Position Statement Assignment:

For this assignment, you will write a five page, double spaced essay, in which you clearly state your position on an issue. You must incorporate references to at least seven outside sources, and you must cite them using MLA citation practices. You can find guidance for citing sources using MLA style at http://www.ndsu.edu/cfwriters/documentingsourcesresourcesforMLAAPA.htm or you can use a reference generator at http://www.calvin.edu/library/knightcite/. You must, however, follow conventions for referring to the texts in your own paragraphs. Review They Say, I Say for templates to help you do that.

1. Pick an issue. Your position statement must be about a topic relevant to our class’s focus on local foods, slow foods, GMOs, Industrial Agriculture. The class conversation can be widened to include direct political actions (like the Seeds’ actions in San Francisco, Seattle, or Idaho; or other subversive actions we’ve read about), large food companies (like “Cynaco” or Monsanto, Nestle, Sygenta, McDonalds), organic vs. conventional farming, and other issues related to sustainable agriculture such as peak oil, biodiesel, ethanol.
2. Find and download five related texts off the web. The texts must represent at least two sides of an issue, and there must be more than one text representing opposing sides. Use Google Scholar to find at least two of the sources. For instance, if you want to write on GMO crops, go to Google and type in GMO crops. Find two or three texts on the issue that represent opposite or at least varying positions. Down load these texts as files. Then go to Google Scholar and do the same thing. The files you have downloaded will be the primary source material for your position paper.
3. Answer these questions for each text: What, in one sentence, is the text’s argument? How is it purposed? What is its rhetorical context?
4. Pick one of the texts as the one you wish to react to primarily and summarize it as you did when you wrote a springboard essay earlier in class.
5. Consider ways to incorporate texts into your own texts: quotations, summaries, paraphrases.
6. Write a summary of what you want to say indicating places where you intend to insert pieces of text, indicating what the text is.
7. Go back to the web and find two or three more texts to incorporate. You may use texts cited in your original five texts to fill out the total required number of outside texts (7). Now that you have seven texts (by now you should have read them thoroughly and digested them), write a rough draft of your position paper, using the springboard pattern we studied earlier in the semester.
8. Bring the rough draft to class. There will be public readings of these papers to the whole class or debates, depending on the class’s decision the l5th and 16^th weeks of class (April 24, 29, and May 1). The final draft is due finals week, May 6, noon. Your whole portfolio (of papers you wrote in class) is due May 8, noon.