Abortion

 

 

Requirements:

 

This is your final assignment of the term and it will be your greatest achievement, including all the things you have learned about writing essays in our class. It will be on a topic of your own choosing, but it must be a topic sophisticated enough for a college writing class and it must be approved by me before you begin writing on it. My approval is only to make sure that it is a college-level topic and that it is manageable for doing a good job—not too broad, not too narrow. You will create your own ideas about what to discuss in your essay, write your own thesis to describe it, and choose your own sources to both explain and support your discussions of it. The four (or more, if you choose) sources may come from anywhere—books, magazines, websites, newspapers, videos, recordings—but they must be college-essay-level quality. This is an opportunity for you to pick something in the world that interests you and find out more about it, writing your most important paper of the semester on a topic that you have chosen. Pick something that you would really like to learn about in depth.

All of the things we have worked on this semester should be done the best you can do. You will create an introduction that broadly introduces your topic, then gradually takes your reader through increasingly focused discussion that results in your thesis. Your thesis should describe precisely what your essay will truly be about and how you will talk about it, hinting at the main themes your discussion will include.

Your body paragraphs should begin with a topic sentence that describes the single main idea your paragraph will talk about; the best topic sentences will also provide a transition from what your last paragraph discussed (remember that all transition sentences begin new paragraphs—they don’t end the old ones). The sentences after that should move into detailed discussion of the paragraph’s theme that is based on what your sources have to say on that theme, paraphrasing (or quoting, where necessary) the sources’ information and providing whatever citation is appropriate for the source without fail, in MLA style. What your sources say on that theme is the basis of what and how you talk about it; you write about it in your own words, but you always mention your source as support. Your paragraph’s last sentence should make clear briefly how this discussion is related to your essay’s overall mission.

Try to organize your body paragraphs in a way that will help the reader follow your ideas more easily; in other words, remember the “Vancouver Island marmot” essay and how that writer put her discussions in a certain order that helped them make more sense and flow better. What information should you begin your essay with that will help your reader understand your detailed discussions and ideas Do you need to explain first a little about what it is Provide a little history Also think about where you want your essay to end up—what you most want your reader to think about and remember—and figure out how to organize your essay to build toward that.

Your conclusion should begin with a sentence that reminds us of the overall big theme of your essay and the main point you are trying to make. Your next few sentences should briefly describe your body paragraphs’ main ideas in the order you wrote them, reminding us what discussions you led to talk about your big theme in detail. The last sentence or two should think ahead about what all this might mean and where things are going—in other words, give us some last thing to think about as a way of closing the essay.

Your bibliography will be a separate page that is not counted as one of your five. It will look like the one in H & S on p. 173. You must look through the book’s listings of different types of bibliography entries to find the ones that are the correct ones for the types of sources you’re using. Lay them out as the examples show. We will review your page as part of our overall peer review on May 9.

We will meet in a study room in Rosenberg Library on May 2 & 4. On those days, I will meet with you one at a time for a few minutes to talk about your rough drafts, which are due in class on April 27. The schedule for those conferences will be provided by that day. We will need students (one for each day) to go online and reserve a study room for those days for class time—say maybe 12:30–2:30—as I am not allowed to do so (only students can make a reservation); the student should let me know which room has been reserved so that I can put it out with the schedule in email.

This assignment engages all four learning outcome goals on page one of the syllabus.

Always feel free to consult me with questions.