Political Advocacy Essay
The purpose of this assignment is to identify and describe a specific problem or issue that you will address in your advocacy essay and to explain an action (or actions) that you want to persuade people to take in response. You may associate the word “advocacy” with the word “activist,” and you may not see yourself as an activist. That’s entirely okay—the purpose of our advocacy work this semester is just to recognize that your writing can do something in the world and that you can build and shape and participate productively within the communities, civic and public service organizations, and political structures that are your life.
For this essay, your audience will be me, your professor. In this project, you need to explain the issue you are focusing on, what audience(s) your advocacy campaign will target, and what action(s) you will persuade your audience to take. Your campaign should have a clear desired consequence beyond just “awareness” or “providing information”—so, people are informed. The paper overall should answer the question: So what? What next? What do you want them to do?
Your research must include the following information (each section should address the things I’ve outlined below, but you may find it works better to address them in a different order or in a slightly different way. These are guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules):
Introduction: Summarize the specific problem you want to address in your advocacy:
What is the specific problem you want to address? This should be fairly narrow. For example, “sleep deprivation” is too broad, “College students are facing health problems due to stress and sleep deprivation” is much narrower and far more specific.
What is the scope of your project? Scope defines the limits of the project, what is included and what is excluded, and why.
Briefly, what actions are you proposing, and who will your audience be? In other words, what will be the major message and target audience of your advocacy campaign?
This section should be around .5 a page.
Background: this will be the longest section of your proposal and it will be based on your research:
Explain your problem in detail and show the impact of the issue. The purpose of this section is not only to provide background information but also to make an argument that there is a problem that needs addressing. Why is your problem important to address? What is at stake?
What solutions have been tried? Are there already programs in place related to your topic? Have they been effective? Why or why not? How will your proposed action fit in?
This section should be around 2 – 3.5 pages.
Audience: who does this affect and why are you targeting them?
Define the audience(s) for your advocacy campaign: Who will you be trying to reach? Since you will be citing more than one source, you may have multiple audiences, or just one. Explain in detail who your audience is and why they will (or should) care about your issue. As we will discuss in class, it is often helpful to conceptualize your audience as “people who…”
This section should be around .5 page.
Advocate: the solution to the problem as outlined in the background.
What do you want your audience(s) to do? Why are they the best audience(s) to take effective action? What action(s) are you proposing and why? 1.5-2 pages
Conclusion: summary of main points and concluding thoughts.
Reiterate your points and any final thoughts.
This section should be around .5 a page.
Your advocacy essay should make use of both scholarly and journalistic sources that you have critically evaluated for their reliability. Each essay must include a full list of at least 5 APA-cited sources at the end. Requirements: 5-7 double-spaced pages, size 12 Times New Roman font, 1” margins, a minimum of 5 reputable sources. The paper should be in APA format including headings and a title page that does not count toward the page count.
The political advocacy can be over items included in your cutting cards assignment but cannot be over the same topic as your News Blurb or debates.
Example-PolitcalAdvocacy-EXAMPLE.pdf–please note this example includes images, that is unique to this topic. The majority of you will not need to include images.
