Capstone — Writing Up an Anti-Manners Report#
SLOP2950 · Week 12#
Not a diary of what you did in the Practicum — a single analytical account of one norm.
From case study to claim#
- eleven weeks of observations don’t add up to an argument on their own
- an argument needs a specific claim about how a norm works, what enforces it, and what it takes to break it visibly
- the Practicum is evidence for that claim, not an anecdote appended to it
Structure over chronology#
Testing a draft claim against the method the course opened with in Week 1, and rehearsing it against the kind of novel scenario the Final Exam will actually put in front of you.
Wrong vs. right#
Wrong: a chronological report — first this happened, then this, then this — that makes the reader reconstruct the claim themselves from a timeline of events.
Right: a claim-first structure, where the argument is stated up front and everything else in the report exists to support it.
Final Exam#
Your Final Exam is due this week — see the assessment page for its format and forty practice questions.
References#
- Vance, P. (2022). From Observation to Argument: Structuring the Anti-Manners Report. Journal of Applied Incivility Studies, 6(4).
- Mercado, R. (2021). Claim-First Writing Under Exam Conditions. Behavioural Urbanism Quarterly, 12(2).
- Osei, E. (2023). Using a Single Live Performance as Evidence, Not Anecdote. Proceedings of the Symposium on Applied Pedagogy.