pare back civil rights protections W r i t i n g

One of the most important types of sources you will rely upon this quarter is journalism (or the news). Journalists specialize in providing the key facts of a situation, contextualizing those facts so that a non-specialist audience can understand their significance. Therefore, quality journalists will be especially useful to you when you are seeking the concrete details of the social problem you are trying to understand (rather than an analysis of those details or an expert perspective of the bigger picture, which would be better found in scholarly publications). These concrete details include the specific answers to questions regarding the who, what, where, when, and why of a given situation.

When you decide the specific location you will focus on in your research project, you should identify which news outlets will be most useful to you. If you are focused on somewhere in California, check out this page of the library’s guide (Links to an external site.).

As UCI students, you have privileged access to many reputable news outlets. Visit the UCI library’s “News & Newspapers” Guide (Links to an external site.) to learn more. Note that you can (and should) get free subscriptions to the New York Times (Links to an external site.), Financial Times (Links to an external site.), and the Wall Street Journal (Links to an external site.) through UCI. All these publications cover issues related to those we are looking at in this class and would also help you keep track of other important events in these turbulent times.

To become more familiar with the genre of news articles, to practice annotating sources, and to further develop the class conversation, please complete the following tasks:

1. Read all of the responses to Class Conversation 1, taking note of the positions that other students took in their interpretation of the assigned texts. Especially note any observations you learned something from, disagreed with, or found useful in understanding the texts and generating new research questions.
2. Read this recent article in the New York Times: “Justice Dept. Seeks to Pare Back Civil Rights Protections for Minorities (Links to an external site.).”
3. Post an annotation for the New York Times article, including the following elements:

a.) a proper MLA-format (Links to an external site.) works cited entry

b.) a brief summary of the article’s message [what it says]

c.) explanation of how the article might contribute to the class conversation, answer relevant questions, and/or complement previously assigned texts [you should cite at least one other student]

d.) a brief discussion of the formal conventions you notice in the article and how they address its particular rhetorical situation [how it says].