Summary and Response

For your first essay, you will utilize the skills of summarizing and persuasive writing to construct a response to one of the two articles we read for this unit. You will choose to respond to either Charles Murray's "Are Too Many People Going to College" or Sanford J. Ungar's "The New Liberal Arts." In doing so, you will have to summarize key aspects of the author's essay and articulate a response, asserting your own rationale and evidence to support your position. Although you may need to locate and use secondary research to defend your claim, you should not use research to make your argument for you. (Do not, for example, use someone else's ideas to form your topic sentences.) As such, you should limit your external research to two sources.

Organization:

Introduction:

1. Identify the debate and the central issue at stake. Try to avoid cheesy, oversimplified statements like liberal education vs. vocational training.

2. Identify the author and text to which you are responding, and summarize the primary argument of the author.

3. Offer a response to the author that includes reasons supporting your position. (This response is your thesis statement.)

Body Paragraphs:

1. Articulate one of the reasons supporting your position.

2. Indicate how this position responds to some point made by the author.

3. Quote and/or paraphrase from the author to summarize his/her position.

4. Provide evidence to support your own response. Conclusion:

1. Reassert your primary argument without repeating your thesis verbatim.

2. Indicate the "so what?" of your argument by identifying what the consequences are of not seeing the issue in the way you have just characterized it. Do not oversimplify here and fall into the trap of the either/or fallacy.

3. Acknowledge the next steps. If we agree with your argument, what are the practical steps that come next? These steps can come in the form of concrete actions that individuals or the government can take, or these steps can come in the form of mental changes that need to happen for us to address the topic more effectively.

Technical Guidelines: Essay must be:

1. Formatted according to MLA guidelines.

2. Three to four pages

3. Contain no more than two secondary sources, not counting the article to which you are responding.

4. Contain a Works Cited page.