5 page paper

Ewrt 2, Fall 2017 Midterm Paper

Overview: Your midterm essay will identify an erroneous belief held by a significant number of Americans. Your paper needs to explain why one might hold such a belief, where one might find support for this belief, and explain why such a widely-held belief may be a threat to the larger culture.

A good place to find an erroneous belief might be Kurt Andersen’s article though he is hardly the only person to have identified irrational thinking in America Culture these days. Perhaps the first 21st Century look at these kinds of beliefs might be found in Wendy Kaminer’s Sleeping With Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety. Another option might be Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason. Others have done similar work, of course. The point is that there are, as Andersen’s book makes clear, any number of potentially dangerous and erroneous ideas floating around to which significant numbers of Americans cling. This leads one to ask why, when most Americans have access to the knowledge of the world available on their phones, they would cling to unproven and unverifiable ideas.

Once you have identified a topic, the real work begins. You need to explain the belief held and its various bastions of support; this will require source support. Much more difficult to do will be to explain why the idea you are exploring has such a wide following and what the implications for the larger culture are if too many people subscribe to the belief. Specifics: Your essay will be a minimum of five pages in length, not counting your works cited page. It will be properly formatted as explained in the “Essay Checklist” in the Midterm Paper Module. Your paper must have a title of your own devising, not “Midterm paper.” Your paper is to draw on at least four sources published in this century to support your contentions, and those sources should be properly cited in MLA format both in the text of the paper and on the works cited page. Since you are too intelligent to subscribe to whatever erroneously held belief you are discussing, there will be no use of the first person singular—I me, my—to refer to yourself in the paper.

Your essay will correctly incorporate a quotation or paraphrase from a source article in most body paragraphs to support the claim / argument made in that paragraph.

Your introduction, thesis, conclusion, and each body paragraph will conform to the rule of three. That is:

A.) Your Introduction will • begin with a sentence introducing the topic to be discussed • provide enough subsequent sentences that enough background information has been

given to make the importance and timeliness of the topic clear • end with a thesis claim that emerges organically from the preceding sentences.

B.) Your thesis will

• be the last sentence in your introduction • it will neither be a question nor an announcement

• it will clearly state the short answer to the prompt question—the body of the paper develops and proves this statement true. C.) Each body paragraph will

• have a first sentence that serves as both transition and topic sentence • offer a well-developed discussion of a single idea using one specific, concrete example,

which • will be clearly supportive of your thesis.

D.) Your conclusion will

• remind the audience what has been learned • restate your thesis as proven rather than as promise • offer a closing insight or suggest an idea for further consideration

Additionally, your paper will end with a correctly formatted works cited page which will need to have at least four entries to meet the assignment requirements.

A Final Note: There are a number of help files available to you in the Module labeled “Week Five – Midterm Paper.” Please consult these files as needed since they contain everything you need to know to do this paper successfully. If you have questions not found in the help files, please ask; I am not a mind reader.