Position Essay in Response to Readings

EN 101

ThisEssay:

https://www.unc.edu/courses/2009spring/plcy/240/001/The_Solution_to_World_Poverty1.pdf

And listen to an interview with the author below

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lu7XHUXvEKU

Essay Two – Position Essay in Response to Readings

Assignment Guidelines

For this second essay assignment, you will be writing a Position essay. This essay will further discuss and develop your responses to the Week Two reading that you posted in the discussion forum.

The purpose of a position paper is to generate support on an issue. It describes a position on an issue and the rational for that position. The position paper is based on evidence that provide a solid foundation f

or your argument. 1 In the position paper you should:

•Use evidence to support your position

•Validate your position with authoritative references or primary source quotations.

•Examine the strengths and weaknesses of your position.

•Evaluate possible solutions and suggest courses of action.

Length:3-4 pages, in correct MLA format:

Topic: you will be answering the question,

“Is Singer's solution an unreasonable demand?”

Singer quotes Unger's hypothetical situations from his book Living High and Letting Die. In his essay, Singer relates Unger's story about Bob's Bugatti. Bob puts all of his assets into a Bugatti as a retirement investment. He takes it for a ride and parks it near some railroad tracks. He sees a child on the tracks and a train coming. He can pull a switch and change the track of the train, thus destroying his car, or let the train kill the child. He lets the child die (Unger, 136-139).

Singer also cites form the movie Central Station. In the movie, Dora is a retired teacher who squeaks by writing letters for illiterate people in the central train station. Here she writes a letter for a woman who is minutes later killed by a bus, leaving her nine- year-old son homeless. When Dora learns that she can earn $1,000 if she takes him to a certain apartment, where the people will place him in a home with a rich foreign family, she brings the boy to the apartment. Later a friend tells her that the boy is too old for adoption and will certainly be killed and his organs sold.

In this week’s discussion, you wrote about what Bob should have done and whether Dora would have been guiltless if she had left the boy with the organ dealers, and continued to believe that he was going to be adopted by a wealthy couple. You also considered Singer's entire article, where he argues that all of us who live in rich nations are in the positions of Bob and Dora. We can save a child's life by sending money to a charitable organization. But he asks that we save more than one life. Therefore, for a household bringing in $50,000 a year, donations to help the world's poor should be as close as possible to $20,000. The $30,000 required for necessities holds for higher incomes as well. So, a household making $100,000 could cut a yearly check for $70,000. Again, the formula is simple: whatever money you're spending on luxuries, not necessities,

should be given away.

For this essay, you will interview five people, or, if you are feeling brave, post the two italicized paragraphs above to your social media site (you may need to provide more context for your friends on The Facebook) and ask for comments. These interviews or comments will serve as your primary sources, using the hypothetical situation about Bob and his Bugatti. Then, after hearing and recording their responses to Bob’s dilemma, you will confront your interviewees or commenters with Singer's argument about their own culpability for not giving to relief organizations. Think about how to design and write questions that reveal what the person feels about what right and wrong are, how they react to the story of Bob, and how they react to Singer's arguments that we are all guilty of letting children die. In his article, Singer lists many of the common excuses for not giving money to relief organizations, which can help you record and categorize the reactions of your interviewees.

When finish your interviews and categorize the reactions, examine what similarities there were in the reactions and look for patterns. Did the people who condemned Bob also look for excuses for themselves? What were the excuses? Did they give as much as Singer suggests?

Before you start writing your essay, consider an argument made by the philosopher Simon Blackburn, whose book Being Good: An Introduction to Ethics, contains a chapter entitled "Seven Threats to Ethics." The threat that is pertinent to this discussion is what Blackburn calls "unreasonable demands." If you set the bar too high for being ethical, then people will stop listening and ignore you.

It is easy to preach this, but much harder to practice it. Indeed, there is usually something ludicrous about the well-fed person preaching charity, or the even better-fed academic arguing that justice is not served unless we have voluntary or involuntary redistribution programs which carve the entire cake equally, perhaps leaving every single person just above a poverty line. If we accept, though, that morality demands this of us, then again, a natural reaction is to shrug off its demands. It's not going to happen: it impractical; we can ignore it (Blackburn, 48- 49).

Look at your discussion responses, your notes and the additional notes you will take on the articles listed in this assignment. Then start

planning:

I. Introduction

A. Introduce the topic

B. Provide background on the topic to explain why it is important

C. Assert the thesis (your view of the issue). More on thesis statements can be found below.

Your introduction has a dual purpose: to indicate both the topic and your approach to it (your thesis statement), and to arouse your reader’s interest in what you have to say. One effective way of introducing a topic is to place it in context to supply a kind of backdrop that will put it in perspective. You should discuss the area into which your topic fits, and then gradually lead into your specific field of discussion (re: your thesis statement).

II. Your Argument

A. Assert point #1 of your claims

1. Give your educated and informed opinion

2. Provide support/proof using more than one source (preferably three)

B. Assert point #2 of your claims

1. Give your educated and informed opinion

2. Provide support/proof using more than one source (preferably three)

C. Assert point #3 of your claims

1. Give your educated and informed opinion

2. Provide support/proof using more than one source (preferably three)

You may have more than 3 overall points to your argument, but you should not have fewer.

III. Conclusion

A. Restate your argument

B. Provide a plan of action but do not introduce new information

The simplest and most basic conclusion is one that restates the thesis in different words and then discusses its implications.

Stating Your Thesis

A thesis is a one-sentence statement about your topic. It's an assertion about your topic, something you claim to be true. Notice that a topic alone makes no such claim; it merely defines an area to be covered.

To make your topic into a thesis statement, you need to make a claim about it, make it into a sentence. Look back over your materials--brainstorms, investigative notes, etc.-- and think about what you believe to be true. Think about what your readers want or need to know. Then write a sentence, preferably at this point, a simple one, stating what will be the central idea of your paper. The result should look something like this:

Original Subject: an important issue in my major field

Focused Topic: media technology education for communication majors

Thesis: Theories of media technology deserve a more prominent place in this University’s Communication program Or if your investigations led you to a different belief:

Thesis: Communication majors at this University receive a solid background in theories of media technology. It's always good to have a thesis you can believe in.

Notice, though, that a sentence stating an obvious and indisputable truth won't work as a thesis:

Thesis:

This University has a Communication major. That's a complete sentence, and it asserts something to be true, but as a thesis it's a dead end. It's a statement of fact, pure and simple, and requires

little or nothing added. A good thesis asks to have more said about it. It demands some proof.

Your job is to show your reader that your thesis is true.

Remember, you can't just pluck a thesis out of thin air. Even if you have remarkable insight concerning a topic, it won't be worth much unless you can logically and persuasively support it in the body of your essay. A thesis is the evolutionary result of a thinking process, not a miraculous creation. Formulating a thesis is not the first thing you do after reading the essay assignment.

Deciding on a thesis does not come first. Before you can come up with an argument on any topic, you have to collect and organize evidence, look for possible relationships between known facts (such as surprising contrasts or similarities), and think about the beneath-the-surface significance of these relationships. After this initial exploration of the question at hand, you can formulate a "working thesis," an argument that you think will make sense of the evidence but that may need adjustment along the way.

For more information regarding thesis statements visit:

http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/thesis.html