Marijuana and Medicine

Introduction
We’ve spent our time so far on two main projects—one that employed rhetorical analysis to understand individual writer’s strategies as they entered into conversation with each other, and another that employed research to discover a conversation for ourselves, on a topic of our own choosing. Both projects used writing as a mode of inquiry, beginning with a question and using writing to “make sense” out of things that might not have made sense to us before.

In this unit, we’ll build off of the base we’ve established so far: drawing on the rhetorical strategies we observed, the information we discovered, the awareness of the tone and scope of the conversation we studied, etc., we will enter into the conversation. In many ways, this is the most exciting unit of the semester: after spending a good amount of time working to understand others’ views and observing others’ writing, and now we get to present our own view, writing with a voice we’ve authorized for ourselves through our research.

Assignment
Write a persuasive, argumentative essay that enters into the “conversation” you explored during the Annotated Bibliography unit.

Your final draft will include:
• A combination of scholarly and popular sources
• A clear, focused claim—remember that this is a claim-driven argument; not a “report”
• Some evidence of an awareness of the discourse community surrounding your topic area

Writer’s Memo
I would like you to compose a Writer’s Memo for the final draft of this paper, which you will turn in with the final copy. In this memo, I’d like you to reflect for no less than 1 page (though no more than 2) on the process of revising your Claim-Driven Argument. You might mention, for example, some of the difficulties you faced in revising, some of the changes you decided to make from draft to draft and why, or even some portions of the final essay with which you are still unsatisfied.

The memo is intended to help you to think about your writing process in writing. In other words, you will use writing to help you think more critically and consciously about your writing. The memo will also help me curtail my comments more specifically to your needs.