Writing Assignment
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wafa20.docxResearch Paper POS2041 FA 2020
DUE 11:59PM 10/12/2020
Assignment Setup:
Your assignment is to analyze 3 proposals being made by President Trump & former Vice-President Joe Biden & evaluate which of the 2 men’s proposals on those issues you most support. The idea is for you to compare what they say they are going to do if elected about the same policy areas & explain which of the 2 men’s ideas you support the most based on those 3 policy areas & only those 3 policy areas. Do not use other factors like Biden is senile or Trump lies all the time. Your evaluation is of their positions on these areas, not of who you will ultimately vote for. The reason for this is because the purpose of the assignment is to assess whether you have attained the General Education Learning Outcome for the class, which is Critical Thinking.
In the College’s view, Critical Thinking involves a student demonstrating the skills necessary for analysis, synthesis, evaluation, & decision-making.
Reading what the candidates say they will do & explaining that in your own words is the Analysis part.
Comparing what each of the candidates will do is the Synthesis part.
Explaining which one you prefer is the Evaluation, & Decision-making part. Keep in mind, explaining why you support one more than the other requires you to discuss not just why you like that candidate’s policies, but why you don’t like the policies of the other as much.
Links to the candidate’s webpages
Annoyingly, both candidates have their webpages set up to make it more difficult than it should be to navigate away from their begging for money pages & pop ups.. It seems easiest to actually get to the info you need & escape the “give my campaign money” pages in Mozilla Firefox (I was not able to get Microsoft Edge to do that at all for Biden). Links to as close as I can get you to the page with their proposals is below.
Former Vice President Joe Biden
https://joebiden.com/joes-vision/
President Donald Trump
Pick 3 policy areas. See what each candidate proposes to do on those. They must be the same policy area or issue. You cannot, for example do economic racial equity, bankruptcy reform, & handling Covid 19 for Biden and compare that with Trump’s immigration, foreign policy, & healthcare proposals. You’d have to do either economic racial equity, bankruptcy reform, & handling for both or immigration, foreign policy, & healthcare for both. Although they often phrase the title of the policy area slightly differently, there are many areas where they both have proposals (generally very different proposals). You cannot do a policy area for one of them & not do the same policy area for the other. If you don’t find where one addresses an area you want to do, you have to do another policy area.
Interestingly, even the title of these webpages within their sites provide a great illustration of Political Science concepts that we will study later. Biden’s, entitled “Joe’s Vision,” talks about what he will do if he is elected, a great example of appealing to people on the basis of Prospective Voting. Trump’s section on policies is called “Promises Kept,” a great example of a candidate making an appeal to people on the basis of Retrospective Voting. Only recently has Trump announced any new policy proposal (& it’s only on 1 issue), for what he would do in a 2nd term, for which a number of Republican strategists have criticized him (Trump in fact forbade the Republican Party from adopting a new platform at their Convention, certainly within his right, as he has to run on it, but a most unusual step). Nevertheless, I think it is safe to assume that he will continue the policies he proudly highlights on his “Promises Kept” page, so, consider those his proposals for addressing those policy areas.
The “Deliverable”
Using the info contained in their websites, write an essay that
1. Discusses proposals of each candidate on the same three policy areas
2. Evaluates their positions on these policies & explains which of the candidates you would most support based solely on those 3 policy areas.
Organization of the paper
The essay must have the following elements:
I. Intro section
This must explain what your overall topic is, what questions about it you are examining, & what your ultimate answer to the questions is.
II. Body of the paper
The body of the paper will consist of multiple paragraphs over multiple pages in which you explain what your sources say about the question you are examining. While the idea that an essay has 5 paragraphs is a good tool for teaching beginning composition, it has no relevance at this level. Essays have as many paragraphs as they need based on the organizational choices you have made. Body paragraphs need to be on a theme or trying to prove a point, not multiple themes or points in the same paragraph. Also, there is no such construct as a single sentence paragraph.
III. Conclusion
Explain what your conclusion to the issue is & what the rationale behind it is.
Other Requirements:
1. This is a formal writing assignment. You must write in grammatically & stylistic correct form. This should be as well-written as a paper for ENC1101. You can lose points for poor grammar & style, just as you would in an English class.
2. There will not be a “Submission Box” in Canvas. You need to send your essay as a Microsoft Word or .rtf file to me in the Canvas e-mail system. Do not send the file in .html or pdf format or to my regular SF e-mail!!
3. You must spell & grammar check your document through your word processing program's spelling & grammar checking function!! While I realize these tools are not perfect, they are a basic first step toward proofreading & you absolutely must take that 1st step. Any errors that spell & grammar check would have alerted to you (that are legitimate errors, I don’t deduct for gray areas like British English spelling, foreign words, gray areas with commas or computer error in grammar, etc.) will cost you 1 point!!!! I am unforgiving on this. My record is deducting 37 points from a 60 point assignment because of someone clearly not taking the time to spell & grammar check the assignment (it was really easy to see his mistakes too, the little red & green lines from Microsoft Word were all over his paper before I even hit spell check). Spelling errors are relatively straightforward, however just because spell check doesn't offer you an option doesn't mean it is not a legitimate error. If it tells you a word is spelled incorrectly & doesn't give you an option to change it & it is not a proper noun, go look it up in a dictionary because you're probably using a word that does not exist or you're using the wrong form of the word. Be especially attentive if grammar check tells you that there is a sentence fragment, run-on sentence, plural instead of possessive (or vice versa), or problem with subject-verb agreement or verb tense.
Plagiarism Warning:
If you are eligible to take a writing intensive course you should know what plagiarism is (if you do not, then the college served you ill by allowing you to register for the class & you should drop it & petition for a refund on the basis of that fact). I am most unforgiving in cases of plagiarism & if you are caught plagiarizing (& trust me, I will catch you), I will work diligently to see that you are punished to the fullest extent possible, which at the very least means you will be removed from my class & quite possibly expelled from the college. Keep in mind, it is plagiarism if the preponderant majority of a paragraph or several sentences interspersed in multiple paragraphs are taken from someone else’s words &/or writing. It does not need to be an entire assignment that has been 100% verbatim copied. Keep that in mind.
