English—Last
Formal Essay —McFarland—Summer—2013
For this final paper, you will be asked to build an
argument/discussion in which you consider your attitudes/philosophy in light of
the concept of Education. You have had a chance to explore your point of view
about Education in series of blog posts. Most of the posts have been in
response to a written prompt or video, though some posts are a response to a
prompt that you came up with.
Now you are being asked to go back and read through
and think about your posts—you may also want to re-look at the video
prompts—and see if you can begin to shape a coherent discussion that links
these different posts into a single essay that situates you inside of
Education—what value does it have for you, what challenges do you face, what
strategies do you employ. The paper as well will be exploring your POV about
Education itself—its value, its challenges, its role in our society.
As you build this essay you will be drawing from 3
sources of writing: 1) the blog posts you have already created…2) new writing
you do to flesh out your thesis…3) transitional phrases and paragraphs you
create to stitch together your paper’s flow/argument.
You
will want to really think about how you want to organize the paper. You have a
LOT of material to draw from if you have been doing all the posts and writing a
lot inside each post.
You must integrate Into The Wild into this paper; quotes
from the book need to be included in your paper, as well as a consideration of
concepts that are found in the book.
You must
average a minimum of 3 short quotes per page. You should include more
than one quote per paragraph whenever possible. Quote length in a paper of this
length should be no more than 1-2 lines. Remember that the video prompts you
have watched are a great source of quote support.
The
essay’s page minimum is 7 full pages…(BNDJTM…)
Paragraph
topic sentences should start with concepts. Paragraph topic sentences should
also feature KEYWORDS, which are taken from the questions/prompts that you have
been exploring.
The
paper is due Monday, August 12th. First
draft is due August 7th. Best of Luck!!
You
will be emailing me the paper in a Word doc format. It should look like a regular
essay:
Send
paper to both addresses—attach the paper but also copy and paste it into the
body of each email,,,just in case the attachments don’t open. Thx!
You
should also put your paper in a post in your blog. (It should be posted the same
day the final paper is due to me via email.) Doing this will give you a lot of
freedom to really bring the paper to life. You can have words or phrases in the
paper be linked to some place on the Internet. For example, you can be talking
about Chris McCandless and link to a picture of him. You can link to education
statistics or charts, or to videos that relate to your point you are making. You
can link to an article that you pulled a quote from. You can divide up sections
of the paper with pictures/quotes/etc. There are limitless possibilities.
You will get
three grades on the final paper.
1. Content 2. Grammar
3. Blog post presentation
