Due Monday, 21 November -- Two Persuasive Essays

Due date: Monday, 21 November

English 1301
Angelina College
Mr. Hall

Persuasive Essays

1. You will write two itty-bitty essays arguing both sides of an issue. Employ both logic and emotion.

2. Write a brief essay, slightly more than a page, supporting an idea or proposition. Then write another brief essay, again more than a page, arguing against that very idea or proposition. Each itty-bitty essay can stand alone or, if you prefer, your second essay may respond to your first essay. Avoid prompt-dependence. As always, follow the MLA essay format.

3. Since you are arguing both sides, you will probably want to choose a topic to which you are not emotionally committed. Indeed, you should have some fun with this (Ford? Or Chevy? Desperate Housewives? Or House?) as a break from your dry, grim, serious research paper.

4. Each essay should employ complete MLA essay format.

5. Write in first- or third-person, although rhetorical questions addressed to the audience (My fellow Texans, how can you find this bizarre idea credible?) are permitted.

6. Don't forget to employ vivid verbs instead of relying heavily on weak state-of-being verbs.

7. Prompts are pretty much open except for abortion, sex, sin, satanism, suicide, terminal diseases, and other grim, depressing issues. You might, however, consider whether or not whoever invented television reality shows should be executed or given a life sentence.

John Steinbeck - "We have only one story"

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden

 

quoted in the webside Happy Catholic

Canada

Canada is God's second-favorite (or second-favourite) nation.

A Few Notes re Research Papers in MLA Format

A Few Notes re Research Papers in MLA Format

1.   The format never changes in a research paper.  Never use bold face or single space.

2.  The top and bottom margins for an MLA paper are one inch.

3.  The side margins for an MLA paper are one inch.

4.  An MLA research paper is written in third-person.

5.  An MLA paper is always doubled spaced.

6.  In the USA the dimensions for letter paper are 8½ inches by 11 inches.

7.  The thesis / thesis statement, for our purposes, states what the paper will demonstrate or prove, and is the first sentence.

8.  The writer of an MLA paper cites sources so that the research can be verified.  Citation is also a matter of honesty.

9.  Plagiarism is falsely taking credit for someone else’s work.  Avoid committing plagiarism accidentally by carefully re-reading and reviewing the drafts to make sure every source is cited.

10.  Plagiarism is unethical and, in some circumstances, a crime.

11.  A paraphrase or indirect quote is rewording a sources original wording, usually for clarity; a paraphrase or indirect quote is always cited, just as a direct quote is.

12.  Much knowledge is common, and need not be sourced – Columbus wandered into the Caribbean in 1492, Eli Whitney invented the concept of mass production with standardized parts, and the sun always rises in the east.  If in doubt, cite the source.

13.  Quotation marks are for direct quotes; they are never employed for sarcasm, even in informal writing.

14.  An ellipsis (three dots) (...) is used in a direct quote to indicate that the writer of the paper is deliberately omitting part of a quotation, usually for the sake of brevity.  Again, this is a matter of being fair both to the reader and to the source.

15.  Although some instructors distinguish between the two, for our purposes bibliography and works cited are synonyms.

16.  In a bibliography / works cited, sources are sequenced alphabetically.

17.  Never, never, never single-space any part of an MLA paper.  Never.  No.

18.  The reader’s last name and the page number, separated by exactly one space, repose at the top, right-hand corner of each page of an MLA paper.

19.  Except for direct quotations, the writer never begins a paragraph with the pronoun "it."  Be careful of pronouns.

20.  The writer's personality, sex, and culture never, never, never reveal themselves in an MLA research paper.  A research paper is about the topic, never about the writer.  Be detached and objective always.  This is quite difficult in our highly personalized, me-me-me culture.

21.  I’ve been negligent in noting this:  after an end-stop, always hit the space bar twice.  There are always two spaces between sentences in a manuscript.

22.  Occasionally take a look at the sample research papers provided.  They will help you greatly.

23.  In your inexpensive little book read the chapter on research, pp. 335-406, and on MLA documentation, pp. 409-454.  The model on pp. 449-454 is especially useful as a visual aide.

24.  If you use really large blocks of quotation, lengthen your paper accordingly.  No filler, please.

25.  Take a look at p. 451 for the spacing of a long (4 or more lines) quotation – indent 10 spaces on the left and do not use quotation marks.  For 1-3 lines, don’t indent and do use the quotation marks.  Also note that the internal citation varies.

Shakespeare Really Was Shakespeare

Don't buy into the 1920's theory that Shakespeare was actually Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford.  This wheezy hoax re-surfaces every ten years or so, promoted by folks eager to sell a book or a film.  Shakespeare really was Shakespeare.

From The Anchoress:

Oct 29th, 2011 by Elizabeth Scalia

There is a great phrase in U2′s The Fly, where Bono sings,

“Every artist is a cannibal
every poet is a thief
they all kill their inspiration
then sing about their grief.”

U2 was then in its Big Irony period, and the lyric is supremely ironic, as the first line of it was lifted from an interview with a British textual artist whose name I forget.

With the opening of the latest “Shakespeare could not have written his plays” conspiracy theorist’s latest entry, Anonymous, once again teasing imaginations, Allen Massie rolls his eyes at the notion:

What do Shakespeare, Keats and Dickens have in common, apart from being great writers, masters of the English language? The answer is pretty obvious. None of them went to university; to some extent all three were self-educated. Ben Jonson said that Shakespeare had “small Latin and less Greek”, and likewise I don’t think Dickens and Keats, despite the latter’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn”, had much of either.

What’s the difference between them? Nobody, I think, has ever suggested Keats didn’t write that ode and others, or that Dickens wasn’t the author of Bleak House and Great Expectations. But Shakespeare – ah Shakespeare – there’s a whole industry devoted to trying to prove that somebody else wrote his plays. So here we go again, with a movie from Roland Emmerich, entitled Anonymous, which hands the authorship to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

Never mind that Oxford died in 1604, some years before Shakespeare’s last plays were written and produced. Such considerations are a mere bagatelle when conspiracies are being revealed. Never mind that nobody at the time attributed the authorship to anyone but the man from Stratford. Evidently they were all fooled, even Ben Jonson, a fellow playwright who knew William Shakespeare and was not devoid of jealousy.

Snobbery is the reason for the nonsense. The “uneducated” Shakespeare, an actor and theatre manager, who attended neither Oxford nor Cambridge, could not – could he? – have had all the knowledge of Greece and Rome and Italy etc displayed in the plays.

Massie destroys the argument deftly: aside from death intruding on the theory, Massie notes that Shakespeare reveals what is lacking in his education through the plays, themselves.

What Shakespeare reveals above all is every artist’s gift for thievery; the ability to crib a bit of history, steal the musing of another, lift a snatch of conversation overheard in a pub and then stir it all up in the stew of one’s own not-unsubstantial reason and imagination and serve it up as something entirely new.

Of course, in once sense, it is all new — old stuff filtered, re-pondered and restyled. Fashion is like that. Fine art is like that. Music is certainly like that. And even blogs and op-ed pieces are like that.

...

Meanwhile, Francis Phillips says Anonymous should be ignored by all Shakespeare lovers. I agree. I’m not plunking down my hard-earned on it.

Monday, A.M. and P.M. Classes, Notes

1. Research paper assignment, three handouts:
A. Discussion of topics, possibilities, and that which is forbidden
B. The assignment itself and requisites for success
C. Time line

Those who were not in class missed a great deal of detailed exposition which will not be re-taught.  Missing class is not a matter of maxing out the misses short of being dropped, it is a matter of missing instruction, assignments, and exchange of knowledge.  There is no such concept as makeup work.

Okay, I'm nagging, but of necessity.  I want you to succeed, and you cannot succeed if you're not present.

P.M. class only -- rough drafts of narrative essays; everybody reads everybody.

All hands:

Check the official Angelina calendar for dates for withdrawal without penalty. 

Friday the 21st is mid-term proper; your mid-term exam will be offered on the week beginning the 24th, and will not be offered the following week.

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