Language and Composition Final Essay 2011 Draft #1



Language and Composition Final Essay 2011 Draft #1 DUE DATE: ________________

Assignment: Students will write an essay that develops an argument through various approaches and appeals to effectively achieve their purpose.

This assignment has four requirements:

• Your essay must have stated at the beginning what it is you want to argue for or persuade someone of. Note: I don’t care if this is in a paragraph or not. You can simply write this as the first line of your paper. We’ll decide later if you want to state it directly in your paper at all, or where the best place for a statement like this would be.

• Freewrite/Brainstrom/Develop—No bullet points. You must write using a variety of approaches to argue your point (I suggest four different ways.) Maybe these approaches will fit nicely together, maybe they won’t. I don’t care right now. Just get as many developed ideas down as you can.

• Your essay must be in MLA format.

• Your essay must be a minimum of 4 pages.

Homework Grade 50 points

This will be an all or nothing homework grade. You either have ALL of these things or you don’t.

Essay Topics:

Education

1. According to Francine Prose, “Education, after all, is a process intended to produce a product.” Examine your school or another part of an educational system (for example, your school district, a Montessori class, a private religion-affiliated school). Describe specific parts of the educational process, and the “product” they strive to produce. Think of this as a cause-effect essay, with the process as the cause and the product as the effect.

2. High school class of 2035! What will high school be like for the next generation? Write and essay explaining what changes you anticipate for high school sin the not-too-distant future. Will the high school be pretty much the same as yours? Will students interact with teachers solely online? Or will future students face a backlash to a more traditional model? What books will students be reading? Will they be reading at all? Can you imagine yourself as one of the teachers?

Work

1. Which of the following quotations mmost accurately captures your attitude toward work or the professional life you hope to have? Write an essay about why the quotation speaks to you.

a. Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and Play consists of whatever a body is not oblige to do. –Mark Twain

b. There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted. –Albert Camus

c. Never work just for money or for power. They won’t save your soul or help you sleep at night. –Marian Wright Edelman

d. Work for something because it is good, not just because it stand a chance to succeed. –Vaclav Havel

e. In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: They must not do too much of it: And they must have a sense of success in it. –John Ruskin

2. Write an argument defending exorbitant salaries or fees paid to athletes and movie stars. Develop a logical argument with clearly drawn reason—or write your response as a satire.

Community

1. Cell phone, email, chat rooms, social networking sites, blogs, and other electronic communication have made our world smaller and increased the pace at which we live life. Have these inventions also given us a new sense of community or opened up communities that would otherwise be closed to us? Or have they lowered our standards of what community means?

2. Write an argument defending what you see as the central issue facing boys and young men in our society. Recommend at least one way to address the issue.

3. What makes a man?

4. In his book Men are from Mars, Wonmen are from Venus, John Gray write, “A man’s sense of self is defined through his ability to achieve results….a woman’s sense of self is defined through her feelings and the quality of her relationships.” Write an essay supporting, challenging, or modifying these statements.

5. Write a personal narrative in which you describe a role that your family or friends expected of your but that you either refused to play or struggled against. Explain the origin and nature of the expectations, as well as your reasons for not wanting to fulfill it. Include a discussion of the reactions you have gotten as; you challenged the role or expectation.

Sports and Fitness

1. Write an essay explaining whether sports is a healthy or unhealthy influence on teenagers’ thought about body image.

2. Discuss how the sports world’s and the media’s idealization of the human body undermines physical and mental health.

3. Write about your own philosophy of life. In your essay, explain your thoughts on how to improve humankind, and examine the ways you have practiced what you preach.

Language

1. Choose one of the follow quotations, and explain why it speaks to you.

a. Who does not know another language, does not know his own. –Goethe

b. Languages are the pedigree of nations. –Samuel Johnson

c. Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

2. Some believe that the Internet is improving writing skills because everyone, especially younger people, spends so much time e-mailing, instant messaging, blogging, and chatting in forums. The very fact that young people are writing so frequently is bound to increase comfort level and may lead to the development of a creative style, they claim. Others argue that such activity only degrades writing skills because the language used is so informal, often a series of abbreviations, and the communication is usually a rapid-fire response rather than a sustained discussion. Write an essay explaining whether you think that writing online (in whatever form that might take) has a positive or negative impact on a person’s writing. Feel free to use your own experience in your discussion.

Science and Technology

1. Write an essay predicting how technology will affect human beings in 2050. Alternatively, write a short story set in that year, illustrating the future effects of technology on daily life.

Pop Culture

1. Is television beneficial or detrimental to society. Analyze a contemporary television series according to the criteria Steven Johnson supplies in “Watching TV Makes You Smarter”: multiple threading, flashing arrows, and social networks. Use your analysis to counter an anti-television argument.

2. Each of the following statements addresses the subject of media. Select one that interests your, and write and essay that defends or challenges its assertion. To support your argument, refer to your own experience with media and to the selections in this chapter.

a. The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news, we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were. –David Brinkley, TV network news anchor

b. Whoever controls the media—the images—controls the culture. –Allen Ginsberg, poet

c. If you want to use television to teach somebody something, you have first to teach somebody how to use television. –Umberto Eco, philosopher

d. Visual chaos is not good for anyone. Billboard companies should not be allowed to sell what they don’t own—our field of vision and our civic pride. –Meg Maguire, president Scenic America

Nature

1. What is our responsibility to nature?

Politics

1. George Orwell says of the imperialist, “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.” Write an essay exploring the implications of this statement.

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