Project Two: Routes Analysis
The contemporary American landscape may seem at first like little more than a crowded tapestry of gas stations and pharmacies, 7-Elevens and Taco Bells, bulky concrete structures standing shoulder to shoulder with remnants of auto repair shops, wires and cables crisscrossing the skies—the whole scene saturated with layers of signs and billboards that seem to hover in mid-air, disrupting the continuity of experience like a webpage littered with pop-ups-all connected by an intricate network of highways threaded through other highways breeding shopping malls and pristine residential utopias. We could also understand this landscape as a series of affluent (but paranoid) islands, fully equipped with guarded perimeters and cutting-edge surveillance technologies, buttressed on all sides by an ever-expanding sea of impoverishment, disempowerment, and decay. These are the spaces we routinely inhabit, routinely navigate.
For Project Two, I would like each of you to explore this landscape, focusing specifically on routes available to you as you travel from your hometown (or home away from home) and EMU's Ypsilanti campus. Like social cartographers, we will devote the greater part of the next four weeks to an ongoing investigation of this omnipresent "culture of congestion" in an attempt to determine the roles it plays in our designed environment, as well as the rules it presupposes for social interactions in such 
environments. Routes, or segments of routes, in and around our hometowns, to and from campus, will constitute our shared object of study.
Writing Assignment
Project Two lasts four weeks and culminates in a 5-6 page analysis essay. Each of you will build upon the work you've done in Project One—observing, describing, interpreting—only this time you will analyze the routes connecting specific areas of your hometown or connecting your hometown and EMU. Think of the essay as an opportunity to register an autobiographical, analytical set of turn-by-turn directions, where your pathways and the social, economic, and architectural forces that mark them are brought more fully into view, even as they connect and collide. Our collective goal for this project is to generate insights about spaces, identities, and cultural beliefs and practices. Toward this end, each of you will:
- attempt to understand some aspect of a route between your home and EMU's campus, including specific qualities of the route that illuminate the relationship between you, the place you are from, and its broader social and political context;
- attempt to make provocative claims about what specific, vivid snapshots (or moments) along the way illustrate, conceal, reveal and celebrate; and
- try to generate new ideas and theories for the rest of the class—and your audience—to consider, challenge, complicate, and learn from.
Throughout the project, we'll also gain more practice with making analytic claims, writing rich descriptions, and recognizing and articulating connections between personal experiences or memories and larger cultural issues (like race, gender, class, ability, sexuality, ethnicity, education, etc.). From our careful readings and discussions of these texts, and from your own "memory work," interpretations, and observations, you should be ready to describe, analyze, and make claims about some segment of the routes between your hometown and EMU.
Just because there is pressure on you (the "I" of the essay) to be critical in your examination of your selected routes, that doesn't mean you will be working alone. That's one of the ways secondary sources can help. Your analysis will be both richer and more persuasive when you contextualize your claims in some way, offering your readers some insight into larger cultural forces and phenomena. You are asked to reference at least two of the readings for this unit, and you are encouraged to consider visual forms of evidence, as well, such as photographs, a turn-by-turn map, screenshots from Google Street View, etc. We will spend time in class discussing and practicing incorporating these forms of evidence into your own analysis.
It will be important for you to move beyond narration and description, in order to examine the details of your location carefully enough to be able to explore what it means, what it suggests, and why it seems significant. As Rosenwasser and Stephen claim in Writing Analytically: "the process of noticing, of recording selected details and patterns of detail, is already the beginning of interpretation" (39). There is no predetermined formula to follow or structure to imitate as you attempt to organize your essay, but your writing and critical thinking are bound to be more successful if you adhere to the following suggestions:
- Provide readers with a rich, detailed description of selected segments of the route, so that they can imagine the space for themselves.
- Keep your narrating to a minimum, and make sure that any stories you tell serve the purpose of supporting a claim.
- Make regular, repeated references back to the details of the space. Readers will appreciate being reminded of what you see and why it is noteworthy.
- Let your discoveries, insights, realizations, claims, or theories serve as the driving force behind the project. In other words, make these things prominent—use them to create shifts or transitions as you build paragraphs or make your way from one point to another.
- Keep in mind an academic audience that is ready to challenge ideas that are unsupportable, over-generalized, obvious, or shallowly developed.
Finally, your project may be organized as a series of turn-by-turn directions, some of which will be subject to analysis and others of which will stand without examination. We'll go over this formatting alternative in class, and whether or not you adopt it for your project, you should examine no more than three segments of the route. That is, limit your analysis to only selected stretches along a route between your home (which, again, might mean hometown or home away from home) and campus.
A draft of the project (4 double-spaced pages, word processed, 12 point font) is due on Wednesday, October 24. Bring a paper copy with you to class. The finished project (5-6 double-spaced pages, word processed, 12 point font) is due on Monday, October 29, to the appropriate Dropbox in EMU Online.
Assessment Criteria
Your project will be assessed for its strengths in the following five areas.
- Reading critically
- Practicing research
- Writing and representing what you know
- Using evidence
- Following the conventions of syntax and mechanics
Evaluation Criteria
Each criterion listed above will be evaluated on the following scale:
<NA----------NI----------AC----------EX>
EX: Exceptional. The writer has applied the criterion with distinction.
AC: Acceptable/meets expectations. The writer has applied the criterion to a satisfactory degree.
NI: Needs improvement. The writer has minimally applied the criterion in the project.
NA: Not applied. The writer has not applied the criterion in the project.
Contact Information
Derek N. Mueller, PhDAssociate Professor of Rhetoric and Writing
Director of Composition
Department of English
Virginia Tech
Office: 315 Shanks Hall
Spring 2020 Office Hours: T, 12-3
Phone: +1-734-985-0485
dmueller@vt.edu
http://derekmueller.net/rc/
