Help needed with a 4 page scientific essay.

Foults Date Assigned:

Spring 2014 Peer Review:

English 101 Due Date: Essay 2: Television

During your college experience, you will need to write many different types of essays. One type can be

particularly difficult if you have never been introduced to it: the scientific essay. Beyond the visual markers

of a scientific essay (headings, graphs), the way data is unique and can be tricky. Therefore, we will be

writing an essay in which you make observations, generate data, and write about your findings. The main

goal of this assignment is to be able to synthesize the data you collect and the readings into one cohesive

argument; this is the tricky part for any scientific essay.

For this assignment, you will need to choose a friend or family member, and you will be tracking their

interaction and time spent with the television. Additionally, you will track your own time spent watching the

television as well as tracking your interactions with it.

In order to write the essay, you will need to discuss the concepts from Robert Kubey and Mihaly

Csikszentmihalyi’s “Television Addiction Is No Mere Metaphor,” and Marie Winn’s “Television: The Plug-

in Drug” to support your research and data collection findings. These concepts include:

• Body at rest • Attention Grabbing • Quality of Life • Family Rituals • Socialization

You should write the essay for people who are NOT in this class and are NOT familiar with the texts. This

means you will need to spend time summarizing and quoting from key ideas, defining terms that might be

unfamiliar, and choosing quotes from each text to help your reader gain a sense of what of the author is

talking about.

Additionally, you must analyze how these ideas and concepts from the text either support or don’t support

your own data. To help organize the complex ideas in the essay, you will need a thesis that provides the

reader with a foundation for how you understand the concepts from the reading and your data fitting

together.

A few things to remember:

• Be sure to track your data and your family member’s data with the concepts listed above in mind. This will ensure you can use the texts to discuss your findings.

• I’d like you to include details, examples, and quotations from the readings to help you develop your data analysis.

• Talk about complexities---for example, feel free to disagree with the texts, but be sure to fully explain your argument.

• TV watching also includes watching videos on the internet or any sort of sustained screen time. Minimum requirements:

 Four pages minimum

 MLA format

 Thesis-driven

 Use at least one of the readings listed above

Tracking Sheet

Date Time Spent Watching

Television

Shows Watched

Date Time Spent Watching

Television

Shows Watched

Follow up questions to ask your family member/friend and yourself:

1. How did you feel while watching the television? 2. At any point of watching the television, did you feel like the show was ridiculous? If yes, why didn’t you

turn the television off?

3. How much time do you spend with your family each day, each week? 4. Do you and your family ever watch television together? How about watching television during family

meals?

5. How many times a week does the family eat dinner together? How many of those meals include a television set?

Note: These questions are only a beginning, and there are many more possibilities to consider from the

reading. Further, you might need to use another tracking sheet (one that you create) if you run out of room

above.

Tracking Sheet

Quote/ concept from the

Reading

Your corresponding data. How concept/ quote from reading supports your data.