Assessment

You began with a clear definition of the purposes and showed the range of possibilities from book reviews to compare and contrast essays. Good use of the wiki space to organize discussion of the genre, and effective engagement of the class in the rubric discussion. When we started investigating the graphic organizers, we were confused about the product analysis vs. the evaluative writing. Analysis is part of evaluation, but not an end in itself. When we analyze an advertisement, we are **not** trying to be balanced, but critical, whereas in an evaluation we try to recognize both good and bad features of our subject. For example, in a book review we don't merely criticize the weaknesses of the book, but try to show its positive and negative qualities. An evaluation of a product advertisement might show how it both reveals and exaggerates the good qualities of a a product. Probably the use of graphic organizers over actual writing in this chapter contributes to this impression, so your confusion is understandable. We will have to be aware of the difference between the pre-writing notes and the actual genre writing in this book to avoid this confusion. 18/20