Insanely Great /Argument Essay

This and the final research paper it will evolve into
gives you a chance to pull together what you've learned
about the creative and networking processes and actually
apply it to your own life and dreams. This is probably
the first and last opportunity you'll have in school (or
maybe ever) to explicitly explore your creativity, and may
well be your only shot at exploring any project you want
to do, so you'll want to take advantage and go for it.

Also, Roger von Oech says you can't know whether your
creative process works unless you go the distance, all the
way from Explorer, Artist, Judge and Warrior, so this
paper does that: you will envision in all possible detail
how you will do your project. The final paper will be an extended

and more extensively researched version if this paper,

demonstrating that your project is doable and that you are
qualified to do it, and it will directed to someone whom
you need to make/let it happen (a foundation, a potential
partner, a government agency, even your parents ;) You
can even do it in the appropriate format of a grant
proposal or business plan if you want, but since my job is
make sure you can do academic writing, run this by me so I
can make sure you have the skills you need (it might just
be a matter of adding an MLA formatted bibliography).

The word "essay" comes from the French, meaning to try or
to weigh (related to our word in English "assay"). In
this case you'll be doing both, you'll try out an idea for
something you 'd like to do, exploring its feasibility.
As this is a prospectus for your final paper, it should
be something that you can research, and preferably
something you'd enjoy researching.

This paper gives you the opportunity to explore an idea
that would allow you to use your talents to their utmost
extent. If you have more or less settled on an idea, you
can still use the Artist and Explorer questions.

(If you
don't have an idea, start by "blue-skying" without
constraints. Or maybe make a list of problems that bother
you and brainstorm some solutions. Go back to the first
autobiographical paper (and especially to the prewriting,
particularly the Parachute questions; I even recommend
that you add to and "mine" that data, especially if you
didn't really explore [for example, if your Perfect Day
had no work in it, it won't be of much use to you now])
for inspiration and an inventory of what your talents are.
Once you have a clear idea of your talents, skills, and
passions, let the Artist play with them. What
combinations can you come up with? What different
contexts can you imagine?)

The Judge role will help you decide if this is the idea
you want, but don't let it paralyze you. You can always
throw the idea back to the Explorer and/or Artist and let
it cook some more. Also recall that part of the purpose
of this project is to help you think and work through
potential problems, and that often involves time, bouncing
ideas off other people, and research.

For inspiration, there's a list of people I think have
done Insanely Great things on the course website, but of
course your list will be different, so I invite you to add
yours . The person you wrote your bio on may well provide
inspiration (and even practical "advice" if they are in
the same domain as your project).

Argument

From Severin's Brendan Voyage, and perhaps from the
biographies you've just completed, you'll appreciate I
hope that not only is persuasion essential in doing
anything insanely great, but in fact really important in
our everyday lives as well. It's also the hardest kind of
writing to do, since it requires that you predict with
great precision what effect your words will have, perhaps
on someone that you've never met thousands of miles away.
However, it builds on skills we've been developing all
quarter, such as finding research and explaining sometimes
complex technical ideas in clear simple language.
Prewriting will be especially important; the dialogue
technique was described in class and is also on course
website: http://people.ucsc.edu/~pmmckerc/reshowto.html

The Lunsford handout on argumentation will be useful in
generating arguments, and in organizing them.

Having a basic understanding of rhetoric will also up your
odds of getting others to agree with your position.
Here's the very least you need to know,
http://people.ucsc.edu/~pmmckerc/rhet1.htm, which has a
link to a more complete version.


Your IG/ argument should be about four pages, and you
should have three or more research sources (if only to
assure yourself they are available). The fuller research
paper will be assessed on how successful it would be with
the audience you specify, but you can try them out on this
version too. We'll use rhetorical analysis to determine
this. The questions are at
http://people.ucsc.edu/~pmmckerc/termfdbk.htm


If you have questions or suggestions, let me know