Personal Response
Essay
Total Value � 5%
Due Date:
�
Monday-Wednesday Class: 1/24/07
Monday-Wednesday-Friday Class
1/26/07
General Guidelines:
- Page count: 2 full pages minimum to 3 full pages maximum, plus an additional
page, which is the works cited page. If your paper falls short of the
minimum required page count the grade will certainly suffer.
- Make certain that the essay has a thesis.
- Use MLA Style Guidelines.
- Use the formatting guidelines established during class lectures.
- Remember to title your essay in the form of a two part title. The
two parts should be separated by a colon, and neither part should read
�personal response essay.�
- Remember: this assignment is an argumentative essay, so it must
have a strong thesis.
Background:
- Students are writing about some of the current
issues that surround the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
- On September 11, 2006, Time Magazine published an issue entitled �What We Lost.� On
the first day of class, students were given a handout that consisted of
copies of the following articles from that edition:
- �What Bush Should Have Said,� by Joe Klein.
- �What We�ve Learned,� by Nancy Gibbs.
- �The Nation That Fell to Earth,� by Niall
Ferguson.
- �It�s Not Over Yet,�
by Max Boot.
- �Why the 9/11 Conspiracies Won�t Go Away,� by
Lev Grossman.
Prompt:
- Read the handout in its entirety, and be
prepared for a class discussion on our second class meeting.
- Bring the handout to every class meeting until
the final paper is due.
- We will spend class time discussing these
articles, so students do not have to work through an analysis on their
own.
- Students are to devise their own thesis and
argument over an issue related to these articles.
- Students must locate one valid outside source
and quote from it.
Criteria That Determines a Valid Outside
Source: (we will go over this at
length during class)
- You cannot use
magazines, websites, or any web-related material that can be reached with
just an Internet connection. In other words, you must use the OSU library
interface to use databases to which the OSU library subscribes.
- Your outside source
must be an article from a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, and the article
must have the equivalent of a works cited section at the end, which might
also be titled as one of the following: references, bibliography, sources
cited, and so on. Alternatively, there may be no such section at the end,
but the article might be footnoted throughout, which is also acceptable if
the footnotes give the publication information that is typically found in
a works cited citation.
- The article must be a minimum of five pages in
length, or it will be considered invalid.
- Do not use articles from anonymous authors, or they
will be considered invalid.
Other Important Points:
- In the final draft of your paper, quote from a
minimum of three of the Time
Magazine articles, plus the outside source, and use appropriate
in-text citations and corresponding works cited page citations.
- I have included an example works cited page
citation below.
- You are required to have four citations on your
works cited page, which means three of the articles from the Time Magazine handout, and a fourth
citation for your outside source.
- You are required to turn in your paper in a pocket folder, along
with a printed copy of all outside sources. Failure to negotiate this
properly will cost points. Do not turn in your project as a mass of papers
stapled together, nor should it be in a three-ring binder or anything
other than a pocket folder.
- You must also turn in an electronic copy of your essay to
turnitin.com prior to class on the due date, and it must be the same exact
version as the paper copy you turn in for final grading. To be on the safe
side, review section 13 of the syllabus under the subject heading �How to
Turn in Assignments.�
- Remember that MLA Style Guidelines are a critically important
element of this course, and if you negotiate them at an exceedingly low
skill level this paper will receive an unsatisfactory grade at best.
Example citation for an article in a magazine:
Grossman, Lev. �Why the
9/11 Conspiracies Won�t Go Away.� Time 11 Sept. 2006: 46-48.
|
Due Date:
�
Monday-Wednesday Class: 1/24/07
Monday-Wednesday-Friday Class
1/26/07