Discussion Prompts

In this unit’s reading, you explored the responsibilities and the habits of mind of effective academic writers:

• In academic writing tasks, you are responsible for:

  Defining a situation that calls for some response in writing;
  Demonstrating the timeliness of your argument
  Establishing a personal investment;
  Appealing to readers whose minds you want to change by understanding what they think, believe, and value;
  Supporting your arguments with good reasons;
  Anticipate and address readers’ reasons for disagreeing with you, while encouraging them to adopt your position.

• To be an effective academic writer, you must take on the right “habits of mind.” According to Greene and Lidinsky, academic writers:

  Make inquiries–observe, ask questions, examine alternatives;
  Seek and value complexity–resist binary thinking, consider all topics open for discussion;
  See writing as a conversation–and demonstrate sensitivity to those involved in the conversation;
  Understand that writing is a process–a continual process of discovering ideas, drafting, and revising; and
  Reflect on their own learning and writing.

In your initial post, use these 5 categories to analyze one of the “Becoming Academic” narratives from Chapter 1: either Coates’ “Between the World and Me,” Rodriguez’s “Scholarship Boy,” or Graff’s “Disliking Books.” Then, compare your experience as a learner to the experience of the author whose work you have analyzed. Make sure that your post does all of the following:

• Examine how the author displays at least three of the five habits of mind; use specific examples from the text to illustrate your analysis.
• Compare your experience as a learner to the experience of the author.
• Quote the article you are analyzing at least once, using MLA guidelines for in-text citations of the quoted material.

Your discussion post should be around 250-350 words and should directly quote the article you are analyzing at least once. Use MLA guidelines to create in-text citations.