Length: 1000-1600 words

For this assignment, you will read two texts that take on the same issue, but that are written in different disciplinary discourses or in genres that are rooted in different disciplines. Your essay about these texts should make an analytical argument comparing how two different discourses respond to similar problems or issues. What are the larger conversations in which these texts participate? How do your chosen texts use (similar or different) techniques to participate in public discussions of the same issue?

Audience: You are writing for an interested, academic audience. Members of your audience have not read the texts you are analyzing. Therefore, you will have to give your readers context without devoting undue attention to extensive summary. Make sure that you supply details and quotations from the texts you are analyzing to help you prove your claims and to give your reader a clear sense of the texts you are analyzing.

Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us“, Wired (April 1, 2000)

Richard P. Feynman, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” American Physical Society (December 29, 1959)

List of subordinating conjunctions for long sentence activity:
OWL, “Identifying Independent and Dependent Clauses”

General interest:
Farhad Manjoo, “Space Invaders“