Due Date Updated: Now Due Monday, March 12

Write a paper of ~1000 words (no more than 1250) exploring what you learned over the course of Saturday’s outing.

General Guidelines

By reflection paper, I mean a piece of argumentative writing that takes thoughtful reflection on your own experience as the starting point and immediate evidentiary basis for an engagement with course readings and themes. In this case, you might choose any of several lines of inquiry:

  • living your education: In what ways does learning about the Don, the Humber, and local creeks differ from learning about the distant Mississippi? Does what you learned affect the way you see your day-to-day life in Toronto?
  • ways of knowing: The two halves of our outing were led by guides with very different perspectives on the lost rivers of Toronto. What kinds of knowledge does each guide bring to bear? How does this affect what lessons we can draw from the tour?
  • river histories: here there are several angles you might take. We’ve read a little bit about river economies, about cultural practices around rivers, and (to a much lesser extent) about experiences of the sacred. Do your experiences on the trip give you insight into any of those questions?

Marking criteria

As with any written assignment, I mark on the basis of the following criteria:

  • Thesis, Argument and Evidence: Is it clear what you are arguing for? Do your arguments “cohere”, that is, are they self-consistent? Does the evidence you bring forward actually support your claims?
  • Style and Grammar: Do your phrasing and sentence structure make it easy (even fun) to understand your arguments, or do they get in the way? Do you make frequent grammatical errors?
  • Spelling and Citations: Do you make frequent typographical errors? Have you used a consistent citation style such as Chicago Manual of Style, MLA, or APA?

For a reflection paper, I add the following:

  • does the paper display some sense of the appropriate scope of arguments from experience? That is, do you seem to understand both the limits of reflection (e.g., the difficulty of generalizing from a single person’s experience) and its specific epistemic virtues (e.g., the strong power of analogy and empathy to craft meaningful narratives)?

An A or excellent paper will be clear, concise, well-organized and thoughtful. It will in general include supporting evidence, be divided logically into paragraphs, have minimal spelling and grammatical errors, and will be of appropriate length. A B paper will share those virtues but to a lesser degree. A C paper will be missing some of these virtues. A D or F paper will lack many of them.

Citations

Note on citations: I don’t care what citation style you use, but you should use it properly and consistently. I very strongly recommend the use of a citation manager, such as Zotero. It will not make much difference for this class, but over the next few years it will save you an enormous amount of work. You may in any case want to join the river project library, which will give you access to a large number of sources.

Submission

Please submit your work by email.

  • use an editable format, such as .doc, .docx, or .odt. Despite their many limitations, these formats are excellent for review and commenting.
  • Include your name somewhere in the file. I need to be able to keep track of which paper is whose!