Your work on this assignment will provide your instructor with insight into how he/she can most effectively support the work you do in ENGL 101. Your response will also help your instructor to determine if you would benefit from writing consultations at the Center for Student Success and/or a one-credit Writing Studio course. (For more information about scheduling a CSS writing consultation or registering for Writing Studio, please see "Getting More Help with Your Writing" in your 101 syllabus.)
Instructions: Please read the following prompt carefully. Then, develop an essay response in which you make a claim and support your position using evidence from both personal experience and the quotation (below) from Everything's an Argument. Your essay should be organized around a clear central idea or thesis and include supporting examples. You will have 50.60 minutes to complete this assignment in class. Feel free to take a few minutes to brainstorm your response on a piece of notebook paper or to briefly outline your main points to help you get started.
In Chapter One of Everything's an Argument, Andrea A. Lunsford and co-editors make the following claim:
...arguments are all around us, in every medium, in every genre, in everything we do. There may be an argument on the T-shirt you put on in the morning, in the sports column you read on the bus...in the assurances of a health center nurse that, This won't hurt one bit.'
The clothes you wear, the foods you eat, and the groups you join make nuanced, sometimes unspoken arguments about who you are and what you value. So an argument can be any text-written, spoken, aural, or visual-that expresses a point of view. (5)
What are Lunsford. Ruszkiewicz, and Walters arguing in this quotation? What position are they articulating? Based on your personal experience, do you agree or disagree with their claims? Do your own observations and/or experiences support the idea that 'everything is an argument" or that individual choices can make "unspoken arguments about who [we] are"? Why or why not? Make sure to provide evidence for your position with carefully-selected examples from books you've
read, television shows you've watched, and/or movies that you've seen.
If you have questions about the prompt as you get started, please feel free to ask.