1200-1500 words
1- The Three Rules of _________
In this assignment, you are to imagine that you are trying to communicate to a total outsider the key norms that they need to learn to function in a social setting that you choose. You could choose almost anything, although some choices probably work better than others. The question at the center of the exercise is not, though, what are the three norms/rules you need to know, but why are these three norms so important to functioning in this setting?
Settings you could pick include a restaurant or other eating establishment, dorms, the gym, a team or club, being a student from another country, the movies, living in a small rural community, having controversial political conversations, and so on, pretty much anything. Feel free to write to your section leader or Prof. Norton about whether a topic you have in mind will work.
Make sure that the norms you identify are different and that you explain them in detail providing plenty of examples of what they are, why they are important, and what happens if they are not followed. Your examples should do a good job in getting specific about the general rules that you identify. The rules you identify, though, should be in service to the bigger point about why these norms are important. Questions that might help you develop an answer to that in the specific setting you have identified include: why do these norms exist in that setting? What do they do? What kind of social order do they contribute to? What do the norms protect, or what vision of the social setting do they advance? What do they have in common? What are the beliefs or values behind the given norms? What happens to norm violators? To be clear, you don’t have to answer all of these questions; rather, they are questions that might help you answer the central questions of the paper: what are the three key rules/norms in the setting you have chosen and what does the importance of those norms tell us about the setting?
2-Theme Song
Many of the issues that sociologists focus on exert a powerful influence over people’s lives and experiences. Because of this many sociological issues are reflected in pop culture, from movies and tv to novels to music. For this writing assignment you will identify a song (with lyrics) that relates to one or more of the concepts or ideas that we have covered in this class and develop a thesis that explains the song’s perspective on social life by analyzing its meaning, resonance, lyrics, sound, history, and/or relevant parts of the biography of its creator/s (you don’t have to focus on all of those things; they are just some of the things you could focus on). The three closely related questions that this essay should answer are: What is the point that the song makes about an aspect of social life that we have touched on in class? How does it make that point? And what evidence from the song can you identify that tells us why the artist/s responsible for the song thought that this was a point worth making?
This essay, then, involves a combination of sociological analysis (to identify appropriate concepts, social structures, data about society, etc.) and literary analysis (to analyze how the song relates to the sociological material). While it necessarily involves a creative interpretive effort on your part, it is important to make sure that your analysis is closely tied to some of the material that we have been talking about in class. For example, if my essay is on Green Day’s “Longview” I want to make sure that there is a tight connection between the song, its themes, and an area we have covered in class. My focus for this song, for instance, could be on social networks (the song is about isolation and loneliness), culture (it is also about the compulsive watching of stupid tv), family, and sex. So I would focus on how the song weaves those themes together, how they relate to ideas about those themes that we talked about in class or that are covered in the textbook or other readings. I might also talk about early 90s pop-punk and the efforts by Green Day and others in the genre to come up with a formula for watering down the musical style and anger of punk enough to make it marketable. In writing the paper I’d be sure to use lots of quotes from the song and maybe some references to bios of the band or an article where they talk about writing the song, or perhaps I would want to write about the reception of the song (especially relevant if you wrote about something that was either a smash hit or was controversial and were trying to explain why – the reaction to it gives valuable insight into what the song is really about).
One of the possible pitfalls of this paper is to get too sucked into talking about the song and leaving out the sociology; another is not talking about the song enough and in a specific enough way for it to anchor your paper. Try to avoid both of those problems. If you want to write about a song that may not quite fit these directions let us know and we can help you figure out if it will work.
If you do this paper include at the end a copy of the song’s lyrics. They do not count towards the paper’s word count.
Alternate: If you want to do this same assignment but modify it to allow you to talk about something related to art or poetry that is fine. Be in touch if you want to work out any of the details.
Grading and General Guidelines
Writing a paper should not be a mystery. You should have a clear idea of what is expected of you. If after reading these assignment descriptions you have any doubts about what the goal of a paper is, please come talk to us!
We will focus on three main elements in assessing all papers: writing, structure, and argument. The key elements of each are described on the table below.
Grades below “B” indicate some problem with the writing, structure, or argument of your paper. “B” papers are good in all respects. “A” papers distinguish themselves from “B” papers by their argument. That is to say, “A” papers have something distinctive to say and do an excellent job saying it. If you want to write an “A” paper, you need to develop a strong argument. This can be hard to do. A good piece of general advice is to start figuring out what you are going to write by asking a real question about the topic you are writing about. A real question is a question without an obvious answer. Your answer to that question is your argument that you develop and support through the structure and writing of the paper. Most of the assignments above provide the question for you.
