ARGUMENT RESEARCH ESSAY
Please read everything in its entirety before you begin working on this essay.
Objective and Overview:
To provide the student the opportunity to develop research and bibliographical skills, to locate and use appropriate reference materials, to document sources and format a paper according to MLA guidelines, and to present and support an argument in writing.
The argumentative research assignment is 35% of the overall course grade.
Guidelines:
Your essay must be 4-5 full pages long not including the Works Cited page.
You must cite three sources (and only three) in your essay of which two must be from Galileo, and one can be any of the following:
a book (online or printed),
a reliable web site
a scholarly article (online or printed).
Please read Chapter14 of your textbook, Patters for College Writing.
Students are responsible for evaluating all sources for credibility. Sources like Wikipedia or About.com, for example, are not acceptable for an academic research essay.
All sources used in the paper must be acknowledged and documented in the body of the paper and must be listed on the final Works Cited page in correct MLA style to avoid a failing grade.
Topics:
In the argumentative research essay, the student will explore a current cultural, social, or political problem that he or she feels strongly about and will present specific ways he or she thinks that problem could be solved.
While students may choose their own topics to write about, they must avoid choosing an issue that is so commonly discussed it has become cliché or one that is so controversial the argument is unlikely to be won, no matter how strongly the student might feel about it.
Examples of topics students may NOT write about for these reasons are gun control, abortion, capital punishment, marijuana legalization, assisted suicide, religion, any political election, and school uniforms.
Writing Tip #1
This Argument Essay is a Classical Argument Essay aimed at both arguing the author’s thesis and refuting the opponent’s thesis. It is NOT a Persuasive Essay, where the purpose is to persuade without necessarily arguing against an opposing perspective. The difference is that an argument essay tries both to persuade and refute against an opposing view.
With this in mind, you should not choose a generic issue that has no credible opposing view – like “energy conservation” – for a Classical Argument essay. One can try to write a persuasive essay that makes an appeal to a reader to conserve energy. But unless you can find a credible opponent with an active agenda opposing your appeal (“We should NOT conserve energy”), then you cannot write a Classical Argument essay.
Writing Tip #2
It can be helpful to look into current legislation under debate everywhere from your city council, state legislature or even at the federal level. But be careful with large issues. Students often like to take them on, but they can be too unwieldy for a short assignment like this.
Within GALILEO, the Opposing Viewpoints database provides lists of possible topics if a student has trouble thinking of one.
Please see the course calendar for associated assignment due dates. The assignments are listed below.
The written research paper proposal.
• The topic proposal must be a brief, properly formatted memo (MS Word has appropriate templates) that is addressed to the instructor and that presents the topic the student wishes to research, explains why he or she is interested in that topic, states the specific question the student hopes to answer through his or her research, and discusses the probable focus of the student’s argument.
Formal Sentence Outline
• Review the prewriting videos on the My Writing Process: Prewriting and Draft page if needed.
• The formal outline must be typed and correctly formatted following the template provided. The outline must show the student’s research question, working thesis, main points, sub-points and supporting details, and the student’s counter-argument for opposing viewpoints. Every line in the outline must be in a complete sentence.
