SECOND FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT

Second Formative AssessmentRead one of the three articles you downloaded for last weeks task as quickly as you can. While you are reading, pay careful attention to the authors argument; what is point of the article? What is the author trying to convince you of in the article (e.g. NATOs intervention in Kosovo was both Illegal and legitimate)? While you are reading, pay special attention to parts of the article that refer to any kind of factual information such as the following: Statistics Examples/past events Expert opinionsUsually, when the author uses evidence, they will say where they got that evidenceso look out for the author referring to primary sources such as the following: Interviews Speeches News Reports NGO Reports Government Reports Official Documents Treaties (like the UN Charter)Factual information that the author brings up from sources like those above is what we call evidence. The author will interpret this factual information and use it to support their argument. When you come across evidence in the article, think about the way the author has interpreted this evidence; do you think that the evidence means what the author said that it means? Do you disagree with their interpretation? For example, if an author refers to statistics that show that a large number of people died during a peace operation, and then they say that this shows that the mission failed, would you agree? Does a mission need to have a very low number of deaths in order to be successful? Remember, you are allowed to challenge the author when they disagree with other articles you have read.Task:While you are reading, find the sections of the article where you think that the author is using evidence and cut and paste them into a Word document. Fix any formatting mistakessometimes there may be paragraph breaks in the middle of sentences, just delete them and replace them with spaces. Sometimes the font and font size will be wrong, just select the text and change the font and font-size to what you would normally use. Sometimes articles will not allow you to cut and paste: this is normal; just type the section out into the Word document instead of cutting and pasting. Now, put quotation marks at either end, then put an in-text citation after it in using the CU Harvard format;(SURNAME YEAR: PAGENUMBER) The correct format is the surname of the author of the article (do not include the initial of the first name), followed by the year that the journal article was published (dont put a comma in between the surname and the year), then a colon, followed by the page number (do not write p, pp, pg or page before the page number). If the citation (the section of the article you are cutting and pasting) goes over to the following page, you must write the page number that the quotation starts on, then a hyphen, then the page number that the quotation ends on. The full-stop goes after the in-text citation, never before. When you are finished, it should look something like this: This is the section you have cut and pasted from the article (Williams 2008: 56-57). Underneath the section that you have cut and pasted, write a few words describing how that evidence was interpreted by the author, and how the author used it to support their argument.At the top of the Word document, write a few words explaining what you think the argument of the article waswhat was the point of the journal article, what was the author trying to convince you of?Once you have done this, email me the whole document as an attachment and Ill get back to you with feedback. Try not to spend more than a couple of hours on this; its important to get through these journal articles quickly because I want you to read about ten to fifteen of them for the essay! All that reading will enable you to breeze through the exam too.