SECOND FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT

Read 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 opinions

Usually, 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.