below you will find a copy of out of class essay assignment #2, which was distributed and explained in detail during today's class.
Later this evening, or tomorrow, I will post at least one sample student response to this prompt.
ENGLISH 20—FALL
2014—C. FRAGA, INSTRUCTOR
OUT OF CLASS ESSAY
ASSIGNMENT #2
Date assigned: Monday, October 20
Rough draft: due to
my personal circumstances, I will be unable to view rough drafts for this
assignment. I am too far behind in grading. This means that all students will
have the option of revision.
Final draft due: Monday, November 10th (please note the due date change, from the 7th to the 10th)
Details/Requirements:
1. Follow MLA
format for the set-up of your essay and for your documentation of sources.
2. A minimum of 5
outside sources on your Works Cited page. If you utilize personal interviews,
be sure there are not MORE interviews than resources from professional and/or
academic publications. The best place to start is the home page of the
Sacramento State Library. By this time in your college career, you should be
very familiar with the AMAZING databases available to you, just a click away!
3. Please, no
Wikipedia or encyclopedias as primary sources
4. No
formulaic, 5 paragraph essay
ESSAY PROMPT:
Among many things,
the series Breaking Bad focuses on the family entity and what happens
when something quite extraordinary occurs—how do various members of the family
cope, adjust, and/or “deal” with the event/situation? (In the case of this
series, obviously it is Walter’s cancer that is the ‘event’).
I am not referring
to the everyday “bumps in the road” that occur for all families. Instead, I am
asking you to consider the family unit when faced with an especially
challenging situation. These situations could include but are not
limited to:
death
bipolar
disorder
birth
asberger’s
syndrome
infidelity
complications
from a stroke
serious
injury
alcoholism
dementia
drug abuse
serious
illness
incarceration
divorce
anorexia
unemployment
bulimia
new
employment
spousal abuse
moving to a new
home/state/area/country
the return of a war
veteran
moving BACK home
after initially moving OUT
suicide
severe depression
‘coming out’ in the
LBGT community
adoption
autism
deafness
sexual abuse
Select ONE
situation that you are most interested in exploring. You will conduct
research (and possibly personal interviews) in order to write an essay that
offers the reader a brief background on the topic and makes an
assertion about what the most significant challenges are for a family coping
with a significant issue, and support your assertions logically and
interestingly.
For
example, imagine that you choose to explore how unemployment impacts a family
unit. As you research, you will narrow your topic and select the supportive
details that will make the most compelling argument. Let’s suppose that you
discovered that the following issues are the repercussions of unemployment when
the main “breadwinner” loses her job: depression; low self esteem;
problems with intimacy; insomnia; eating disorders; financial hardship;
foreclosure; etc. As the writer, you will need to select the issues that YOU,
based on YOUR research, believe are the MOST challenging of all the issues.
If you wish to
focus on a situation that you are familiar with firsthand, that is fine.
However, this essay is not a narrative. It is a research and rhetorical analysis
essay. In other words, you can certainly utilize personal observations and
experiences, but you CANNOT rely on them to in any way be the main supports for
your essay.
Your thesis might
read something like this:
When a family
member develops dementia, the challenges are often devastating, yet the disease
definitely impacts family members more than the dementia patient.
Or…
When a couple
divorces, it most certainly impacts the children still living at home; however,
it is the older children who have already moved away that are most affected by
the split.
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