The following is the prompt that your paper will be about:
For this assignment, you will write a three- to four-page essay that grows out of your reading, your discussion, and your thinking about delayed gratification. Your audience for this paper is students who will be arriving at your institution next year. Your essay, if accepted by the college’s New Student Orientation Committee, will be included in a packet of information new students will receive to help them understand how to be more successful in college.
Think deeply about delayed gratification—what it is, when it is a good strategy, and how one might be successful at doing it. Support your argument with information from the articles you have read or others you locate yourself and/or with examples from your own life or from the lives of people you know.
If you want to use your sources most effectively to support your argument, it’s not enough to simply include them as a series of unrelated sources; you need to tie them together, explain their relationships with each other, and express your conclusions about them. This process is called synthesizing, and it is discussed in more detail in Synthesis (22.14).
Because your essay is an argument, you will want to follow the conventions for arguments. You may want to review these conventions in What Is an Argument? (18.1), The Features of Effective Arguments (18.3), and How to Answer Counterarguments (18.5).
Documentation. If you do quote, paraphrase, or summarize material from the articles you have read, be sure to provide appropriate documentation and to include a works cited list or list of references at the end of your essay. If you need to review how to provide this documentation, refer to MLA Documentation (Topic 23).
The above prompt means that this essay is a Persuasive Argument. Your purpose in this essay is to intelligently argue a point in order to persuade your audience to, at the very least, be open to your point of view. The most important aspect to this is your use of evidence. This is when SHOWING is at its simplest and most natural. Most of us find it natural to back up what we say if we are trying to get a point across to someone. Your job is to use this already established skill in a specific way to persuade the audience you’ve chosen. This is also where the research comes in. It is also very important to make sure you are including counter arguments to establish credibility with your audience and strengthen your argument by stripping your audience of any offense or defense they could use to disagree.cIn this case, your goal is to argue that incoming students should understand, appreciate and practice delayed gratification in specific situations that would benefit them, and why.
For this assignment, there will be three drafts The first draft is the outline for the paper, for which there is an example below. The outline is not what will end up being 1000-1250 words, but drafts 2 and 3. Once your outline is completed, you will research for and complete your second draft, which should be a completed version of your essay which will be peer reviewed by some of your fellow classmates. The third draft, which is the Final Draft, will be the final version of the essay that I will grade, and it should include revisions based on feedback from your peers. Again, it is only the second and third drafts that will be 1000-1250 words, not the outline.
The requirements for this paper are that it demonstrates an understanding of argument as a mode of expression, that it provides a solid, substantiated argument which is clear and linear, that includes counter arguments to solidify your position as well as your ethos, that lacks in grammar and sentence structure mistakes, and, of course, that makes good use of research.
As mentioned, you will be doing research for this paper. There are helpful materials in the textbook reading and on Canvas. The sweet spot for a paper of this length is 3-5 sources and 6-10 in text quotes and/or paraphrases.
The following is a basic outline of this kind of essay:
Thesis: Beauty pageants set young girls up for a physically, mentally and emotionally unhealthy life because parents push their daughters too hard, there is a possibility of an inescapable rift between parents and child, and girls can end up tying their self worth to their looks or even end up with body image issues.
Body Paragraph 1
Topic Sentence: Beauty pageants are known to cause parents to push their daughters to perform.
- Some parents like to live vicariously through their children.
– Parents are supposed to guide their children through the children’s interest, but living vicariously through children tends to put the parents’ personal interest above what is best for their children.
– Parents may believe that they are just trying to teach their daughters a senseof competition, but there is a point at which that turns to greed to win causing parents to push too hard.
Body Paragraph 2
Topic Sentence: Pushing a child too hard can cause a permanent rift in the relationshipbetween child and parents.
– Trust is an important component in parent/child relationships, and pushy parents can damage that trust.
– It is difficult for a child to maintain respect and communication with a parent that she lacks trust in, but that she perceives to only be interested in her success in what is, essentially, a meaningless hobby.
– It is easy to say that any child will have difficulties in her relationship with her parents, and that it usually passes, but when those difficulties arise due to behavior that borders on abuse, they may end up being too much for love and family connection to overcome.
Body Paragraph 3
Topic Sentence: More damaging even than a damaged child to parent relationship is the fact that beauty pageants cause young girls to grow up believing that their worth is tied to their looks.
– Awards being handed out for the way girls look is a disgusting practice that ignores the intelligence, humor, kindness and other things that are more important and impactful on society.
– There is already a societal problem with too much of a girl’s self worth being tied to her looks, and further promotion of that problem, especially by parents, can only make it worse.
– Sure it’s true that little girls like to play dress up and look pretty, but when that innocent act is pushed into a competitive drive, that idea of looks being a measurement of worth begins to rear it’s ugly head.
Body Paragraph 4
Topic Sentence: It only takes common sense to understand that body image issuesfollow assigning too much worth to outward appearance.
– Females with body image issues are willing to do things that damage their health in order to improve what they perceive to be less than ideal body.
– If someone who ties a lot of her worth to her outer appearance further experiences inner or outer disappointment in her body, she will feel worthless, regardless of what else she has to offer, and more dangerous attempts to fix the perceived problem may follow.
– There are those that would argue that a person with body image issues simply needs to understand her true worth and can receive professional help to get to that point, but the problem is that this person was taught to focus on outer appearance at an early age, and years of perceiving herself in an unhealthy way is not easy to turn around, even if she feels comfortable with, or is aware of, the fact that professional help may be needed, and there have already been years of damage done.
Documentation Style BuilderYour instructor would like you to follow MLA style guidelines for this assignment. Certain elements of MLA require additional page headers or sections. As you draft, you can use buttons in the side panel to add page numbering and Works Cited sections to your draft.Source CheckSource Checks allow you to check your drafts for potential plagiarism prior to (if enabled) and during submission. Source Check reports show you possible types of plagiarism that might be present in your work, paired with content that will help you evaluate and fix any problems.Add Documents to the DatabaseEditDraft(s) will not be added to the database.Identify Similarity Types• Exact Match: Contains identical language to sources on the web or in the database• Close Wording: Uses nearly identical wording (e.g.; “slow” becomes “slowly”)• Close Structure: Maintains close sentence structure with synonyms replacing original textExclude from Source Check• Quoted materialReport Frequency• Student may run up to 2 reports per draft until due dateWhat’s Included in Source Check Report?• Similarity Analysis• Flagged Material• Source Matches• Recomm