Essay 1 Workshop Worksheet with Objectives/Requirements Checklist                                              

Essay 1 Workshop                                          

Dr. James Wright

• Characterize the writer’s ethos. (How is ethos being presented? Sarcastic, facetious, balanced, subjective, objective, hyperbolic [excessively exaggerated], dogmatic, angry, etc.?) How does the writer’s ethos affect the argument (the writer’s ethos should be delivered in a way that creates audience engagement [remember that presentation style—pace of delivery, grammar and mechanics, development of ideas—are ethos-related issues as well])?

• Examine and comment on the thesis statement, introduction, organization, presentation/development of ideas (claims and support), and conclusion. Some questions to consider: Does the argument flow smoothly (look at transitions and paragraph formation)? Is the essay well structured (are some ideas [words, sentences, paragraphs] out of place, underdeveloped, overdeveloped, etc.)? If so, provide suggestions to remedy the problems.

• How does the writer address the issue of public engagement with multiculturalism? Is her or his mode of analysis related to the major mandate of the assignment (see the prompt about this and remember that essay 1 does not call for a general discussion of multiculturalism; rather, it calls for a specific argumentative position to be taken toward the issue of public engagement—does America, Houston in particular, need more active public participation in multiculturalism)?
• Does the writer do more than summarize the four cited sources, i.e. does she or he examine the issues critically and provide acute insight, based upon her or his own ideas and those taken from the sources, into the issue of multiculturalism? Does the writer fully support, via development and analysis, all of her or his claims? Does the writer use her or his claims to advance the thesis?

• Does the writer effectively incorporate citations from the unit texts and database articles into the essay? Does the writer make the reader aware of why the citations are significant to his or her focus? Does the writer properly introduce or conclude all citations (take another look at the coverage of source incorporation strategies and guidelines in this unit’s EO material) with his or her own voice? Are the citations relevant to the writer’s purpose (do they fit the writer’s argument and are they germane to the writer’s intention[s])?

• Do you find that the writer has allowed the sources to speak for her or him? If so, suggest some ways this can be avoided (the writer’s own critical voice should be the primary director of the argument). If the writer is paraphrasing/summarizing a secondary source, can you tell where the paraphrasing begins/ends (the writer should inform the reader of where source material begins and ends)? Can you think of anything that will improve the writer’s use of source material?

Are the basic mandates of the assignment being met?

Yes   No

□       □ The essay is at least four full pages?

□       □ The writer has constructed an appropriate and engaging title for the essay?

□       □ The writer has established and sustained a clear argumentative focus?

□       □ The writer has produced an essay that directly addresses the prompt 

               requirements (the author attempts to persuade an audience with an

               argumentative position)?

□       □ The writer has cited and used in critical, effective, and correct ways four sources

               (two from the in-class texts and two from the HCC library databases)?

□       □ The writer has effectively and correctly used in-text citations, following MLA

               guidelines throughout?

□       □ The writer has created a works-cited page following MLA guidelines (9^th ed.)?

□       □ The writer has created an interesting, clear, and well developed introduction?

□       □ The writer has created unified, cohesive, and well developed body paragraphs?

□       □ The writer has delivered steady and cogent insight into the topic, and has not just

               raised points only to immediately leave them behind?

□       □ The writer has composed a readable, grammatically clear and mechanically sound

              essay?

Essay # 1                                                        

English 1302                                               

Dr. James Wright

Opening Comment:

• Expectations for Essay 1 are much higher than they are for the discussion forums. As I cover in “Discussion Forum Grading Rubric and Posting Instructions,” the evaluation of the discussion forums is based on three things: 1) meeting of deadline; 2) meeting of requirements; 3) level of effort put into the submission. The evaluation of Essay 1 is much more involved, and is based in a much fuller range of criteria. These criteria are directly established in the Grading Profile for Essay 1, which will be made available in the next couple weeks.    
• As mentioned in the class schedule and other resources, a tutor-reviewed rough draft will need to be submitted along with a final draft when the essay is due. Any final essay submission lacking a tutor-reviewed rough draft will be penalized 5 points. See “Tutoring Requirements and Upswing Submission Instructions” for information on the review process.   

◙          Using two of the essays of this unit—Volokh’s “The American Tradition of Multiculturalism,” Mukherjee’s “American Dreamer,” Saulny’s “Black? White? Asian? More Americans Choose All of the Above,” Michaels’ “The Trouble with Diversity,” Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Blumgart’s “The Invisible Segregation of Diverse Neighborhoods,” Kim’s “How Do L.A.’s Ethnic Communities Keep Their Identities While Living with Others? Just Read the Signs,” Herrera’s “Why Democrats Are Losing Texas Latinos,” and Staples’ “Just Walk On By: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space”—and two outside (secondary) sources, write an essay to the Houston Chronicle arguing for or against a deeper public engagement with multiculturalism. Please do not feel compelled to take a rigid (dogmatic) approach to the issue. You may examine the issue in terms of degrees and gradations, if you wish, and suggest that some approaches to multiculturalism, including the institutions (educational, religious, political, and so on) they represent, are positive while other forms are negative. In the end, however, make your case for a specific approach to the place of multiculturalism in the institutions, symbols, and social practices that make up the United States. Create your own approach, but make sure that it is related to the central mandate of the assignment—arguing for or against a deeper public engagement with multiculturalism.

To help you make your argument (to set up, promote, defend, etc. your points), you are required to cite material from four sources—two from the above list of in-class essays and two from outside sources that you will locate in the HCC databases. You need not simply adhere to the positions conveyed in the sources; feel free to refute the ideas/themes/passages of the sources as well (remember that refutation, in the Socratic form—dialectic—and in terms of Kastely’s notion of “meaningful disagreement,” is a democratic necessity). You should not expect your four sources to speak directly to one another or offer the same insights into the topic. Therefore, you will need to work diligently to identify some connections among the sources before you sit down and begin writing your essay. In other words, you need to determine how you plan to connect your source material to your overarching argumentative focus before you start to compose your essay.

Length and Structural Requirements:

• Follow guidelines listed in the “Assignments” section of the syllabus (Compose the draft on a computer or word processor. I will not read any handwritten drafts. Always double-space to allow room for revision, comments and overall easier reading [please note that there should be no additional spacing between paragraphs]. Use 12 point Times New Roman Font and standard margins [1 inch top and bottom and 1.25 inch left and right]. Always title your essays, using original titles. Save all work.);
• 4 – 4 ½ Pages (Any essay short of the length requirement will be penalized. The severity of the penalty is determined by how short the essay falls of the length requirement. Although I typically do not penalize essays that exceed the length requirement, for this essay I want everyone to make careful choices with their material and thus generate compact, precise essays.);
• Cite and fully analyze passages (see all relevant course resources and the links in “Class Readings” on incorporating direct quotations, summaries, and paraphrases) from both the in-class sources and outside sources. You are required to incorporate into your essay two of this unit’s in-class essays and two outside sources. For the outside sources, be aware that you will need to locate, examine, and evaluate roughly triple this amount in order to find two relevant, on-topic, reliable, and authoritative sources. You are required to pull the outside sources from databases such as ProQuest Research Library, Academic Search Complete, Gale Academic OneFile, and Project Muse. You will create a works-cited page for this project, following MLA (9th Edition) formatting style.
• Important note: Avoid plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty. For additional information on plagiarism, see my statement on academic integrity in the syllabus and here, and view the coverage of plagiarism in our class readings. Also, the use of any AI chatbot constitutes academic dishonesty. Turnitin, which is an application through which the Canvas system runs all submissions, now includes an AI detector. Any submission that exhibits evidence of plagiarism and/or AI use will receive a grade of 0. Moreover, a report will be filed with the Dean of Student Success for a violation of the HCC Academic Integrity policy.

Some key considerations:

• Develop a focus for your essay before you begin the drafting process, perhaps conducting a couple of prewriting exercises to help you generate and refine points that will become significant to your argument (see “Class Readings” and other pertinent course resources). Given the nature of the assignment, this is a deeply important step, and one that should not be taken lightly. If you fail to decide upon an argumentative strategy before you start writing, you will inevitably fashion a loosely structured, ineffective essay that will not engage, let alone persuade, the reader;
• Establish an approach, which should be argumentative, that does much more than generically address the four cited texts. Generate your own argumentative approach to the topic (taking a position on more or less public engagement with multiculturalism) and develop that approach using your own critical insights along with some of the insights generated by the authors of the texts you choose to cite. In other words, the passages you cite from your chosen texts should play a purely strategic role in helping you achieve the overarching purpose of your own argumentative pursuits (in general, your essay should have a minimum of four citations [one from each of your four sources] and a maximum of six/seven citations. If your essay has eight of more citations, you are moving in the wrong direction);
• Provide all of your points/claims with full and sharp coverage; make sure that you establish clear and relevant connections among all of your points and source citations;
• Work to create cogent introductory and concluding paragraphs and unified, cohesive body paragraphs (see “Class Readings”). Carefully examine each paragraph to determine how it is focused, structured, sequenced, and developed (do you have a strategy for each trait? You should).
• **While it is acceptable to incorporate some personal anecdotalLinks to an external site. material into your argument on occasion, Essay 1 is in no way intended to be a personal narrative. What this means: if you find yourself writing the story of your life, or part of your life (or the story of someone else’s life, such as a family member’s life), you are moving in the wrong direction.**

Brainstorming Strategies:

To prepare for Essay 1, I would like everyone to take a look at a couple of sites (site 1 (Links to an external site.) and site 2 (Links to an external site.) [these sites can also be found in our Class Readings under “Brainstorming”]) that provide some astute and practical coverage of the prewriting process, particularly brainstorming. As you will notice, the Essay 1 prompt, while directly related to the Unit I topic (multiculturalism), is rather open-ended. This is by design: I want to create space for a variety of argumentative approaches to the topic. What this means is that each of you will be responsible for 1) identifying an aspect of the topic on which to place your argumentative attention, and 2) establishing a structural approach through which to carry out your argument. This cannot be done, obviously, a day or two before the essay is due. And that is where prewriting, including brainstorming exercises, comes in. Along with helping you to generate ideas for and thus put yourself in position to craft Essay 1, the material presented in the sites above will provide you with strategies for moving organically, yet deliberately, through the writing process. I have also provided you with another prewriting resource in our Unit I module that is a bit more specific to Essay 1.

Please see the schedule for the week’s readings (from Herrera to Staples [both versions]). Make sure that you read all of the texts and complete any assignments connected to them. 

After completing this week’s reading, review the Prompt Sheet for Essay 1. Essay 1 requires the incorporation of two of this unit’s sources, those referenced in the schedule, and two HCC database sources. To get up to speed on the HCC databases, please review the “Information on Databases” page, complete the HCC library’s on-line orientation, and take the corresponding quiz.

This week’s coursework is also designed to introduce everyone to correct and effective source incorporation strategies/requirements, which are necessary for Essay 1.

I cannot stress enough the centrality of the source incorporation process to the crafting (on your end) and the evaluating (on my end) of Essay 1. As the prompt lays out, Essay 1 requires the use (citing) of four sources–two from the class readings and two from the HCC databases (this is a strict requirement–your two outside sources must come from the HCC databases). It is absolutely imperative that you effectively (following the strategies established in two of this week’s instructional resources–“Source Incorporation Guidelines, Strategies, and Requirements,” “Source Incorporation Walk-Through,” and the third section of the “Class Readings“) and correctly (following MLA guidelines, which are available in Unit I) incorporate your sources into your essay. What is important for Essay 1 is the application of effective and correct source-incorporation strategies. Therefore, once again, cite all of your sources according to the guidelines and strategies covered in this week’s resources and the ones to come in the following weeks. 

I had planned to make the Grading Profile for Essay 1 available next week, but I have decided instead to release it now in an effort to provide everyone with a clear sense of how the grading, and the evaluative criteria, of Essay 1 varies significantly from that of the discussion forum assignments. 

Also, please spend some time reviewing and considering how you might put into practice in Essay 1 the material covered in the following resources: “Titles and Introductions (Opening Paragraphs)” and “Essay Writing: Focus, Idea Development, and Voice.”

Finally, the midterm is scheduled for late this week/early next week (see the schedule). A midterm study-guide, which will also cover how and when the exam will be taken, will be made available near the end of the week. Until then, to put yourself in position to take the exam, make sure that you are up to speed on all of the course readings and resources.