Papers

Professional Narrative

Revise the professional narrative you produced for BGS.

Paper #4: Research Project

Description:

Pick a current controversy involving local public policy. Identify who has authority over that decision: it might be a council, a board of trustees, a committee, an electorate, etc. That authority will be your audience. Imagine that you are part of a public policy decision-making staff whose job is to advise that authority. For example, if the policy is a city policy, you might imagine yourself working for the City Council. If it is a College policy, you might think of yourself as working for President Benson, SGA, the Faculty Senate, a particular department, etc., depending on the issue.

  • Thoroughly research the issue.
  • Sketch the current and relevant older history of the issue.
  • Determine who are the stake-holders or interest groups.
  • Refute the argument(s) that most threatens your thesis
  • Contribute your own arguments

Research Paper Format:

The final version of your paper should be about 6-8 pages long, not including your Works Cited page. You do not need to conform to any particular format, but you might consider the following as suggestion:

  1. Introduction

      establish the issue

      interest your reader

      establish your ethos

      deliver your thesis

  1. History

      narrate the relevant background

  1. Provide your own arguments
  1. Refute the best argument against your thesis
  1. Conclusion
  1. Works Cited page

You must use MLA parenthetical citations, according to the Purdue OWL website.

This project is the culminating work for the semester. It is important that you end strong, demonstrating to me the level of research you can do and how well you can persuade readers.

Grading emphases

This is your culminating work in HONS 110, so I’m going to be looking for several things:

  1. proper attribution and documentation of all sources
  2. strong inductive and sound deductive arguments
  3. appropriate ethos
  4. clear sentences
  5. well-organized paragraphs

 

 

Op-Ed

Write a 500-word op-ed piece on some local public policy controversy of your choice. That might be a matter of police/criminal justice, housing, gentrification, transportation, education, taking down Confederate monuments, etc. But it needs to be a real, current controversy.  Pick something you’re interested in, because you’ll be working on it for the next month or so.

You should introduce the general issue, define the particular public policy, offer your opinion on that proposed policy, and defend your opinion with some arguments.

Readers: the readers of the Charleston Post and Courier

Documentation should follow MLA style as illustrated at the OWL website.

Due date: 2 November

Paper 2

Write a 900-word essay arguing that the city of Charleston should have or should not have “taken” Longborough Park through its power of eminent domain. A persuasive essay will make use of several documents we’ve read so far this semester—for instance, Kelo v. New London; the Comprehensive Land Use Plan; demographic information from the U. S. Census, Social Explorer, or the Kaiser Foundation; and the Post&Courier articles concerned with the Longborough development.

Your paper must contain at least one fully-developed refutation: an evaluation of someone else’s inductive or deductive argument.

Your own arguments must be well-reasoned according to the terms we’ve used to analyze and evaluate logical argument so far this semester. You should also attend to your own ethos.

Note: due dates have changed:

Draft of your refutation due: 30 September

Final draft of the paper due: 5 October

 Readers: the readers of the Charleston Post and Courier

Documentation should follow MLA style as illustrated at the OWL website.

 

Paper 1

[Here’s an example of an A paper.]

Write a 750 word essay arguing that student life at the College of Charleston is a “bohemia” or is not a “bohemia.” You will want to draw upon your summary of “Boundaries of Bohemia” to establish a definition of that term. And then use your own experience and whatever other evidence you can to persuade your readers that your thesis is probably true.  Turn the paper in through the DropBox in OAKS.

Readers: fellow students in our class