When starting a paper, evidence was discouraged in the introduction, and the thesis should always be communicated at the end of the first paragraph. However, in class texts portrayed a different story. For example, Alexander in The New Jim Crow introduces readers to what drew her to addressing mass incarceration, along with the story of those against the system. Introductions like Alexander’s brought me to a new conclusion that contextualization is not only important in explaining a situation, but also provides the audience with the understanding of the implications and issues at hands. My argument should be as strong as the information I put forward to my audience. In Artifact 5, the exercise “Summarizing Through Context” was the first instance I countered my original approaches to writing introductions. Understanding the tone within the rhetorical situation, and mentioning the evidence, this cemented the appropriate use of present tense when discussing the issue amongst scholarly work, and past tense to describe the work during the period itself.

Also new to me was the addition of multimodal evidence through in-text figures (see Artifact 6). Sure, I have cited from videos and movies prior, but another form of engaging with the audience was perpetuated through the inclusion of multimodal evidence. For me, the additional dimension of evidence helped me convey the growing issue of electronic monitoring through the numbers in the context project. Within the advocacy project, the inclusion of a news report allowed me to place the reader in the present, as the news report was recent and relevant to the ongoing challenges to electronic monitoring.

Retaining the reader’s attention is important, and multimodal evidence provides breaks in between text. Supporting the argument by providing diversity through dissent or the way information is illustrated. Aside from being a requirement, providing the reader with alternatives of text is important to the evolving work of art and research.

To strengthen my claims, providing more conviction, I approached both essays with a method. The guidance to the reader provided me with more structure to my paper’s body paragraphs by providing an additional line of reasoning to my analysis, which related to the overall story I was attempting to perpetuate through each paper. In the context project readers were asked to view electronic monitoring through the problem of mass incarceration, through the harm perpetuated to the monitored. And in the advocacy project, I guided the reader away from the idea of abolition and electronic monitoring possibly replacing the current system.

Although there was an emphasis to focus beyond the analysis of my paper, 39C radically changed how I communicate analysis in my body paragraphs. In Programming with Software Libraries, another class I took this quarter, we learned about a concept called callbacks. A function that receives another function (typically similar in purpose), passed in with the purpose of execution or communicating back with the initial function. Callbacks in my programming class are what signposts are to this one. The professor always pushed me to signpost, to bring my arguments back to the thesis and the overall paper (see Artifact 7).

Both papers in Artifact 7 advocate towards implementing legislation to address the problem but notice how the paper on the left achieves the goal of communicating the ability to enact legislation. Meanwhile, the paper on the right additionally achieves the goal of reminding the reader how legislation would benefit monitored users and is a callback to the overall issue and theme of mass incarceration.

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