Math Topics
None
Writing Topics
Genre/Rhetorical analysis
Description
Learn how to write in a new genre by analyzing its features. Practice on the article and lecture note from the pre-recitation assignment, comparing the Genre and Rhetoric (PDF).
Preparing to Write Your Term Paper (PDF)
Pre-Recitation Assignment
Identify the rhetorical situation for research articles vs lecture notes.
Instructions: To a first approximation, the 18.200 term paper should be written as a mathematics research article. To gain familiarity with this genre, during recitation you’ll compare an example of it to an example of a more familiar genre: lecture notes. Before recitation, read the introduction of “Tetris is NP-hard even with O(1) Rows or Columns” and the introduction and first section of Counting Lecture Notes (PDF), and answer the following questions:
Question 1: What are the authors’ purposes in writing this lecture note?
Question 2: Who are the audiences of this note? What are their purposes in reading the note?
Question 3: What social action does this note perform?
That is, why did the mathematical community develop this genre?
Post-Recitation Assignment
Term paper assignment released.
