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:
1. “What Bush Should Have Said,” by Joe Klein.
2. “What We’ve Learned,” by Nancy Gibbs.
3. “The Nation That Fell to Earth,” by Niall Ferguson.
4. “It’s Not Over Yet,” by Max Boot.
5. “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