Report Essay

Setting Up a Thesis and Internal Citations for the Report Essay

Your report’s thesis will be an unbiased one, therefore this thesis will show both sides of an argument. To do this, you will adapt the SIRS Issues Researcher question atop the two columns of suggested YES and NO articles that appear when you click on your chosen topic.

Sample on “Popular Culture” from the SIRS List

Does the spread of pop culture harm society?

YES NO

Pop culture is responsible for a large degree Pop culture has the ability to broaden

of social deviance. learning methods.

Both perspectives should be covered in a two-sided thesis, as below:

Regarding the question of whether pop culture harms society, opinions are split. As detractors argue that pop culture is behind social deviance, supporters argue that pop culture increases the spectrum of ways to learn.

In a similar manner, take the SIRS question affixed to your own topic and convert it to a two sentence thesis by using paraphrase and summary skills.*

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*NOTE: This will not be the thesis for your argument essay.

After you have written a thesis, take a fact from the first article in the YES column, and write a sentence incorporating that fact (as quote, summary, or paraphrase). As below, you will correctly cite the source before the period ending the sentence. Use the author’s last name or the title (in quotation marks) and the page number, unless the source has no pages. Use titles when authors are not listed.

Rebecca Collins of the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls says that pop stars are “rebroadcasting (…) a broader societal message that women’s value is in their sexuality” (qtd by Oldenburg and Thompson A1).

As done here, you will cite a fact and tell its source:

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