FOR A-PLUS WRITER

English 144

Essay 1 Topics

This essay is to be based primarily on your personal reflection on a topic related to one of the early course readings. It requires you to state a thesis, develop an argument, and cite evidence as appropriate (direct references to course material, personal experience, and/or secondary sources).

The assignment must be typed , and it should be 500-600 words (2-3 pages) in length. For lay-out and referencing, it should follow MLA or APA format. Please remember that both your writing skills and your understanding of the issues will be evaluated, and that you must acknowledge and document all sources you use (except standard dictionaries) with careful and complete citations and a bibliography (do not include your bibliography in your word count).

This first essay is due in your tutorial section on Jan. 21 (Tutorial 1) or Jan. 22 (Tutorials 2-6). Please give your essay a title that indicates your topic in an interesting way.

1. “Tapping into Text Messaging,” written over a decade ago by media expert Janet Kornblum, does not mention sexting, an issue that has emerged as a problem more recently, especially for young people. How big a problem is youth sexting?

2. In “Shouting ‘Fire!’” Alan Dershowitz writes that “freedom of speech does not protect a kid who pulls a fire alarm in the absence of a fire.” In fact, the Criminal Code of Canada lists “false alarm of fire” as an indictable offence. Yet there are reports that Ali Martin, a survivor of the mass shooting last year at a movie theatre in Lafayette, Louisiana, saved numerous lives by pulling the cinema’s fire alarm. Others caution, however, that pulling a fire alarm during an active-shooter incident is not the right response. To pull the alarm or not to pull it, that is the question.

3. In “A Few Kind Words for Superstition,” Robertson Davies suggests that superstition is linked to the human desire to know our fate and to have some hand in deciding it. The continued prevalence of superstition when he was writing (in the 1970s) might be linked, he says, to a “renaissance of the irrational.” Some major Canadian newspapers, including the Globe and Mail and the National Post, publish a daily horoscope. Is this appropriate in the twenty-first century?