Womens social issuses arent being heard (rights and economical issues)

RESEARCH PAPER AND PRESENTATION: CONTEXTUALIZING THE ONION Introduction: Over the course of the English composition sequence, you have been exposed to terms like thesis, argument, primary idea, and logic, and applied them to other readings and to your own writing. But to some extent, nearly everything we come into contact with in our daily lives presents some form of argument or agenda. In particular, humor has long been used as a method of argument. Satire, for instance, is a specific form of humor that is usually intended to influence people’s minds concerning a particular topic. However, as is often the case with forms of argument like advertising and parody, satire can also contain subtle, politically-oriented humor. Our Dumb Century: The Onion Presents 100 Years of Headlines from America’s Finest News Source is a publication put out by The Onion (a contemporary parody newspaper) that uses humor to create both direct and indirect arguments. In it, both major historical events and cultural trends are parodied. In order for the humor to “work,” however, you the reader must be knowledgeable about the subject. In some cases, this means knowing details about the actual event being discussed, or having a sense of general cultural trends during the event’s time period. In other cases, it means being familiar with modern thinking about these past events, or being able to spot anachronism. The first step in writing this paper will be to pick a story from The Onion book or website (http://www.theonion.com/ (Links to an external site.) Links to an external site. ) and research it. The most important thing to keep in mind is that most Onion stories layer information; that is, not only do you as the reader need to know about the central event, but you also need to understand the secondary allusions and information presented. So, before you begin your research, you should go through the story carefully, several times, and note anything that is unfamiliar to you. An important aspect of your research will be investigating what you believe are the key references—those on which your understanding of the article absolutely depends. The Research Because of the multiple perspectives presented in The Onion, your research should be as broad as possible. That is, you will be looking at informative sources as well as “interpretive” sources. Your project must have at least one source from each of the following categories (five sources total): one reference source; one primary source (newspaper or magazine article, official or personal documents, etc.); one Internet source; one scholarly/academic source (book, journal article, etc.); and one recent popular (non-academic) source. Note that these are the minimum research requirements! It’s to your advantage to know as much as possible about your story, so you are welcome to use more than five sources. Once you’ve done the research, your job is to analyze each source. What is the main point or thesis of each source? How does it help you understand the Onion story? How will you use that source to write your 10-15 page paper? At this point, you will write brief summaries of each source in order to answer these questions.