Perhaps you've learned to stitch together sources, or to crank out horrible "five-paragraph papers," but you might not have learned how to develop the most important feature of mature writing: a sophisticated claim. The claim of a paper is not the same thing as a thesis. Where a thesis is often a simple sentence, a claim is the major idea that your paper is contributing to the larger "conversation" that experts in the field are holding.

Think of a paper as something like a party: the guests (sources) are invited on the basis of some strength, and at the party they engage in conversations about shared interests. It's your job to know the background facts, information, methods, and questions that shape their interests. But as a good guest, it's also your job to add to the conversation with new insights, ideas, and connections between the guests. Thus, you play an active, inventive role in writing. What you add to the "conversation" is your claim.

Your final assignment is to move beyond a simple thesis and create the claim for a paper that include all of the previous assignments. Thus, your final assignment is not a traditional research paper. Each of you will return to the earlier papers and "extract" a description of "the conversation" each one is engaged in. This activity enables you to recognize your implicit claim. I recommend that you write them down, one after another, into a paragraph. They will form a rough set of concerns that have shaped your approach to the questions we have pursued throughout the term. This set of sentences becomes the first step toward writing a substanatial claim. You will develop them into a complex, insightful statement about the problem toward which our other assignments have pointed. A strong, clear, complex claim will likely require 1-2 pages.

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In order to understand this final assignment, we need to review the process we’ve gone through:

1. First, we began with a fairly simple task: describing peer review. This was a simple “stitching-together” of information from various sources.
   
   
2. Second, we looked at a particular case (Science) and how it implements the general case we described in the first step. This was slightly more complex; you were still reporting on some straightforward facts, but you were comparing and contrasting this specific case to the general case.
   
   
3. Third, we looked at social, economic, and political forces that helped to create the structural/organizational/institutional aspects of Hwang Woo Suk’s “performance.” This asked you to generalize the idea of a small, specialized “discourse community” to the idea of our culture as a sort of discourse community that had ways to support and validate some ideas.
   
   
4. Fourth, we described how Hwang Woo Suk managed to keep his own collaborators -- both in the laboratory and in the world of publication -- from catching on to what he was doing. This assignment gave far less direction than the previous ones.

This last assignment will force each person to realize that the information that has been compiled does NOT speak for itself. You will need to recognize that the information has been highlighted on the basis of cultural values and disciplinary forces. Good writing names the constellation of choices that selects them. You need to explain why you are you giving selected information to your reader. What is the big “so what?” that you’re answering? You need to have a complex claim that “makes sense” out of your facts.

DUE: August 5
Points: 300
Review the Critical Thinking Rubric to sharpen your sense of the task.

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Remember, you are not writing the full paper. You will write the claim to the research paper which you would have written. This paper would have integrated the previous papers into a single, long paper. You claim integrates all the “integrated insights” of the previous papers into a wise and informed overview of the insights you’ve gained about peer review, fraud, discourse communities, and about the creation of knowledge in complex societies such as our own.

• Your conclusion may be longer than one paragraph.
  
  
• Your conclusion may not be longer than two pages (500-600 words)
  
  
• The usual expectations for mechanics, grammar, transitions, etc. still apply.

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For a recent section of ENGL 321, the class developed a sample claim.