Assignment
Here are a few more considerations as you think through your Issue Proposals. First, this is what the format should look like:
- Paragraph 1: Introduce the issue as you know it. The last sentence should be your claim, posed as an open-ended question. This question is arguably the most important part of the assignment.
- Paragraph 2: Describe why you find the issue compelling. In general, you should assume you need to avoid using the first person (I, me, my, we, us, our) or the second person (you, your) in any essay. For this paragraph (and the next), you may use first person.
- Paragraph 3: Describe what you already know about your topic and what you need to learn still.
Make sure the proposal has complete sentences and that each paragraph is at least five solid sentences in length. However, we won’t cover the details about formatting until it is time for your first full essay, the Exploratory. But feel free to get a head start on studying your format if you’d like.
Remember some important factors in choosing a topic. It must be debatable, with clear positions (ultimately, three or more). It must be something being debated now. But it must have been around long enough for you to find source material using our resources. This includes our book collection (or collections at libraries near you), including books you can acquire through Interlibrary Loan. It can also include our databases (articles from JSTOR or our EBSCO databases; dissertations or theses at ProQuest; scholarly reference works through Credo Literati). You should look to minimize website sources—read closely: you will only be allowed one purely web-based source for each essay you write! (Sources from our databases also exist in print, so they do not count as web sources.) If your topic is too new or too narrow, you might have a hard time finding scholarly sources.
And again, while you are allowed to do bigger or more controversial topics, I want to reiterate that it is often in your best interest at this point to avoid them. In particular, if you don’t think of writing or research as “your thing,” if you’ve struggled with courses like this in the past, taking on a big, emotionally-charged issue will very likely create more problems for you than it solves. Consider being a bit more offbeat, with debatable topics that are more specific to a discipline and less intense.
And remember that you must treat all sides fairly. Whatever position you choose, you must be able to read, understand, and articulate the best arguments from the opposing side(s), to use the academic Golden Rule and extend to your skeptical audience the same courtesy you would want them to extend to you in a debate. Think of how you feel when you are reading something you disagree with, and then realize that those feelings are what your opponents feel. Your goal is not to “win” the argument—it is (with the boundaries of ethics) to persuade someone who disagrees with you to agree, or at least (a more realistic goal) to come closer to considering your position. Real argument takes charitability, care, thoroughness, and patience. When I read your papers to grade them, I will be reading them the way an intelligent skeptic would read them (regardless of my own personal perspectives on any issue).
Dr. Reiter
My Work
The social scene has devolved from its standards in the late 1990s like the sinking of the Titanic; no one seems to have an answer, but everyone is hiding a lot of hate and their own view of and feelings in the past. The world culminated to a lot in "the 21st century;" people were often jealous of certain eras, like people born in the late 1950s and what it was like in the 1980s in comparison to the 1990s and onward indefinitely. People usually, however, at the time, treated the past with a "gay abandon" and claimed the future was cooler; the problem is that for some reason there is competition to be the best and different from others so that not everyone can feel their best, and people who are set as liking the future over the past rejoin the crowd, when it's too late somehow and when nicer people are remembering what their parents and grandparents taught them was of important value, completely innocent and requiring some effort and "perspiration." Basically, today, people are hypnotized with things in front of them to where they always react on an impulse and make things worse and blame others for their problems and put them down, to build themselves up socially, making it look like bad people have it together and good people don't, therefore meaning bad people are really accepted and good people are turned down as changed, like you can't trust what's most important physically and mentally. How can we solve a solvable issue without people thrusting their bodies into the situation like it's hopeless for them and that's all that makes them feel better and better, stopping others from getting things?
This issue is important because one of the most important things, love and "intimacy," are at risk. I know, first, I am willing to go through life about my business, but I keep being bothered about things people don't want me to earn that relate to things I need, want, and desire, "love;" I still feel like a child and feel that older people are like older siblings to me and I feel people want to fell that. People I know insist things are okay so that later they blame me for their unhappiness because I thought it was okay and that there was no way to help! plus, older people get involved and hurt me for it, just to give the other people what they want before they bother me more, though they are flawed as people themselves. I have gone through my life lacking satisfaction in intimacy from friends, parental figures, younger children, etc. etc., but other people seem so sedated they can't even focus on their homework or get anything of any worth out of it, "so they say," though in the end they have more comfortable lives and I'm the "starving artist" of music and of the other things I do in the arts. Posterity will not benefit when it's time for us to have babies and form relationships like families etc... if we do not get it together, but people are just jealous because it's not their kids they see now; our kids will be messed up if we don't get it together, and we accomplish that we feel they are very important like our predecessors did us because in this case us being parented by parental figures we love is just something on the side of this part of life. Marriage is not forever but "'til death do us part" and having children is until 18 years after the start!
Something everyone knows is that problems lie in the family and they say if a person their age gets love and affection from an older adult who is not their parent that their parents should be hurt because they didn't use them until their soul was sucked out, as opposed to leaving some for friends, etc. etc. It's strange because a lot of older people can like a nice young person, and people, the becomingly jealous peers, only go for some people, people who are easy to take advantage of socially, emotionally, personality-wise, and in other ways, maybe for the valid and ignored topic of mixed race, which is interesting to some only when convenient. Basically, the problem is that people learn to typecast people and notice when the best gets the best and all come out and say that their life was unfair and suddenly admit things they are and aren't just because they didn't get immediate gratification, despite whatever moral work they think they've done. So, people like to take out their problems on others first only to be more "comfortable" later, including in situations of affection; pretty much, they're allowed to fight and tease people for thinking they are better than they think and for not being perfect simply as a tool. So, are feelings of guilt avoidable these days or is it all test and not a reality for one person to love another, for whatever pre-existing reason, like because of other people, who "have it out" for people with better and more accomplished lives?
*I can find things to research, like the culture of the 1960s, for example, to use it as an appeal factor. I can find other important things, like the classical arts, and use it as a tool or hub for attention in people's subconscious. I'm not sure how to find the answer, but I can try.