Your Writing Task, should you choose to accept it (like you have a choice, right?)

This will be the final writing assignment for the quarter (yay! or aah!). As the culmination of the term's efforts, your final essay is an argumentative research essay. You should argue for some particular point related to your reading of chapters six and eight of Jackson and Jamieson's UnSpun as that point relates to the upcoming presidential election, using evidence from outside sources to support your claim and opinion. Do your best to argue for something because that is a more effective rhetorical strategy than arguing against something. The outside sources can include interviews with experts, journals, magazines, books, radio or television shows, films, or any other source outside yourself that is reliable and authoritative. You have some experience with evaluating reliability and authoritativeness, so choose wisely. I'll provide some more on this in class.

The essay should take this particular direction: again using a passage from UnSpun as a spring board/starting point, you are to construct an argument for why your reader should vote for a particular candidate. You can use whatever researched evidence you like as long as it is authoritative and persuasive to a reader who either has not yet made up their mind or disagrees with you. If you don't want to argue for a candidate, you can argue that there is a particular issue that your reader should seriously consider as they decide upon who to vote for. The issue could be the War in Iraq, the environment (global warming, deforestation or some such thing), the economy, health care, education or whatever it is that you find important that has relevance on the national stage. You might also examine whether America is "ready" (whatever that means) to be led by a black man or a woman or any color or race. Historically, this is a big, big deal.

The essay is expected to contain a thesis that makes a point that should be developed using Aristotelian Argument format, which requires a clearly evident opposing view and its refutation. Each point made in support of this argument is required to have a specific example and an appropriate in-text citation, and a clearly established relationship to the thesis. Additionally, paragraphing, sentences, grammar and mechanics will be under review. Sources must be cited using proper MLA format both in the body of the essay and the works cited page, which is also required. Four sources minimum are required. Only two of these sources may be from the web and UnSpun, which will be used as well, does not count as one of your sources. One source must either be a book or journal (Proquest articles count) from the last six months. The essay should be about 1200 words in length and no more than 1500 (that's four to five pages double-spaced with a 12-point font).

See the following documents for more of the particulars.