Here we are with the final essay! I'll have the third essay returned in the next day or so (other college projects have been interfering with my time reading and responding to your work). This final assignment gives you a bit more leeway in choosing your topic, but we're still looking at the upcoming elections.

The biggest difference this time around is you are expected to familiarize and use some of the research tools available. The one that is best, and your other teachers will expect you to be able to use, is ProQuest, a collection of publications and articles in an online database. You can access this through the SFCC Library website. click on the Article and Reference Databases link and from there click on ProQuest. At this point you will be asked to login if you are off campus. Use your student login that you use to get grades, register for classes and the like.

click on the "read more" link below.

The trick with any database of this sort is finding the right search terms. There is little scientific in how this works. It is very hit or miss. You just have to play around. One of the assignment requirements is that you find a source that is no more than six months old via ProQuest. First, click the box near the bottom of the screen that says "full text articles only." For instance, if you are looking at why Obama would (not) be the best choice in the upcoming elections, you would search using "obama, "election," and "2008" for starters. When you do that, you'll see, along with the results, that there are other subject headings to search and you should try those. If there is a particular issue you want to look for, plug in "health care, or "defense" or what have you. With something like "defense" you could couple that with the search term "or" and a second term such as "military." Since these two things are very closely related, they should return similar articles, whether supporting him or not will have to be determined by looking at each article, or it's "abstract," which is a brief summary. One of the other headings this brought up was "elections and defense." Follow these suggestions and keep trying new things.

When you are choosing your sources, you will have lots of choices, from scholarly journals, to magazines, to trade publications, to newspapers and government and other references and reports. Generally speaking, you want to go with the scholarly journals because they have been vetted. What makes these the more reliable source is that before they are published, they are sent to readers with expertise that bears directly to the article. They will send it back to the author with comments to address and the essay won't be published until the readers and editors, all of whom are experts in the field, are satisfied. While not fool-proof, this keep shoddy information, most of the time, from getting through (the book gives us a good instance where this broke down, but it happens in academia, the media and just about everywhere, but at least there are safeguards.) These scholarly journals are written by experts for other experts, so they are often tough sledding. Generally speaking, you want to stay away from publications such as Us, People and the like. They are purely entertainment publications. When it gets to the Time and Newsweek type publications, you are on more solid ground. Other publications, one of which is in the news this week is Mother Jones regarding the Iraq invasion and supposed forged documents (if I'm keeping things straight), will provide some solid investigate journalism on a variety of topics. Follow the advice of the text, engage in due diligence, and your sources will be reliable. I'll let you know if they aren't.

A second major difference is the structure of this essay: Aristotelian argument format. This calls for your to introduce your topic, show why the reader of your essay should find your claim valid, but to then provide an opposing view, which you then rebut/counter and finally conclude. This format has been around for several thousand years and remains a favorite of academics because it works for a variety of reasons. One is that it forces you to look at what is wrong with your argument when you provide the merits of the opposing view. There will be no proving anything one way or the other, but instead showing how your view is valid and worth considering. For instance, we can't prove that Obama or McCain will be better than the other as president, though we can present evidence in favor of one or the other. the only way to prove it is to have them be president in parallel universes with the same conditions and see who does better (after agreeing upon what "better" looks like, probably impossible in and of itself). But we can argue that one's approach to health care, defense or the economy is likely to produce more favorable results based on a particular set of criteria.

A number of you have indicated that you don't follow politics or care about politics, that whatever will be will be (I won't break into a Doris Day song here; that would show my age more than I have already done). If you still feel that way, which I hope you don't, you can argue that whoever is elected president won't really matter all that much because of W, X, Y, and Z. Of course, you opposing view would have to look at why it does matter (for instance, I think it safe to say that if Al Gore had won in 2000, while we would have troops in Afghanistan, there is a strong, strong likelihood we wouldn't be in Iraq, and the Supreme Court justices appointed in the last few years would not be so conservative; that much (the justices) we can be sure of.) Maybe you think these things don't matter in your day-to-day, and maybe you are right. The point here is that you can go in a variety of directions with this assignment. As long as you make use of the argument format, base the argument on something from UnSpun, and incorporate your research effectively, you can take on a wide variety of topics. I'll post more later. Time to get back to reading and responding to your essays. Let me know what questions arise as you move forward.