food issue
ES103
Summer session 2 2017
NEWSPAPER ARTICLE RESPONSE ASSIGNMENT
Paying attention to environmental issues in the news can make you a more informed citizen. To encourage your environmental awareness, this assignment requires you to respond to two newspaper articles on each of the following class themes, for a total of eight responses. Your responses to these articles will be worth 20% of your final grade. You should turn in responses to two articles on each theme by the due dates shown below:
| Theme | Assignment due date |
| Food | Friday, July 7 |
| Energy | Friday, July 14 |
| Water | Thursday, July 20 |
Article selection criteria:
Articles should be obtained from reputable internet news websites (e.g. www.cnn.com, www.nytimes.com, www.csmonitor.com, www.washingtonpost.com, etc).
Articles must be newsarticles – that is, they must report objective fact. News websites also contain opinion pieces, editorials, letters to the editor, blog entries and the like – these are not news and are therefore not acceptable for this assignment. One important aspect of this course is for you to distinguish between news and opinion. Refer to the handout “Understanding News Media: Fact vs. Opinion” to clarify the distinction, or check with me if you are not sure.
Articles must have been published this year – that is, since 1/1/2017.
Articles must be sufficiently detailed and complex for you to write a 1.5-2 page response.
I must be able to access the full text of the article without having to pay for access. Through the UE library, you and I have subscriber access to articles on www.nytimes.com and www.washingtonpost.com. Please ensure that I can access articles from any other source.
Responses to articles that do not meet all of these criteria will not be graded, and a score of zero will be recorded. The most common error students make is selecting an article that is not news.Please contact me if you have any questions about whether a particular article is suitable for the assignment.
Assignment:
Include the title, source, and publication date of the article in your response. I must be able to read the article in order to grade your response, so include a hyperlink to your article.
Write a two paragraph response for each article. (This will be approximately 400 – 550 words, or 1.5 – 2 pages of double-spaced text in 12-point font with 1 inch margins.) The first paragraph should summarize the article; the second paragraph should voice your response to the article.Note that an important requirement of the assignment is that youpick a sufficiently interesting/complex paper to form an informed response.
Your response should demonstrate proper writing skills (spelling, grammar, sentence structure), but should also voice your informed viewpoint. A response which merely summarizes the article but does not provide a personal response will receive a maximum grade of a C-.
Please turn in your newspaper responses to bothBlackboard and LiveText. Late assignments will be assessed a penalty of one letter grade per day.
GRADING RUBRIC
Evidence of plagiarism: results in a score of zero, AND the honor code violation will be reported to the Office of the Dean of Students.
Paper summarizes an article that does not meet the stated criteria: results in a score of zero.
Paper does not provide a working link (or other access) to the article: results in a score of zero.
| Content criteria | Advanced (A level) | Proficient (B level) | Not there yet (C level) | Not there at all (D/F level) |
| Summary (10) | Article is relevant to the theme, and summary is complete, detailed, specific, and particularly well-written | Article is relevant to the theme, and summary is complete, detailed, and specific | Article is tangentially relevant to the theme, and/or summary is incomplete, vague, repetitious, or misunderstands some aspect of the article | Article is irrelevant to the theme, and/or summary is too short or missing, mirrors the text in the article too closely, or misunderstands the article |
| Response (10) | Summary and response are unified and well-supported with relevant detail, demonstrating excellent insight and understanding of theme | Summary and response are unified and well-supported with relevant detail, demonstrating good insight and understanding of theme | Response has concrete support, and is only occasionally vague or irrelevant | Response is not supported with concrete, relevant detail |
| Language (5) | Clear/effective language, varied and interesting sentence structure | Clear/effective language with standard grammar, punctuation, spelling | Occasionally vague or incorrect language or contains extensive use of quotes instead of paraphrasing. | Language confused, full of misspellings, fragments or run-ons |
