Identify three (3) timely, useful, credible, and relevant secondary sources from Step 2: Annotated Bibliography. Your work with these sources should help you revise and expand the work you completed in Step 1: Primary Source Analysis

Three Essay In Different Topics

Below you will find a list of objectives for the assignment. Be sure to follow the directions outlined in Points to Keep in Mindcarefully and to consult our textbook The Writer’s Companion (especially Chs. 5 and 6) as you seek to extend the work completed in STEP 1: Primary Source Analysis.

Your work should be 4-5 pages, double-spaced, typed in 12-point font, and set to 1” margins.

Objectives:

• Identify three (3) timely, useful, credible, and relevant secondary sources from Step 2: Annotated Bibliography. Your work with these sources should help you revise and expand the work you completed in Step 1: Primary Source Analysis
• Demonstrate the ability to comprehend the central arguments of these sources
• Perform meaningful, thoughtful analysis of these secondary sources—in other words, enter into a conversation with the sources by making the sources speak rather than letting them speak for themselves (WC, p. 60)
• Assert and maintain your own critical voice rather than letting the secondary evidence speak for you
• Develop an evolving thesis to orient your analysis and source integration
• Integrate secondary sources into your analysis by paraphrasing and/or directly citing the writers’ language and ideas
• Include proper in-text citations of each source and an appropriately formatted Works Cited page using MLA guidelines

Points to Keep in Mind:

Evolving Your PSA

• Return to your Primary Source Analysis, look over my comments, and decide which ideas, themes, and points you might focus on in your final paper.
• Consider each secondary source’s main argument and how it relates to, supports, complicates, or differs from the argument you plan to make in your final paper.
• Concepts from the Primary Source Analysis can be carried forward into the Secondary Source Integration. Consider the conversation that exists between your secondary sources and determine how you might weave elements of your previous analysis into this conversation.
• Choose three sources that will allow you to engage in conversation, not just sources that agree with or support your main point.
• Use secondary evidence to expand and revise your analysis, continuing to engage with your primary source. As you work with secondary sources, you may discover new things about your primary source or want to analyze your primary source in new ways. Your analysis should deepen and become more thorough as a result of researching secondary sources.

Developing Your SSI

In order to expand and revise your past analysis, consider the following steps:

1. Focus on your own analytical claims. Interaction with secondary sources should allow for your research questions to evolve and to take shape, enabling you to revise or extend claims made in the previous assignment.
2. Focus on analyzing and integrating the secondary evidence into the conversation. This step can be difficult as it builds on the skills you have developed not only with the Five Analytical Moves (Chapter 4 in WC), but also with the basics of Interpretation (Chapter 6 in WC). This step requires you to demonstrate how to effectively use secondary sources (p. 59-63).
3. Focus your evolving thesis around a compelling analytical claim while also accounting for all relevant evidence.

You should especially focus on:

1. Making your sources speak by “conveying to your readers why they mean what you say they meant” (p. 69). You might ask yourself whether or not you have explained the connection between your claims and the secondary evidence completely and explicitly.
2. Putting your sources into conversation with one another (p. 59-60). This move requires that you understand the arguments of the secondary sources and are able to convey this understanding via paraphrase and direct citation. As the title suggests, the emphasis of this step is on you making the sources speak rather than letting the words that you paraphrase or cite speak for themselves or for you; instead, maintain your own critical voice and make clear that the secondary evidence is one part of the conversation, not the featured speaker.
3. Integrating Sources into your own writing by paraphrasing or “splic[ing] quotations into your text” (p. 61).
4. Citing Sources in proper MLA Style (See “MLA Citation and Style Guide”). You should end the assignment with correct MLA Works Cited entries of the three secondary sources and your primary source.