Reference no: EM133263500

Question: For this essay, you will have the same topic and the same list of sources to work from, but what areas of the topic you focus on and which sources you choose to use will be up to you and will help make your essay unique. Your essay should answer the following question:

What is wrong with our education system and how could it be fixed?

Though your essay must address the topic, you should feel free to focus on an aspect of the topic that interests you. For example, your essay might consider how expensive college is and how it could be fixed, the structure of K12 instruction, gender differences in how students are directed from K12 through higher education, or another focus of your choosing. Review pages 4-13 in A Writer's Reference for examples of narrowing a topic to a thesis statement.

Your own ideas are your most important source for this essay; however, you will want to achieve an academic tone. As such, it means that if you use anecdotes (stories) of your own experience, limit the use of first person to the introduction as a technique to engage readers. Anecdotes might be used later in the essay, but 1) should not be the only source of evidence used to support a claim you are making, and 2) be recast in a more objective third person voice. Regardless of whether you decide to include such stories, however, your essay will be comprised mainly of your own ideas through your analysis, comparison, and evaluation of your other sources and through the framework you create with your introduction, conclusion, and topic sentences.

In addition to your own ideas, you must use at least FOUR of the sources found in the Course Readings Module in Canvas (available at the bottom of the course homepage).

You should develop your essay as described in the reading in sections A4 and C2 of A Writer's Reference. Your essay should smoothly synthesize your chosen sources with your own ideas in order to create a new, insightful perspective on educational reform.

A note on synthesis in a full essay: We've been practicing with synthesis by writing body paragraphs that include information on the same topic from several different sources. Your essay should include at least some synthesis for your chosen sources; however, it is not necessary that EVERY paragraph include multiple sources. The most important consideration is to organize your essay by topic, not by source. In other words, if only one of your sources addresses a given topic, it is fine to use it in a section by itself, but where multiple sources address the same topic, they belong together. It's also okay to use different amounts of information from each source; you might use one article in several paragraphs and another only once.

As you organize your materials and decide where each of your chosen sources will fit into your essay, you will also have to make decisions about when to use summary, paraphrase, and direct quotation. In particular, be wary of using too much direct quotation--ask yourself whether what you are quoting is really worthy of preserving word-for-word, or whether paraphrase would work just as well. (One direct quote in a paragraph is usually plenty, and not every paragraph needs one. A good guideline is that no more than 10% of any piece of writing should be in another person's words--and less is often better!)

Whichever you choose, make sure your summaries and paraphrases contain no unmarked borrowed language from the source, your direct quotations are accurate and punctuated correctly, and that all three have the author's name and where appropriate, a parenthetical citation.

You will work through this process by engaging in the Writing Process, starting with the Pre-Writing/Freewriting and Outlining Assignment you completed last week. Then you will put the plan into place by drafting your essay. You should spend some time with careful revision to ensure that your essay accomplishes the goal of the assignment and supports your thesis. After ensuring that the essay is doing what it should, you will want to engage in careful proofreading to be certain that the essay says what it is supposed to say.

You need to be sure to cite your source, both in-text/parenthetically anytime you incorporate ideas/words from the sources and at the end on the Works Cited page. The Work Cited entries are provided for you in the Course Readings ebook in Moodle, but you will need to incorporate the in-text/parenthetical citations according to the specifications in A Writer's Reference.