CMN 656 UNH Rhetoric of Hope in Action Dover City Climate Adaptation Paper Your final task is to integrate your previous work with additional inquiry and s

CMN 656 UNH Rhetoric of Hope in Action Dover City Climate Adaptation Paper Your final task is to integrate your previous work with additional inquiry and study as needed to produce an incisive analysis of environmental communication, complete with implications. Your group will produce a 10-12 page, double-spaced, well-documented paper, plus appendices containing, among other materials, either the group’s advocacy position or the group’s rhetorical ecology assessment. The final project report overall is worth 10% of your final grade.

Each member of the group should be lead author on a portion of the project paper. You will include an appendix that indicates the portion of the final draft each group member authored. Your individual grade is worth 5% of your final grade and will be based partly on peer evaluation and partly on my own assessment of your contributions to the group project.

Your group will need to settle on the point of your paper (a thesis) and the arguments you have to support that point. Altogether, this is the logic of your paper. Your paper should consist of analytical arguments that explain how communication operated rhetorically, that is persuasively, in influencing public judgment about the problem. As planned, you have done much of the analytical work already. You submitted three term project reports. Each project report required that you engage in lines of analysis that conceivably could contribute to your final project. Now you need to review those papers and decide what analytical arguments they enable you to make about communication on the problem studied.

As you start formulating arguments in support of a thesis, remember that you cannot write up everything there is to say about the problem you are examining. For example, don’t just stitch together the three papers. You must choose the most essential rhetorical features of public communication on the problem that you disclosed through your analytical studies. You should now be well positioned to complete a final analysis that is clearly focused on rhetoric, that uses concepts with precision, and that has something worthwhile to say.

I recommend that you meet with your group to review the reports, select out important lines of analysis, and think about the point about public communication those analytical claims can convincingly support. Draft that point as your thesis in a single declarative sentence and bring it to class on Monday. We will discuss them as a class at that time.

For your convenience, below is a summary of basic requirements for the final group paper plus an example of how to organize its different components into a cohesive whole.

Basic Requirements

The analysis is 10-12 pages, not counting appendices.
The paper should be double-spaced using Times New Roman and 12pt font
Use MLA or other formal style format for in-text citations, reference list (both scholarly and town and project data sources), and endnotes. Be consistent in your use of that format.
Include at least three relevant scholarly sources in addition to those assigned in class in the references
Appendix A: Group advocacy position or Group rhetorical ecology evaluation (see handout)
Appendix B: Authorship of final paper (see above)
Recommended Framework (tentative)
Introduce your topic (1-2 pp.)
Compelling opening about why your topic is important or interesting
State your thesis (should be directly related to your research question)
Overview the organization of your paper – give a preview.
Set the problem context (2-3 pp.)
Give your reader relevant background information about the problem.
What are the discourses relevant to this problem?(How, where, and by whom does it get discussed?)
Frame your problem as a rhetorical problem or exigence
Analyze the discourse in light of a rhetorical theory or selected concepts (4-5 pp.)
Set out the anchoring concept/theory you will use
Define this theory/concepts
Explain why the theory/concepts are appropriate/enlightening for your issue
Apply the theory/concepts to your issue (analyze selected communication)
Make good arguments that disclose how the communication operates rhetorically
Support those arguments with good examples from actual communication/language
Come to a conclusion and give implications of your analysis (2 pp.)
Summary
Review the thesis
Review the ideas/results supporting the thesis
Implications (answering the “So what?” question); some options:
What does your analysis help us to understand about rhetoric on the problem?
How does this analysis influence our perception of the town?
What can we do with this knowledge to improve communication?
References: compile a list arranged alphabetically by authors’ last names of all sources, scholarly and other (including interviews), used in the study
APPENDIX A:Group Advocacy Position or Group Rhetorical Ecology Evaluation
APPENDIX B:Authorship list
Indicate who authored which portions of your paper, including advocacy position.