ENGL 1102 - Abbott (Online) - Summer 2021

The Assignment

Research Essay Complete Draft

Purpose

Research papers are perhaps the most common writing assignment in college. You will write many of them before you graduate. This assignment, along with the other assignments in this cycle, will give you a chance to develop a personalized process for writing good research papers that should increase your success with research-based writing assignments in other classes throughout your college career. 

Tasks

When people think of catastrophic events, they usually focus on the destruction or loss of life, but these difficult events often bring out the best in human beings and lead to advances in medicine, the economy, social justice, infrastructure, or other areas of society. These positive outcomes do not lessen the tragedy, but they do create a "silver lining." Using the catastrophic event you chose at the beginning of this assignment cycle, write a 5-6 page argumentative Research Paper that shifts the perspective on this event towards the positive effects that it spawned. Limit your discussion of the event itself to one page or less, so the bulk of your essay focuses on the positive outcomes. 

Complete your essay, and then proofread carefully.

Submit your essay to this assignment folder. It will automatically be submitted to Turnitin.com. Also submit your assignment to the Peer Review discussion in the next module by copying and pasting it into a discussion post. This will alter some of the formatting, which is fine. Do NOT attach the file because that asks your classmates to download a file to their personal computers.

Criteria for Success

This essay should:

  • draw a conclusion about the topic/present an argument (thesis)
  • synthesize the information from a variety of sources into a new whole that supports the conclusion/thesis being presented
  • include source material from more than one source in each body paragraph to demonstrate corroboration between sources on each subtopic
  • exclude some information on the topic because it's not relevant to the argument being made
  • only include information from at least 5 reliable, preferably scholarly, sources (minimum of 3 sources from GALILEO, including at least one book/ebook)
  • be clearly organized
  • be written in a formal tone, typically using 3rd person point-of-view and excluding 1st and 2nd points of view (I, we, us, our, you, your)
  • be 5-6 pages long
  • provide appropriate documentation, including in-text citations in MLA format
  • be submitted to the assignment folder as well as copied and pasted into the Peer Review discussion

©2023 Georgia Highlands College | ask@highlands.libanswers.com