5 – 6 Pages (Any essay short of the 5-page minimum length requirement will be penalized. The severity of the penalty is determined by how short the essay falls of the length requirement. Although I typically do not penalize essays that exceed the length requirement, for this essay I want everyone to make careful choices with their material and thus generate compact, precise essays. In other words, I would like everyone to stay within the page-length range.)
As the first line of the prompt asserts, Essay 2 is meant to be an argumentative position paper. It is not intended to function as a report on or review of a topic/issue. On occasion you might have to review/report on an aspect of your topic in an effort to provide sufficient context, but the central goal of the essay should be argumentative—taking a position on an issue, or more particularly an aspect of an issue, and developing a persuasive argument around your position.
It is a good idea to choose a topic you already know something about or want to learn more about. In general, the more engaged you are in the topic, the smoother the process will play out. You also want to make sure to choose a topic that is argumentative by default (many topics/issues are amenable to a variety of viable argumentative positions, such as dress codes in schools, or the privacy practices of social media platforms) or that can be made to be argumentative (some topics/issues are not exactly amenable to a variety of argumentative positions, such as humans should eat healthy food [who would disagree, offer an antithetical position, here?] or murder is not good for society [again, who would you be trying to convince of this?]). In the case of the first type, you will just need to build a solid base of knowledge on the topic/issue, establish a specific argumentative approach to it, and set out to develop this approach—using your own critical voice and the voices of your sources—over the course of your essay. In the case of the second, you will need to massage the topic/issue a bit to locate a suitable entry point for your argument (perhaps arguing for a government program that makes healthy food more accessible to certain communities, or arguing for a type of educational intervention that reduces the rate of murder in certain communities).
Work to set specific parameters for your approach to your chosen topic. Avoid any attempt to approach a topic in a broad, wholesale way (such an approach will almost certainly end up becoming a review/report on the topic, which is not what Essay 2 calls for). Instead, identify a specific aspect of an issue on which to focus your argumentative attention. For example, let’s say that you want to craft an argument around law enforcement practices. Your first step should be to winnow down that topic to a manageable focus, such as increased training for community policing programs. Your next step should be to narrow down that topic/approach even further, perhaps looking at a specific type of program, or limiting your approach to the community policing practices for a certain state or city or even neighborhood in a city. In short, specific topic parameters lead to a specific argumentative approach.
Identify a specific audience that you plan to target with your argument. It is up to you to decide whom this audience will be. For example, if you choose a topic in the field of education, depending on what your topic is and how you plan to approach it, you might target public school board members, or perhaps school administrators, or maybe even federal or state legislators, on and on. You should work under the assumption that your target audience disagrees with your position (holds an antithetical view to yours, to phrase it according to dialectic) on the issue. As a result, your argumentative objective is to draw this target audience into your argument and attempt to convince this audience of the legitimacy of your position. You should also seek to practice prolepsis (one of the rhetorical moves we examined, which is an act that attempts to anticipate the target audience’s responses to the claims being raised in the argument) on your audience in an effort to demonstrate both your awareness of the issue and your proficiencies in acts of communication.
You are required to use no LESS than five and no MORE than six sources. Please keep in mind that you will need to locate, examine, and evaluate roughly triple this amount in order to find five to six relevant, on-topic, reliable, and authoritative sources. You will pull the bulk of these sources from databases such as ProQuest Research Library, Academic Search Complete, Academic OneFile, and Project Muse. You will create a works-cited page for this project, following MLA (9th edition) formatting style.
To put yourself in position to complete this essay, you need to choose an appropriate topic and start working toward developing an argumentative approach to it as soon as possible. To help you achieve such a goal, this week’s Discussion Forum requires you to 1) commit to a topic; 2) come to terms with what you know about it; 3) examine potential secondary sources in relation to the topic; 4) develop a working thesis for your argument. See the Discussion Forum exercise in the Unit II module for details and the due date.
