Discussion Prompts
In this unit’s reading, you explored the responsibilities and the habits of mind of effective academic writers:

In academic writing tasks, you are responsible for:
Defining a situation that calls for some response in writing;
Demonstrating the timeliness of your argument
Establishing a personal investment;
Appealing to readers whose minds you want to change by understanding what they think, believe, and value;
Supporting your arguments with good reasons;
Anticipate and address readers’ reasons for disagreeing with you, while encouraging them to adopt your position.
To be an effective academic writer, you must take on the right “habits of mind.” According to Greene and Lidinsky, academic writers:
Make inquiries–observe, ask questions, examine alternatives;
Seek and value complexity–resist binary thinking, consider all topics open for discussion;
See writing as a conversation–and demonstrate sensitivity to those involved in the conversation;
Understand that writing is a process–a continual process of discovering ideas, drafting, and revising; and
Reflect on their own learning and writing.
In your initial post, use these 5 categories to analyze one of the “Becoming Academic” narratives from Ch. 1: either Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” Rodriguez’s “Scholarship Boy,” or Graff’s “Disliking Books.” Then, compare your experience as a learner to the experience of the author whose work you have analyzed. Make sure that your post does all of the following:

Examine how the author displays at least three of the five habits of mind; use specific examples from the text to illustrate your analysis
Compare your experience as a learner to the experience of the author
Quotes the article you are analyzing at least once, using MLA or APA guidelines for in-text citations of the quoted material