Project 2

The Use and Effectiveness of Politics of Scale in Anti-Fracking Movements in Colorado

Workshop Draft: Writing 5 Project 2 Workshop Draft

Peer Commentary: comments in green are from Kaylee and comments in blue are from Emma

  • Starting position: fracking is most often harmful to both workers and the environment, so it needs to be regulated somehow.The government alone may not be capable of this.
  • Starting point: fracking is bad; also, it is an example of politics of scale
  • Research Question: How is the anti-fracking movement an example of politics of scale and what has it accomplished?
  • Research question:How have activists in the Colorado anti-fracking movement created politics of scale, how successful has this politics of scale been in changing fracking/anti-fracking legislation, and what might this mean about the use of politics of scale in other political movements?
  • Conceptual lens used will be Smith and Kurtz: Used to define politics of scale + example of community gardens used as guideline for its successful application
  • So your conceptual framework is the concept of “politics of scale” combined with these news articles
  • I think [the march by the GOP debate in Boulder] is your strongest piece of evidence.
  • Support for this statement [that the state government is a friend to the energy sector]?
  • Example of adapting paper to audience by explaining unfamiliar terms: Overall you do a good job of this throughout your paper
  • Good evidence: supports the claim that the efforts of the anti-fracking movement to establish a politics of scale may not have much impact.
  • Answer to research question: The anti-movement on Colorado was not very effective for various reasons, but there are also successes (such as the movement’s ability to raise awareness of the issue of fracking) that should be noted and possible applied to other movements that employ politics of scale
  • I think you did a great job of addressing your audience. You went into great detail about the background and process of fracking which I think was critical to the rest of your paper.
  • You provide a lot of information about the anti-fracking movement, their motives, and their accomplishments, but I think you could do more to answer the first half of your question; how is this an example of politics of scale and how is that intertwined with localism?

Post-Workshop Revision Plan:

My goal for this revision was to explain more of the claims that I made and tie everything together into a more cohesive essay.

Conference Draft: Writing 5 Project 2 Conference Draft with comments

Draft Commentary: comments are in the order of markers on the page

  • This is quite good! Could you label that last block to help your audience connect that to politics of scale?
  • OK topic and question emerge in this first sentence.
  • Can you be more precise about how you use it and what from it you use?
  • All of this context seems really important to me. We do need to know why the activists are trying to respond, and these details seem helpful.But we also need to get to your question (and your case) a bit sooner, I think.
  • I wonder if this material (which constitutes the context in which the anti-fracking group’s rhetoric must operate) belongs in results.If you were not required to explain all of this detail here, you could get us to a brief summary of what the activists are doing. That would lead to you research question.
  • OK. you follow the question, method, significance model pretty successfully here. You do have the option of slowing down a bit to offer a more robust explanation of what the broader significance might be (in a sentence or two).You might also consider translating the question (which uses the politics of scale as a term) into a more accessible sentence.By considering the politics of scale, I will examine how the activists created public arguments about their plan, and the degree to which their approaches were successful….
  • I know that you are being brief here because your audience consists of people who have read this piece, but I want to encourage you to be more expansive in your account of this text.You want to ensure your audience will come away from this paragraph with a couple of portable concepts that can be immediately evoked with just a brief phase.What key ideas do you need to be that immediately accessible?
  • Great.
  • We need you to translate this for us, I think.To understand how the activists responded to their political context, I rely on ….
  • In general, I think that you may want to try to give this paragraph a more precise internal structure:

1. where to find information about the movement’s activities and rhetoric
2. where to find info about the context in which they operated
3. where to find info about their ultimate effects.

Highlighting these categories may allow you to avoid the list-like quality of the current paragraph by letting us group sources more clearly under the functions.

  • OK. I’m having a bit of a hard time following the focus of this paragraph.Perhaps you might treat the meeting crashing as one topic and the ballot initiatives as another topic?You seem to argue that the ballot-proposals cover a limited scale. is that right? Or are there multiple ballots taht cover different scales?What about the meeting crashing?
  • OK. why are these fake or implausible?
  • OK. So, the lack of a robust coalition and the lack of major mobilization both seem like pretty compelling evidence that the P of Scale isn’t having the desired effect.
  • OK. so this situation is something that a good use of the P of Scale would be able to disrupt?
  • But they can’t disrupt it because they’re just not very successful?
  • Consider revising the structure of this results section to allow yourself more space to deal with the activists’ approaches. Those approaches are only very briefly described here. We don’t get a rich engagement with evidence very often.If you offer an interpretation of how they operated separately from what the effects were, you may be able to expand your engagement with that evidence.
  • OK. The case suggests that unity is crucial?
  • Or the case suggests that robust intra-movement exchange is crucial?
  • Is that something you proved above?
  • Or, that you need diverse approaches operating simultaneously?
  • I would have liked to have heard a lot more about that approach in the results.
  • Because it’s newsworthy? I guess I’d like to hear you explain this a bit more carefully. Why should this work to create broader connections?

General Commentary:

  • The introduction likely needs to get to question and topic sooner. Could you put some of the contextual material into results (as a section about the context into which the activists enter)?
  • At times, I’m having a hard time following the logic of your paragraphing in results. I’d like to talk about how you might refine your presentation of information there. (see page 7 comment). There’s room for expansion here!
  • The discussion could also use some attention in terms of structuring. I’ve tried to outline a few claims I think I see emerging there.

Final Draft: Writing 5 Project 2 Final

Project Post-Mortem:

One of the writing strategies I found the most helpful for this essay, because it was a heavily modified IMRD document, was precise planning of what I would write about in each section of the project. I had done IMRD papers before, but they were all scientific; the sections were clearly demarcated and there was no confusion about what part of the experiments would go where. In this project, however, it was more difficult because I did not have a real “experimental procedure”. Instead, I was forced to adapt that section into more of a materials section. Also, because I did not come up with results in the form of tables and graphs, I had to map out what was considered “results” and what was considered “analysis”. My planning allowed me to successfully determine what sort of information would go into each section, which then made it easier for me to organize how each of those individual sections would create a coherent essay.