Information Systems assignment

MODR 1760 - Essay Guidelines Pt. I General Guidelines

The starting point to writing a good essay is knowing what an essay is. An essay is an argument. The introduction (and conclusion) state and frame the thesis and the body of the essay provides the reason(s) why thesis is correct. An essay is not a summary (of a text, lecture, tutorial, etc.). The purpose of an essay is not to report what someone else thinks. The purpose of an essay is to convince the person reading your paper that your position on an issue is correct.

Index Structure of Essay. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1

• Intro. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 • Body (general comments). . . . . .2 • Body (dialectical essays). . . . . . .3 • Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4

Quotes and References. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Writing, Grammar and Formatting. . . . . . . . . . . 5 Academic Honesty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 ______________________________________________________________________________

Structure of Essay

An essay has three main parts: Introduction, Body, Conclusion.

Introduction The introduction to an essay should clearly state three things (these are sometimes referred to as the three P’s)

• Problem • Position • Procedure

In the first paragraph or so of your essay clearly and concisely lay out the problem or issue which your essay will address. Try to show that it is a genuine problem (i.e. there are or could be different views on the issue). Explain why the issue is important and/or interesting

• Pro tip 1: Be concise. You shouldn’t go on and on about how important the issue is. Your goal is to lay out the problem as efficiently as possible.

• Pro tip 2: Do not use rhetoric (e.g. “From time immemorial humankind has wondered...”) Just jump right in and state the problem clearly and concisely.

In the second paragraph or so of your essay, state your position or thesis. This is the most important part of the intro and shouldn’t be omitted. You should make it crystal clear what your position on the problem is. A good test method to make sure that you have a genuine thesis is to state it in a sentence which starts with “Although it could be argued that...”, for example,

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Although it could be argued that the the Palestinian Roots mural should be removed from the student centre, in fact it should remain where it is. (The italicized part is the thesis). Of course, you do not have to actually write that in your essay. This is just to make sure that you have identified the thesis.

• Pro tip1: Do not leave the thesis statement until the end. The reader of an essay wants to know exactly what you will argue at the beginning of the paper.

• Pro tip2: Do not have a thesis like “Both sides have merit and it depends on your point of view”. The reader wants to know which side is more plausible. If you can’t decide which side is more plausible, then you aren’t ready to write an essay on this topic.

On longer essays it is often a good idea to outline the procedure you will use to prove your thesis. You might write something like: “This essay will have three parts. In the first part I will show. . . Then, in the second part, I will show. . .etc”. This gives the reader an overview of your strategy, and this makes it easier to understand your overall argument.

• Pro tip: Dividing the body of your essay into sections with distinct sub-headings is an excellent practise. It makes it easier for you to organize and structure the argument, and it makes it easier for the reader to grasp it (think of how much easier it is to read an article that is divided into sections than it is to read an article that is just a big block of text). I have rarely encountered A-level papers where the body of the essay was not divided into sections.

Body - General Comments The body of the essay is where you lay out the argument(s) for your thesis. This is where you present the reasons why a reader should accept your position. These reasons should be as uncontroversial as possible. If you don’t think that the reader would immediately accept them, then you should supply sub-arguments in support of them. Imagine that the person reading your essay is intelligent and open-minded, but doesn’t agree with your thesis. Try to use premisses that you think this person would accept.

• Pro tip: Just because you accept something doesn’t mean that your reader will. You want the premisses of your arguments to be as uncontroversial as possible. If you happen to believe something that is widely disputed, don’t use it as an unsupported premiss in your argument.

Many students have been taught that an essay must have three arguments for the thesis. This is silly. If you prove your thesis with one argument, you don’t need to prove it two more times in two different ways? Quality counts more than quantity: I would rather have a single good argument than a million bad ones. Of course, there is nothing wrong with providing more than one argument for a thesis, provided that they are all cogent. But don’t feel that you have to do this.

Many students start the body of the essay by giving background to the issue (the background is usually a summary). This is almost always a bad idea. The person marking your essay already

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know the background to the problem, so you aren’t informing them of anything. Moreover, background is not an argument, so it does not provide the reader with a reason to accept the conclusion. Unless stating this background is essential for understanding your argument, it is better to leave it out.

• Pro tip: Don’t have a separate section of your essay devoted to background. If you need to provide background for the reader to understand a premiss in your argument, include that background at the time when you present the premiss.

Body - Dialectical Structure Most student essays only present arguments for their thesis. An alternative is to give your essay a dialectical structure. You are required to write a dialectical essay for this assignment. The dialectical section counts for about 50% of your essay mark.

A dialectical essay will have two main parts: a positive part and a dialectical part. In the positive part of your essay you present the argument(s) for your thesis. The goal of this section is to prove that your thesis is correct. In the dialectical part of the essay you will lay out an argument for the opposing thesis (a counter-argument) and then show that this argument is flawed. The goal of this part is to show that the best argument you could find for the opposing position is not cogent.

So, suppose you were writing a dialectical essay on whether the Palestinian Roots mural should be removed from the student centre, and your position is that it should be removed. In the positive part of your essay you would present an argument (or arguments) for why the PR mural should be removed from the student centre. Then, in the dialectical part of your essay, you would lay out the best argument you can find for why the PR mural should remain in the student centre, and then show why this argument is flawed. It is important to note that the dialectical part of the essay is not where you argue against the opposite conclusion. The goal of the dialectical part is not to prove that the PR mural should be removed from the student centre (you already did that in the positive part of your paper). Instead, the goal of this part of the essay is to show that the argument for the opposite conclusion is flawed. So you would lay out the reasons why someone thinks that the PR mural should remain in the student centre, and then show why these reasons are flawed.

The easiest way to show that an argument is flawed is to show why it fails one of the ARG conditions. See “General Guidelines for Critiquing Arguments” (below) for more information.

The counter-argument must come from a secondary source (you can’t just make it up yourself). You should choose the strongest counter-argument that you can find. The stronger your counter- argument, the better it looks when you knock it down. Although the dialectical section often appears after the positive section in the essay, it usually makes sense to write it first. You don’t want to write out the positive part of the essay and then realize that you can’t find anything wrong with an argument for the opposing position.

Because this essay deals with local issues, you probably wont be able to use books or journal

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articles as sources for the counter-argument. The most useful sources will be newspaper articles or editorials, interviews, tweets or comments on discussion forums. These sources aren’t ideal. Scholarly books and journal articles usually contain decent arguments, whereas editorials, interviews and discussion comments often do not. It might take some time to find a good counter-argument.

Conclusion The conclusion should re-state the thesis and concisely sum up the argument for that thesis. _____________________________________________________________________________

Quotes and References

A quote can be direct or indirect. A direct quote is one where you use the author’s exact words. Direct quotes should be used sparingly. In general, you should only use a direct quote under the following circumstances:

• To back up a particularly controversial claim • If you plan to comment extensively on a passage

An essay that unnecessarily strings together a lot of direct quotes gives the impression that the writer hasn’t given a lot of thought to the issue (even if they have).

If you omit anything in the quote, indicate with the omission with three dots . . . and then provide the citation. If the direct quote is shorter than three lines, put it in quotation marks “ ” and then provide the citation. If the direct quote is longer than three lines, the entire quote should be double indented (indented on both sides) and single spaced with the citation at the end. Do not put quotation marks around the long quote.

An indirect quote is one where you express the author’s ideas in your own words, and then provide the citation. Indirect quotes are great. They show that you are familiar with the literature on the issue.

The following link will give you some information about direct and indirect quotes • https://spark.library.yorku.ca/essay-structure-quotations/

Please use the MLA style of citation. In-text citations appear in brackets after the direct or indirect quote. If you cite a book or an online source with page or section numbers, you should list the author’s last name and page/section number, e.g. (Strabbing, 148-149). If you cite an online source with an author that does not have any page or section numbers, then just write the author’s name, e.g. (Owens). If the online source does not have an author, just cite the title of the webpage in italics, e.g. (Health and Disease). The URLs will appear in the bibliograhy

In a dialectical essay it is often a good idea to quote the source of the counter-argument directly so that the reader knows exactly how the argument is supposed to work. However, this is only possible if the passage with the argument is fairly short (say, less than 1/4 of a page). If the

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argument is long, it will be necessary to paraphrase it (i.e. use indirect quotes).

The following link will give you some information about direct and indirect quotes • https://spark.library.yorku.ca/essay-structure-quotations/

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Writing, Grammar and Formatting

Your essay should be easy to read, properly cited, grammatically correct, politically correct, and should use technical terms appropriately.

• Pro tip1: Write in short sentences. Semi-colons aren’t impressive. • Pro tip 2: Feel free to use first-person and present-tense phrases like: “I argue

that...” • Pro tip 3: Don’t use “man” or “mankind” to refer to all human beings. Feel free to

use “she” instead of “he” in examples or when you need to use a third-person pronoun to make a general claim about human beings.

• Pro tip 4: It’s okay to be boring. Refrain from using “flowery” language. • Pro tip 5: Use technical terms when necessary but outside of technical terms don’t

try to use a “fancy” vocabulary. Clarity is the most important thing. • Pro tip 6: Proof read, preferably out loud and more than once. On important

papers, editing can take as long as writing.

There is a difference between a part of an essay and a paragraph of an essay. An essay has three main parts: intro, body, conclusion, and the body of the essay may be further divided into a number of sub-sections. Each part of the essay does something different

• The intro lays out the problem and position • The body defends the position (if it has a number of subsections, then each one

defends to the position in a different way) • The conclusion sums up the argument and restates the position

By contrast, a paragraph, like a sentence, is a unit of grammar. Each paragraph deals with a specific idea or theme. For example, the previous paragraph in this guide (“Your essay should be easy to read...”) dealt with how you should write your essay, while this paragraph deals with the difference between parts and paragraphs of an essay. Just as an essay does not have a set number of sentences, so it does not have a set number of paragraphs. It should have as many paragraphs as there are separate ideas or themes that you are discussing in the essay. The body of an essay typically contains many paragraphs.

General Comments about Formatting • Make sure that your essay includes the following information: the title of the essay, the

course code, your name, my name, the date it was submitted and the word count. • Your essay should use 1.5 spacing, and standard 1-inch margins. • Do not put a space between each paragraph (indenting the beginning of each paragraph is

sufficient). Putting spaces between paragraphs sometimes makes sense on a single-spaced

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paper (and that is why I did it here), but it is ugly and unnecessary on a double or 1.5 spaced paper.

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Academic Honesty

Whenever you take an idea from someone else, you should reference it. Include a citation even if you changed the wording (indirect quote). If you aren’t sure about whether you should reference something, ask your TA or the instructor. You can find out information about York’s policy on academic integrity at the following url:

https://www.yorku.ca/secretariat/policies/policies/academic-honesty-senate-policy-on/

The York library website contains excellent resources, including a tutorial, a checklist and practical guidance. I STRONGLY recommend that you check it out.

https://spark.library.yorku.ca/academic-integrity-what-is-academic-integrity/

Using ChatGPT or other forms of generative AI is not permitted on this assignment ______________________________________________________________________________

Over to Part II You are strongly encouraged to read Part II of the guideline. Part II contains important information about how to research your essay, as well as information about how to write an A- level essay.

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