Essay #3 “Exploring Your Major”

Context: Throughout the semester, you have been analyzing your personal experiences as well as other texts such as movies, readings, and songs. The final paper will incorporate the skills you’ve already learned such as critical thinking, analyzing, summarizing, evaluating, and integrating sources along with sharpening your persuasive technique and defending your argument with research. 

For this essay, you will be working within the realm of your chosen major. What does that mean? Well, you are free to explore any topic as long as it fits in with your major. For example, if you’re an Art major, you might write about how many public schools today are eliminating the arts in place of extra Math and English courses. Or, if you’re majoring in nursing or a health related field, you could write about the use of marijuana for Alzheimer patients. As you will discover, this is a pretty broad topic, so the sooner you narrow down your ideas, the better off you will be. Now, what if your major is undecided? No problem! Chances are, you probably have a fairly good idea of where you’re going and if not, this is the opportunity to maybe figure that out. 

**In the end, my hope is that you will become more knowledgeable in some way about the career path you’ve chosen to pursue and more confident in writing research-based essays; I can guarantee that this will not be the last one you write in your academic career. 

Writing Task: You will be writing a 5-7 page research based persuasive essay.  By thoroughly researching your subject, you will situate yourself in an ongoing dialogue/debate.  It is vital to choose a subject that you find interesting, but keep an open mind while you’re doing your research. To build an effective argument, you need to present the best positions, which support your ideas as well as demonstrate why the best positions against your ideas (counter argument) are insufficient.

Topic Proposal: By Thursday, November 2nd, you must submit a topic proposal, explaining in some detail, the topic you would like to write about (This will be in the same format as a RJ). You don’t need to have a definitive thesis, but you should have a tentative one.  Also, you should include your research plan—What kind of research do you plan to pursue for your essay? What sources do you intend to use and why? We will also go over these in class that day.
      
Your essay should have:
•       A topic related to your major
•       A controlling thesis which states a definitive position
•       Cohesive, focused, body paragraphs that relate back to your thesis
•       At least four credible sources (see requirements below)
•       Summaries, paraphrases, and direct quotations of your sources
•       A Works Cited Page and in-text citations using MLA format
•       A logically progressive structure
•       Audience awareness (appeal to and educate your readers)
•       Style (sentence variety, an engaging tone)
•       Few sentence level errors
•       5-7 pages typed, double-spaced and formatted in MLA style

Requirements for Sources:
•       Your essay must have at least four credible sources.
•       You must include at least one journal articles (specialized or academic)
•       You are limited to two sources from general interest magazines (e.g. Time, Newsweek) and newspapers (e.g. Sacramento Bee, New York Times)
•       Limit your use of Internet sources.  Internet sources should come primarily from on-line journals
•       Do not cite general encyclopedic works (eg., the dictionary, the Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia) in your essay
•       Start as soon as possible
**You might consider interviewing or at least talking to a professor or professional in your field. This can really add a credible dimension to your essay. Talk to me if you’re considering this and we can discuss some methods for pursuing this goal.

**Remember that a well-researched paper will include a variety of sources.  Also, for academic papers, books and scholarly journals tend to provide the most credible information.

Note on Plagiarism: Like all essays written for this class, your research essay must constitute original work. Research essays written for other/previous classes will not be accepted. If your essay is not original for this class, it will constitute cheating, and disciplinary action will ensue.