Paper details:

Essay #1:

Critical Reading of a New York Times Editorial

Note Lightbulb: Read these essay assignment instructions carefully and follow them precisely.

Many of the mistakes I see most commonly on the submissions for Essay #1 are a result of a student simply failing to follow instructions carefully enough, which results in that student’s failure to achieve the purposes of the assignment in his or her essay — which, in turn, results in the student failing to earn a satisfactory grade for Essay #1Scared!

So, please read ALL the instructions in this Week Four Module carefully before you begin working on any PART of this assignment– your process will be more effective if you “begin with the end in mind.”

Also, be sure to refer back to these instructions during your writing process to make sure you stay on track. At the very least, re-read them as part of your revision strategy, before you submit your Peer Review Draft of Essay #1 to your Class Discussion Forum next week.

We will use this essay assignment to work through the steps of an effective critical reading and writing process. So, we will begin our first formal essay assignment, starting with a series of pre-writing/planning “Writer’s Notebook” journal activities you will complete this week to help you prepare to write a complete draft of your essay, for peer review, next week.

These “Writer’s Notebook” assignments are described in other sections of this Week Four Module. However, before you begin thinking about them, first carefully read the instructions for Essay #1 itself, given below, so that you will understand how to make the best use of the “Writer’s Notebook” activities this week as tools to help you plan your paper and to develop material to integrate into Essay #1.
Essay Assignment

Essay #1: A Critical Reading of an Editorial Argument

(from “Editorials for Essay #1 section of this Week Four Module.)

The purpose of this assignment will be:

To better understand the principles of effective academic argumentation;

To practice the critical reading process described in both A Writer’s Reference handbook and, especially, in The Aims of Argument;

To practice and to develop an effective writing process;

To practice the following skills that you will need to develop (at the college level) in English 103:
Critical reading skills
Summary skills
Critical thinking skills
Analysis and argumentation skills
Writing skills – including planning, pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading skills
Organization skills
Time management skills
Peer review skills

To serve as a diagnostic tool for me to assess where each of you is at in your development of the following skills (so I can direct you to the appropriate resources and help you make a personalized study plan to improve upon them, as necessary):
Your sentence-level writing strengths and weaknesses,
Your essay-level writing/organization ability,
Your ability to summarize and analyze an argument for an audience who has not read the editorial for themselves,
Your critical thinking and analytical ability,
Your ability to cite sources, using MLA style documentation.

Topic:

Writing Assignment:

Essay #1: A Critical Response and Evaluation of a Newspaper Editorial Argument

Note: Consider the following description of the goals for Essay #1 very carefully — it is the failure to focus their discussion on achieving these goals or following these basic instructions carefully that commonly leads to students earning a failing grade on Essay #1 and having to start over Broken HeartSad!

For this first essay assignment, you will summarize and analyze the argument made in a newspaper editorial – from among the choices I have posted in the “Editorials for Essay #1” section of this Week Four Module, mostly from the “Opinion” or “Op-Ed” section of The New York Times.

Your GOAL will be . . .

To demonstrate whether or not the argument is an example of “responsible reasoning,” according to the four qualities of a responsible reasoner (listed below), as defined in Aims of Argument (8-10):Aims of Argument: A Text and Reader, 8th edition by Timothy Crusius and Carolyn Channell

ISBN: 1259284891

A Writer’s Reference, 8th edition, by Diana Hacker and Nancy Summers

ISBN: 1-4576-6676-6
1. Responsible Reasoners Are Well Informed (9);

2. Responsible Reasoners Are Self-Critical and Open to
Constructive Criticism from Others (9);

3. Responsible Reasoners Argue with Their Audiences
and Readers in Mind (9-10);

4. Responsible Reasoners Know Their Arguments
Contexts (10).

Important Note:
Your point is NOT to agree or disagree with the author;
BUT INSTEAD
The point of your discussion is to show your understanding of the qualities of responsible reasoning.

You will NOT discuss your own opinion or make your own argument on the topic of gun control that the editorial discusses.

Rather, you will analyze the argument the editorial makes, and assess whether or not it makes an effective argument for that demonstrates the qualities of “responsible reasoning.”

Brief Assignment Description:

Your essay will need to do all of the following (these points are explained in more detail below):

1. Introduce your topic for a General Audience of readers who are not in our class and who do not already know the purpose of your essay or the assignment you have been given;

2. State a Thesis about the quality of the reasoning in the argument made by the editorial you write about (This is the point about which you must take a position in your essay. You will not take a position about the issue the editorial is discussing (i.e. gun control), but about whether or not the editorial’s argument exemplifies
responsible reasoning);

3. Explain the purpose and the main point of the editorial you discuss;

4. Summarize the argument (briefly, but comprehensively) made by the Editorial to support its claims;

5. Provide any necessary background information about the issue your editorial is discussing that your audience needs to know to fully understand its argument, main point, and purpose;

6. Place your editorial in the context of the overall public debate over the topic it discusses (i.e. where does the editorial fit within the range of arguments made by the writers of other editorials on the topic, and/or where does it fit on the political spectrum – liberal, conservative, moderate, or something else);

7. Analyze and Evaluate the argumentation made by the editorial, including pointing out any logical fallacies and analyzing whether or not it is an example of “Responsible Reasoning,” according to the four criteria listed in the Aims of Argument.

Essay Organization:

This is an outline of how this essay should be organized:

Paragraph 1: Introduction – Your first paragraph must introduce the topic of your paper, including the following (not necessarily in this order, except for your thesis statement, which should come at the end of your first paragraph): Introduce issue the editorial discusses, introduce the editorial itself (including the name of author, title, and place of publication), provide basic background and/or context for the issue or editorial’s argument, attract reader’s attention, and end with thesis statement explaining the main point of your paper – for Essay #1 your thesis will argue either that the author does or does not make an argument that meets the criteria for responsible reasoning in his or her editorial.

Paragraph 2: Offer a comprehensive summary of editorial’s argument;

Paragraph 3: Evaluate whether author exemplifies first quality of a responsible reasoner in his or her argument (For example, the topic sentence should state either that the author successfully argues from a well-informed perspective or that he or she fails to argue from a well-informed perspective). In the body of the paragraph, in addition to providing detailed evidence (including direct quotations) from the editorial to support your evaluation, you must also summarize and quote from Crusius and Channell to explain this quality of a responsible reasoner for your readers (who have not read Aims of Argument). Remember, your goal is as much to explore what qualities make an argument responsible as it is to show whether this editorial argues responsibly.

Paragraph 4: Evaluate whether author exemplifies second quality of a responsible reasoner (open with a clear topic sentence and quote from both the editorial and from Crusius and Channell to support your evaluation);

Paragraph 5: Evaluate whether author exemplifies third quality of a responsible reasoner (open with clear topic sentence and quote from both the editorial and from Crusius and Channell to support your point);

Paragraph 6: Evaluate whether author exemplifies fourth quality of a responsible reasoner (open with clear topic sentence and quote from both the editorial and from Crusius and Channell to support your point);

Paragraph 7: Conclusion – emphasize the main point of your paper and leave readers with a final thought — about responsible argumentation, about the author’s argument in particular, about gun control, or about any combination of these topics — or otherwise give your paper a sense of ending.

Now, you do not necessarily have to evaluate the editorial’s argument according to all four of these criteria, if one of them does not seem to apply to your analysis of author’s reasoning directly enough. However, otherwise, this is the basic organization you want to use.

Note: You want to write a unified, coherent essay, but your editorial
may meet some but not all of the qualities of responsible reasoning. You must decide whether or not, on the whole, the author makes a responsible argument, but you should not try to prove it meets qualities it does not (or that it fails to meet qualities it does posses). So, part of the challenge for some of you may be in how to fairly evaluate the argument according to the four criteria while still making a unified argument about its reasoning.
Audience:

As is the standard practice for formal college essays, you will write your essay for a general academic audience, not for your classmates or instructors specifically. Academic essays are always written for a “general-skeptical” audience who does not know you, is not in your class, and does not know the purpose of your essay. This means your essay must convey all of this basic information to your readers.

First, you will summarize an editorial that your audience has not read. Your goal as a writer will be to help your audience to comprehend and critically assess the argument made in the “Opinion” editorial you select. You will write your essay with the assumption that your readers have not read the text you are writing about, which is the conventional practice of academic essays.

You also must establish credibility with your audience by . . .

Writing a clear, thoughtful essay that has been carefully revised, edited, and proofread;
Using logical reasoning ;and
Taking your audience’s needs as readers of your essay, possible attitudes towards your subject, and knowledge of your topic into account.
You must present yourself as a reliable source of information and a fair judge of logical reasoning so your readers will trust you.

Process:

Given that we have been focusing on process for the first month of class, this assignment is as much about the process we will use to develop it as it is about the final product.

Process: For Week Four, I will be assigning a series of specific journal exercises intended to prepare you to write the first draft of your essay in Week Five.

We are using this analysis of an “Opinion” argument as a way to practice pre-writing and planning processes, which become more and more important as the research projects you will work on in college get longer and more complex.

Basic Essay Requirements:
– Or, things your essay must be/have/do to earn a passing grade and serve the purposes of the assignment!:

Length: “How long should this paper be?” This is often the first question students ask me about an essay assignment. However, I do not like to give page or word counts for essays – because students often “pad” their essays to reach some arbitrary length. “Padding” is always bad writing, and it’s often very painful to read – it is far better to submit an under-developed, short paper than a poorly written, wordy, repetitive one that reaches a specific page count. Instructors specify page requirements to give you a sense of the scope, depth, and detail of a writing project. So, instead of giving you a page count, I will explain the basic points you need to cover and the level of detail in which you should discuss them.
[My Reasons for not giving specific page-count requirements are described in more detail in another section of this Module.]

Format: Your final essay should use the following formatting, which is standard for academic essays:
Spacing: Use Double-Spacing. However….
DO NOT double-space your paper by manually inserting a space between each line.
Use the paragraph formatting menu on your word processor, instead, and select “double-spacing.”
If you do not know how to set your word processor to automatically double-space your paper, post a question about it on the class “Questions” forum (be sure to include the specific word processing program you are using — i.e. Microsoft Word, for example) – and if you do know how to double-space your paper using the paragraph formatting editor on your word processor, post an answer for any less technically experienced peers who post questions.

Font Size: Use 12 point font,
Font Style: Use either “Ariel” or “Times New Roman” only, and do not use italics or boldface for the main text of your paper (these are used for specific purposes in academic essays – for example, book titles are placed in italics in MLA style papers, and either bold or italics can be used for emphasis, but should only be used sparingly, in a formal essay.
Margins: Use the normal 1” margins that are the standard default on most word processors — you probably do not have to adjust or set the margins, as your word processor will most likely already be set to the standard margins.
Title: Include an informative, original title,
I.e. do not simply title your essay “Essay #1” or use the title of the assignment as the title of your paper.
Instead, write a title that fits your paper specifically, rather than one that could describe any of your classmate’s papers.
Center your title at the top of your paper.
Sources: There are two required sources for this essay (but you may use additional sources, if appropriate):
1. Required Source: The editorial you elect to write about,
In addition to the brief, comprehensive summary of the argument it makes, your essay must contain direct quotations from the editorial — both to support your summary and to allow your readers to hear the author state important points that you intend to analyze in his or her own voice.
Generally speaking, good academic writing uses at least two or three direct quotations in each supporting paragraph;
However, you should keep quotations brief — quoting only or two sentences at one time.
2. Required Source: You will refer specifically to The Aims of Argument to discuss the “Four Criteria of Responsible Reasoning,” described in Chapter One (8-10), as your essay will assess whether or not the editorial you write about is an example of Responsible Reasoning.
Quote each criteria in Crusius and Channells’ words, directly — in the supporting paragraph where you evaluate whether the editorial exemplifies that quality (but it is best to do so after you state the topic sentence in your own words);
Also, quote from Crusius and Channell, as necessary, to help explain these criteria clearly to a General Audience.
Be sure to introduce Crusius and Channell by their full names (and give the title of their book) the first time you mention them (it is best to introduce them in the body of your paper, when you begin to discuss the first specific quality of a responsible reasoner) and thereafter, use their last names only in your MLA Style signal phrases to cite them as the source of words and information about “responsible reasoners.”
Additional Optional Sources: You may also want to use other sources to provide background information or to help you explain the context of the editorial’s argument. For example:
Since you will need to explain who the author is, you may want to look for his or her biography on the “contributors” page of the “Opinion” section of the newspaper.
Many newspaper editorials include links to other sources that they are commenting on, and it would be appropriate, for example, to cite some of these, especially when you are evaluating the evidence or expert authority your editorial uses to support its claims.
Also, many newspaper editorials comment on issues related to stories covered in the newspaper. You may want to search for articles about the issue your editorial discusses on the newspaper site to give yourself a context for the argument, and you may want to include information (either in direct quotation or using a combination of both quotation and summary) from other articles in the newspaper to give your readers the context, too.
In addition to Aims of Argument, you may refer directly to the section on “Evaluating Arguments,” in the “Academic Writing” chapter of A Writer’s Reference to help you evaluate the validity of the editorial you analyze for this essay.
MLA Style Documentation: You MUST attempt to cite sources all the sources you directly refer to in your essay (whether you summarize information from them or quote them directly) in MLA style, which you should have learned how to do in English 101 (I will use this essay to see whether or not each of you will need more instruction in documenting sources in MLA style).
I will not deduct points if you make mistakes in citing your sources on this essay – we are using this first formal essay as a diagnostic tool to tell us whether or not you know how to use MLA Style documentation correctly.
However, if you do not attempt to cite your sources, you will either . . .
Earn a failing grade (if you commit intentional plagiarism from a source), OR
Be required to revise the paper to include documentation (if you commit unintentional plagiarism because you do not know how to cite your sources properly in MLA style).
While I will use this essay to assess your documentation and provide feedback to help you improve on it, the points below explain the most correct, effective, way to document sources in MLA Style:
In the text of your paper: Use signal phrases frequently to name the author of the editorial, and use Crusius and Channell’s names when you quote from or summarize information about responsible reasoning from Aims of Argument, and any other sources you mention AND for print sources only, give the page number on which a quotation appears in parenthesis following the quotation (Note: Because the editorials for Essay #1 are all from the online editions of the newspaper, they should be treated as electronic sources, so you will NOT give page numbers for quotations. This means you will generally need a signal phrase only to cite those sources, and will not need to include a parenthetical citation. When you quote from or summarize a specific point from Crusius and Channell, however, you WILL need to give a page number in parenthesis):
For example: “Crusius and Channell define a responsible reasoner as “Direct quotation here” (#).
For electronic/Internet sources, you generally need a signal phrase ONLY, when you are quoting the words or ideas of the author directly and name that author in your signal phrase;
On your Works Cited page at the end of your Paper: Include an MLA Style entry on your Works Cited page for each source you cite in your paper, beginning with the author(s) name(s), listed in alphabetical order.
For more detailed instructions on how to correctly cite sources in MLA Style, refer to Chapter M, “MLA Papers,” in A Writer’s Reference, looking up and following the models from the “Index to MLA In-Text Citations,” and “Index to MLA Works Cited Page Entries,” for the specific type of source and situation in which you are using it.
Debate over Gun Control

Newtown:

Articles written after the elementary school Shooting in Newtown, Connecticut:

Editorial #1

Guns, Butter and Then Some

By

Mark Bittman

Aug 9, 2012

Back in the administration of W., we looked for the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That was the wrong place; they’re here at home. Normally the W.M.D. I write about is the Standard American Diet (yes: SAD); occasionally I talk about food safety, or climate change, or related topics. But no matter what you look at, the basic problem remains so-called leadership that cannot stand up to big ag, big food, big energy, Wall Street …or the N.R.A.

Since 9/11, 33 Americans have been killed by “terrorists”; roughly 150,000 Americans have been killed by non-terrorists: that is, your run-of-the-mill murderers. Murder, like the leading cause of death — heart disease — is often preventable, through regulations, education and medical intervention.

We don’t know why Jared Loughner — had you, too, forgotten his name before he reappeared in the news on Tuesday? — shot Gabby Giffords, but we do know that he told his shrink that he wished he’d taken the antidepressants he’d been prescribed before the shooting. We don’t know why James Holmes allegedly shot up the Batman crowd, but we do know he was acting in a weird manner, and though his analyst told the police he was troubled, there was no one to help him. We gather that the suicidal Wade M. Page was a racist so ignorant he didn’t know a Sikh from a Muslim.

In any event, none of them seem to have been capable of distinguishing right from wrong. The easy solution to that is to make gun purchases more difficult, especially for disturbed people who appear to think they’re part of some “solution” to a series of “problems” identified by hatemongers. (Remember Bill O’Reilly all but calling for the death of the “baby killer,” the obstetrician George Tiller?)

We already have laws and regulations to protect us from murderers, at least when we call them terrorists. We have our mouthwash and water confiscated, we take our shoes off, we’re bombarded by X-rays and herded like cattle, photographed and eavesdropped upon. If a Muslim had flown a small plane into a movie theater, do you doubt that stricter laws governing the use of private planes would have followed? Yet you can buy a semiautomatic weapon online almost as easily as you can a book.

Yes, no law is going to stop a crime of passion, but crimes of passion don’t kill people by the dozens; neither do knives or rifles. The opponents of gun control, like those of many progressive measures, spread doubt: “Gun control might not have prevented Aurora,” they say, or, nuttily, “If someone in that theater had been packing, they could’ve taken Holmes out.”

Similar statements that stall forward movement: “How do you know climate change is responsible for this drought?” “Processed food didn’t create the obesity epidemic; overeating and lack of exercise did.” “Our food supply is already the safest in the world.” “Financial regulation may slow the economy.”

It’s easy to say that without proof of direct causation you can’t justify regulation, but how many people died while the tobacco companies lied? Of course cause and effect is complex, but that’s no reason to ignore the smokiest guns.

This is where leadership comes in; you read President Obama’s statements after Aurora and Oak Creek, and each is nearly identical to the other, and for that matter to Mitt Romney’s.

Yes, we’re all sad; but real leaders lead. Though gun control is said to be too risky an issue for most politicians, didn’t we elect them for their judgment and will? Otherwise, why not govern by polls and Twitter?

[< Note: You might want to look at the article “Guns and Political Suicide” by Thomas B. Edsall, posted in the “Additional Articles” section of this Week Four Module, which gives interesting and surprising statistics about political opinions on gun control that refute the claim that gun control is as politically risky as it is generally assumed to be. For your convince, I will also post a link to this article here – “Guns and Political Suicide.”]

I suppose it goes without saying, but United States gun regulation is lax. Perhaps not generally as lax as it is in Arizona, where, says the F.B.I. agent Dave Voth (quoted in Fortune), “someone buying three guns is like someone buying a sandwich,” but lax enough so that we collectively own 300 million guns, more than there are adults in this country. (Even more than there are cars, and you know how we are about cars.) And despite Mitt Romney’s misstatements, most weapons used in murders, even semiautomatics, are bought legally — including the weapons of Mr. Loughner, Mr. Holmes and Mr. Page. In the United States, there are nearly three (2.98) gun murders per 100,000 people. In Britain, by contrast, where there were 18 gun homicides in 2009 (a rate of nearly zero — actually 0.03 — per 100,000 people), civilians can’t even possess pistols or revolvers. And there are records of gun acquisitions, sales and transfers.

We’ve experimented with little or no gun control. It doesn’t work. Let’s try something else: real gun control. That will work; after all, it was law enforcement officials and unarmed citizens — not vigilantes — who apprehended Mr. Loughner, Mr. Holmes and Mr. Page. Then perhaps we’ll be encouraged to move in better directions on other issues we need to tackle: Health care. Diet. Climate change. Our lives ride on all of these.