Essay 3: Proposing Change Within an American System or Institution
Background: For Essay 2, you learned about and critiqued one specific American system or institution in light of its racial/systemic bias. Essay 3 will ask you to pivot. You will focus on your Essay 2 topic, but rather than critiquing, you will propose change with the intention to persuade. Worth up to 150 Essay points.
Prompt: In an essay of at least 2,000 words, respond to this prompt: Propose some type of meaningful, reasonable change in policy or procedure as a means of mitigating or reducing racial bias within a specific American system or institution. Use at least 4 credible sources, at least one of which originates from OneSearch. (Do not use a dictionary or encyclopedia as a source.) Include a works-cited page, which does not factor into the word-count.
Audience: Write to persuade a skeptical audience by “selling them” on your idea and its effectiveness. How will this inform the approach and the rhetorical tools you use in your argument? (Review elements of persuasion in your textbook.)
Some considerations/paragraph ideas:
- What level/who is responsible to implement this plan/policy/practice? (local, state, national)
- What would such a plan/policy/practice entail (funding, time, training, among many other factors)?
- What would that look like and how might it be achieved?
- Who is the intended group for implementation? Would it affect other groups/people?
- Timeframe for implementation?
- How might this plan/policy/practice gain support?
- Any successful comparisons or examples, or reasonable speculation about its potential effectiveness?
- Potential downsides and/or limitations of this plan/policy/practice?
- Counterparagraph: What about….? Yes, but…?
Warning: Stay focused on the prompt! While your intro will contextualize the issue and your body paragraphs may refer to some of the problems, in this essay you are not critiquing and evaluating the system or institution. Your primary task is to propose reasonable, even achievable, solutions and to convince skeptical readers of their necessity/importance.
Assignment details:
- To support your ideas, use at least 4 credible, approved sources. While you do not have to use an academic or peer reviewed source, at least one of your sources must originate from OneSearch. Do not use a dictionary or encyclopedia. Again, all of your sources must be approved by me before you proceed. If you find new sources during your research process, do not move forward with them until I’ve given the okay.
- Intro and thesis: Keep it under ¾ of the first page.
- Include more than three body paragraphs. For this particular essay, I suggest at least six. One body paragraph should address opposing views. All body paragraphs should include at least one source, well integrated and cited. Rule of thumb: if your body paragraph reached one full page or more, see where you can break it into two paragraphs.
- MLA page-layout: 1” margins; 12-pt. TNR font; double-spaced from start to finish. Include a title and paginate. Use MLA formatting when introducing and citing sources and format the sources in your essay as they are formatted on the works cited page.
- Provide a correctly-formatted works cited page that includes all of the sources used in your final draft. The works cited list does not count toward the word-count minimum.
- Turnitin score should be under 12%. You will get a chance to test-run one of your final drafts and lower your score, if needed, before submitted your essay.
- Your analysis should be written with college prose; that is, using complete sentences, correctly spelled words, and lacking grammatical errors. It should show evidence of having been proofread, too (no typos).
