good idea to choose a topic that is related to the topic you want to do your research project on later in the semester. You may be able to incorporate the essays you use in the explanatory synthesis into your research paper as well. This essay is due March 3, 1999.

• Critical Review Essay: This essay will be written in class on Friday, March 26, 1999. For this essay you are to critique another opinionated essay. You have two basic choices for essays to review. Every student may review "'People Don't Know Right From Wrong Anymore'" (385-401), or you may choose to review an essay that you find in the library. You will receive a written assignment that explains the kinds of things you will want to consider when you critique the essay, but here's a brief list now: You will consider how useful it could be for your research paper. You will evaluate the arguments put forth in the essay. You will review the writing style. If you are choosing an essay to review from the library, it should meet the following criteria:

1. It needs to be opinionated.
2. It needs to be an essay of substantial length, i.e. it cannot be an editorial from a newspaper.
3. It needs to be an essay that you might incorporate into your argumentative synthesis and/or research paper.
4. I need to approve your essay by Wednesday, March 24, 1999.

• Argumentative Synthesis Essay: This essay will be due April 12, 1999. You must write a persuasive essay addressing some aspect of family, economics, media, science, technology, education, gender, or race. Your essay must incorporate at least three sources. One of these sources may come from our book, but the other two must come from periodical sources or Internet sources that you find on your own.

• Argumentative Research Essay: This project will be due on May 10, 1999. The research project should be an extension of your argumentative synthesis essay and possibly your explanatory synthesis essay. It will be a lengthy project of approximately eight pages and will incorporate a large number of sources (8-10, though you will want to locate about 15). The actual assignment will specify what I consider acceptable sources, but right now you should know that you will be required to incorporate several periodical and Internet sources, and at least one book source (besides your textbook).

Now you that you have some idea of the assignments that are still lingering in the air, you can begin to look for sources to incorporate into those assignments. Here is some advice on how to use three of the major resources in the JCCC library.

• The Reference Collection. Along one wall of the library on the first floor are a number of shelves containing reference books. Here you will find encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, etc. that may have some important statistics or numbers for you to incorporate into your research essay. On the sides of the shelves is a listing of Library of Congress subject headings and call numbers. You need to look at this list before browsing the shelves. Let's say you want to find some information about education. Rather than looking through all ten rows, you would go to the side of the shelf and look for EDUCATION on the Library of Congress list. You would see it listed along with the letter "L." Now, you can just go to the row where the L's are and browse only those books. Let's say you want to find out how many single-parent households there are in the United States. You might find this information in a statistical source, so find STATISTICS on the Library of Congress sheet, and you will see it marked with HA. Go to the HA section, and there you'll find The Statistical Abstracts published by the US Bureau of Census which might contain this information.

• SearchBank. This is a wonderful resource that lists millions of periodical essays and articles. Many of the citations in the database contain the complete text from the original source, so you can print these out right at the computer. When your enter SearchBank, you will find four databases; choose Reference Center Gold. After this screen, you'll come to one that allows you to enter your search terms. You have two choices.

• Your first choice is to enter a word and search for it under SUBJECT GUIDE. You can type in MARRIAGE and you'll be taken to a long list of subjects containing the word MARRIAGE, but if you then click under SUBDIVISIONS you find links under such headings as "analysis," "appreciation," "case studies," etc. I clicked under the subdivision "evaluation" for example and found 12 articles relating to the evaluation of marriage as an institution.

• Your second choice is to do a KEY WORD search. This allows you to type in a number of terms related to your topic. For example you could type in MARRIAGE and INFIDELITY and the computer would look for all the articles and essays containing the words marriage and infidelity (34 articles by the way). If you had typed in MARRIAGE or INFIDELITY, it would look for articles that contain either word, which would give you a much larger list.

When the list of articles appears, you will see that under each citation you are offered a chance to view the text or abstract. If it only allows you to view an abstract, you will have to find the complete text elsewhere, most likely at the Periodicals Desk. Fill out the appropriate slip of paper with magazine title, month, year, etc., and they will get the periodical for you. To check to see if the library carries the periodical, check the black notebook by the SearchBank computers. If the citation says it contains the full text, then you can print out the text at the computer. Think carefully before you print out an article, however. Only print out what you honestly believe you will use in your essays. Don't print out every article on your topic -- print out only the best articles on your topic. Don't waste paper.

To avoid printing out excessive articles, you may wish to wait and print your sources at the end of your search. As you search mark each citation that looks good to you. Clicking on the box next to the citation marks the entry. At the end of your session, you can then view all the citations you marked and then decide which ones to print by clicking on MarkList in the upper right corner of the screen (under the SearchBank logo). At this point, the computer will show you all the articles you marked and it will even tell you which ones the JCCC Library carries. You can print out the articles you like and/or you can e-mail them to yourself as well. The screen above is part of the marked entries resulting from a key word search of FAMILY VALUES and SEX.

• World Wide Web. The library also has several computers for Internet use. To use one of these computers you must leave a picture I.D. at the Reference Desk. Be aware that you need to be very patient on the Internet. You will find a lot of information on most any topic, but much of the information will probably be unreliable or ultimately unrelated to what you want to do with your topic. There are several search engines available. If you place quotations around words, it will look for that phrase only (example: "family values"); if you place the word and between two words, it will look for documents with both those words in the document but not necessarily together (example: family and values would result in documents with the words family and values, but many of these pages would probably not mention family values).

You may also find it helpful to search a specific magazine site like Pathfinder that archives many articles and essays from Time-Warner publications as Time and Fortune magazine. To get to Pathfinder, go to http://pathinder.com. From this main page, you can go to the Time magazine site, and search only for articles that have appeared in Time.

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