Essay 2 Assignment Sheet English 1302

Essay 2

• 5 – 6 Pages (Any essay short of the 5-page minimum 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. In other words, I would like everyone to stay within the page-length range.)
• 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.

This project serves as the final stage of our exploration into rhetoric and argument. You are required to take a position on a current issue/event, direct your position toward a target audience, and attempt to persuade this audience of the legitimacy of your position. This project asks you to put into practice the major objectives of the course:

• Analyzing the ways in which ideas are presented through rhetorical designs;
• Recognizing rhetorical designs in an effort to encourage refutation (dialectic);
• Using rhetorical designs to engage in argument;
• Considering how argument can function as “meaningful disagreement”;
• Using argument as “meaningful disagreement” to learn more about our own identities and commitments and to perform acts of community;
• Achieving “meaningful disagreement” through the effective assessment and incorporation of research (“ongoing conversation”).

You are required to use no LESS than five and no MORE than six sources (at least two of your sources must come from the HCC databases). Please keep in mind that you will need to locate, examine, and evaluate roughly triple this amount in order to find five to six relevant, on-topic, reliable, and authoritative sources. You will pull the bulk of these sources from databases such as ProQuest Research Library, Academic Search Complete, Academic OneFile, and Project Muse. You will create a works-cited page for this project, following MLA (9^th edition) formatting style.

To put yourself in position to complete this essay, you need to choose an appropriate topic and start working toward developing an argumentative approach to it as soon as possible. To help you achieve such a goal, this week’s Discussion Forum requires you to 1) commit to a topic; 2) come to terms with what you know about it; 3) examine potential secondary sources in relation to the topic; 4) develop a working thesis for your argument. See the Discussion Forum exercise in Canvas for details and the due date.

Potential topics, but by no way a comprehensive list, taken from research papers written by 1302 students over the last several semesters:

• Environment (Houston or nation water quality/supply, a recent EPA rollback of an environmental regulation, cap and trade, drilling in the arctic refuge, hydraulic fracturing, climate change issues [not the general issue itself, but instead some specific element intrinsic or related to the issue], etc.)
• Immigration (militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, the Dream Act, temporary guest worker program, asylum protocol, sanctuary cities, deportation policies [perhaps ICE round-ups], the H-1B Visa program, the border wall, etc.)
• Sports (compensation for student athletes [NIL and other measures], NBA’s age eligibility rule, use of technology in the officiating of professional sports, unionization in collegiate sports, expansion of college football playoff, etc.)
• United States Supreme Court (number of justices on [“court packing”], term limits, etc.)
• Changes being made to federal government agencies and departments
• The impact of social media on politics/democracy (government regulation of TikTok, foreign government troll farms, etc.)
• Outsourcing (Offshoring)
• Farming practices (use of antibiotics in livestock, laws that criminalize the documentation of animal abuse, federal subsidies, etc.)
• Houston’s approach to zoning policies/historic preservation
• Houston post-Harvey (home buy-out programs, re-establishment of flood plains, construction of new reservoirs, etc.)
• Inner-city revitalization projects (in Houston, consider the build-up in the East End and the Wards)
• Gerrymandering (redrawing of congressional districts that occurs with each census)
• Education (cuts made to the Education Department, cuts made to research/grants funding, dress codes, recent decisions of the Texas Education Board, state of primary, top ten/eight/six percent rule, charter schools, vanguard and magnet programs [especially as they are being assessed by HISD], use of technology in teaching, role of public school pre-k programs [Head Start, for example], teacher shortage, the four-day school week, etc.)
• Incarceration practices in the U.S. (public/private, purpose [punishment/rehabilitation], racial dimensions, sentencing practices [reform], solitary confinement policies, etc.)
• Law enforcement practices in the U.S. (stun guns, body cameras, training, types of policing, etc.)
• High-speed rail in Texas
• NASA/American space program (perhaps Houston’s continued role in)

Considerations:

As the first line of the prompt asserts, Essay 2 is meant to be an argumentative position paper. It is not intended to function as a report on or review of a topic/issue. On occasion you might have to review/report on an aspect of your topic in an effort to provide sufficient context, but the central goal of the essay should be argumentative—taking a position on an issue, or more particularly an aspect of an issue, and developing a persuasive argument around your position.

It is a good idea to choose a topic you already know something about or want to learn more about. In general, the more engaged you are in the topic, the smoother the process will play out. You also want to make sure to choose a topic that is argumentative by default (many topics/issues are amenable to a variety of viable argumentative positions, such as dress codes in schools, or the privacy practices of social media platforms) or that can be made to be argumentative (some topics/issues are not exactly amenable to a variety of argumentative positions, such as humans should eat healthy food [who would disagree, offer an antithetical position, here?] or murder is not good for society [again, who would you be trying to convince of this?]). In the case of the first type, you will just need to build a solid base of knowledge on the topic/issue, establish a specific argumentative approach to it, and set out to develop this approach—using your own critical voice and the voices of your sources—over the course of your essay. In the case of the second, you will need to massage the topic/issue a bit to locate a suitable entry point for your argument (perhaps arguing for a government program that makes healthy food more accessible to certain communities, or arguing for a type of educational intervention that reduces the rate of murder in certain communities).

Work to set specific parameters for your approach to your chosen topic. Avoid any attempt to approach a topic in a broad, wholesale way (such an approach will almost certainly end up becoming a review/report on the topic, which is not what Essay 2 calls for). Instead, identify a specific aspect of an issue on which to focus your argumentative attention. For example, let’s say that you want to craft an argument around law enforcement practices. Your first step should be to winnow down that topic to a manageable focus, such as increased training for community policing programs. Your next step should be to narrow down that topic/approach even further, perhaps looking at a specific type of program, or limiting your approach to the community policing practices for a certain state or city or even neighborhood in a city. In short, specific topic parameters lead to a specific argumentative approach.

Identify a specific audience that you plan to target with your argument. It is up to you to decide whom this audience will be. For example, if you choose a topic in the field of education, depending on what your topic is and how you plan to approach it, you might target public school board members, or perhaps school administrators, or maybe even federal or state legislators, on and on. You should work under the assumption that your target audience disagrees with your position (holds an antithetical view to yours, to phrase it according to dialectic) on the issue. As a result, your argumentative objective is to draw this target audience into your argument and attempt to convince this audience of the legitimacy of your position. You should also seek to practice prolepsis (one of the rhetorical moves we examined, which is an act that attempts to anticipate the target audience’s responses to the claims being raised in the argument) on your audience in an effort to demonstrate both your awareness of the issue and your proficiencies in acts of communication.

Essay 2 Prewriting (Discussion) Exercise 

For an assignment such as Essay 2, it is absolutely imperative that each of you choose a topic as soon as possible (see the prompt sheet for the kinds of topics that are acceptable [essentially current event/issue topics] for this type of assignment). After choosing a topic, you need to begin researching it, working to become knowledgeable of its important dimensions and current constitution. Following that, you need to decide how you might approach the topic argumentatively, where you want to place your attention and why (if you have not already, please carefully review the “Considerations” section of the Essay 2 prompt sheet for important details about the assignment’s end goals). Many other important steps follow, which we will cover in the weeks ahead, but they are not possible without the ones stated above. Hence this Pre-writing Discussion Forum.

In my many, many years of experience as an English instructor, I can say for certain that procrastination is a student’s worst enemy when it comes to research-based writing. This Discussion Forum is designed to combat procrastination. If you happen to wait too long to do the initial work of a research-based assignment, you will put yourself in a bind that you may not be able to wiggle out of. Research-based writing assignments require time and commitment. Do not discount these requirements. I have designed the class around making sure that you will have enough time to do the necessary work, but the work still needs to get done. This Discussion Forum asks you to articulate your initial efforts in getting that work done. 

Respond to the following questions. For full credit, follow the directions, meet the requirements, and match the structure as it appears below.

1) Your topic (be specific). Respond in a sentence or two;

2) What you know about the topic. (Have you had conversations with friends and family members about the topic? Have you listened to or watched news reports on the topic? Do you have some sort of personal investment in the topic [experience, professional goals, etc.]? Do you have some other interest in or point of contact with the topic? Etc.) Respond in two or three full sentences;

3) The research you have conducted on it so far. This response should come in two parts:

Part I: provide a synopsis of the base of knowledge you have put together on the topic so far (a quick summary of what you have gathered from the sources you have looked at [a two-or-three sentence response to this part of the question will suffice]);

Part II: provide the following information for one source in particular: A) Full name of the author (Ex: Richard Perkins); B) Title of the document (Ex: “The Good Old Days.”); C) Name of the source (Ex: Wall Street Journal); D) Author’s background with the topic (Ex: lead researcher in a study on the drawbacks of microloans) or relevant credentials (Ex: professor of economics at M.I.T.); and E) a 75+ word critical annotation of the source;

4) Your working thesis (a concise and cogent sentence [or two] that attempts to lay out the specific argumentative approach you plan to take on the topic).

Annotated Bibliography Prompt (Submit the Annotated Bibliography Here) 

English 1302                                                  

Annotated Bibliography                                         

The Annotated Bibliography serves as a pre-writing assignment for Essay 2. It requires you to do two things, both of which are written into the name of the assignment: to annotate (make notes on, or in this case produce critical summaries/assessments of sources [see details below]) and to produce works-cited citations (bibliographies), following MLA-formatting guidelines, for a few of your potential sources for Essay 2. This assignment is designed to meet a practical purpose: to inaugurate the knowledge-building that is necessary to complete the type of persuasive essay called for with Essay 2. 

For the Annotated Bibliography, you will cite and annotate (in your own words, which is the whole point of the annotation process) four of your potential secondary sources for Essay 2. After locating and reading four sources (magazine or newspaper articles, scholarly journal or trade publication articles, book chapters, or relevant and reliable internet sources [please keep in mind that most of your sources need to come from the HCC databases]), annotate each source in at least 150 words. Your annotation will be derived from your responses to three questions/evaluative categories:

1) Publication date of the source. (Questions to address: does the date of the source affect how you might use it? Is the source current/timely?) Because you are writing a current event/issue argument, you will need to find and incorporate current/timely sources if you want your argument to be compelling/pertinent. Of course not all of the sources need to be current (you might choose one or two that allow you to cover the history/chronology of an issue in an effort to show full and sharp understanding), but up-to-date sources are necessary for effective argument;

2) Information about the author. (Is the author credible and authoritative [expert in the field; professional journalist; etc.]? If information about the author is not intrinsic to the source, i.e. if the publication or the author do not provide details about his or her connection to the material being presented in the source [often times the author will announce her or his connection to the field/issue in the opening paragraphs], type the author’s name into the databases and see if you can find evidence of her or his credibility/authority. You can also conduct a Google search on the author, but make sure that the sources that Google links you to are legitimate and credible);

3) A summary and critical assessment of the source. For the summary, do more than superficially summarize each source; rather, cover points that speak directly to not only your topic but also the specific argumentative approach/angle that you are taking toward the topic. For the critical assessment, apply the relevant evaluative criteria provided in the Unit II module of EO under “Evaluating Sources.” Conduct this assessment to determine the usability of the source for your argument.

What you need to do:

• Cite all four of your sources, using MLA (9^th edition) documentation style;
• Arrange, as required by MLA documentation style, the citations according to author’s last name or the first non-article of the title;
• Produce an annotation for each source that responds to the three questions/evaluative categories outlined above.

The citations/annotations that make up your annotated bibliography should look like this (be certain to model your submission on this structure/form. This is meant to be a straightforward assignment; do not make it more complicated than it is intended to be):

Zamora, Quintis. “The Politics of Illness.” Health Law Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 4, Dec.

     2024, pp. 77-98. Project Muse, muse.jhu.edu/article/395205. Accessed 16

     Nov. 2025.

1) While Zamora’s article is over a year old—it was published in the winter of 2024—many of the issues he covers in the article have been discussed in recent politicaldebates over health care policy. His points about a single-payer system are still applicable to . . .

2) Zamora points out that he is a law professor at the University of Illinois law school. After conducting a quick Google search of Zamora, I found out that he has published an assortment of articles and books on the government’s role in providing citizens with medical care coverage. In the late 1990s, Zamora served as chief of staff for Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago.

3) The article outlines what Zamora sees as some of the future problems with private health care and . . . Zamora’s position seems a bit too emotionally charged. He provides only scant evidence to support his argument and too often narrows the focus of the debate to his own ideological pursuits. Zamora . . .