Assignment Task
This assignment asks you to give an exposition of each of the following terms:
- Chinese-room argument
- Double bind
- Mimetic Desire
- Scapegoat
- Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Additional Discussion
What are the basic skills involved in this assignment? There are two: the development of expository writing and the deployment of academic conventions (especially use of referencing). Expository writing is writing whose purpose is to summarise – to summarise an idea, or an historical episode, or a law, or a recent experience of yours, and so on. In this assignment you summarise concepts. By the way, expository writing is another say of writing an exposition, or a summary.
Why do it? Because all non-fiction writing (and much fiction writing, albeit in a different way) do this. It’s about half of what is going on. (The other half is critical response.)
How do you do it? If you want to think about it simply, imagine a friend of yours has come up to you and asks ”So I’ve heard about this idea called ’symbolic representation.’ What is that exactly? At base, you summarise the concepts. Final tips? You first need to locate the concept within the week of the unit; you then need to locate the concept within a particular reading or set of readings. Note: don’t use bad quality references or things like Wikipedia.
