Worthy Charity Argumentative Essay

Purpose

Being able to persuade others to think or act in a certain way can be useful in a variety of career fields, especially if you are able to do this with your writing. Whether you are arguing for a change in a policy at your workplace, seeking social justice for a cause important to you, or just trying to win an argument with a friend on social media, argumentative writing is a skill you want to possess. This essay will allow you to practice argumentative writing as well as formal, academic writing--a skill you'll need in order to successfully complete your college degree.

Related Course Objective(s)

• Identify the rhetorical situation in texts from a range of genres
• Demonstrate writing as a recursive process
• Gather, evaluate, synthesize, and cite information from academic and non-academic sources
• Recognize the grammar, mechanics, punctuation, vocabulary, and formatting considerations appropriate to genre or assignment

Tasks

1. Review the Avoiding Plagiarism (Excelsior OWL), and review the Essay Rubric. 
2. Chose a charity you believe is worthy of volunteer hours and/or monetary donations. You can visit one or more of the following websites to locate information about potential charities for a large array of causes:
   1. https://www.handsonatlanta.org/
   2. https://www.volunteermatch.org/search/orgs.jsp?l=Atlanta%2C+GA
   3. https://greatnonprofits.org/state/Georgia
   4. https://www.charitynavigator.org/
3. As you review various charities, visit their websites to learn more about them.
   1. What is the percentage of donations that goes directly to aiding the cause vs. towards the charity's administrative costs?
   2. What is their impact on their chosen community?
4. Choose a charity that you would be interested in volunteering for, or one you would donate to if you were able. 
5. Locate one reliable, non-biased website that discusses the problem your charity is trying to alleviate. This will likely be a government page with statistics or a news outlet's site reporting on the issue your chosen charity is trying to solve. Be sure it's reliable by using the information found in the Library Assignment Guide. 
6. Locate one reliable source in GALILEO that also discusses the problem.
7. Write a 3-4 page argumentative, academic (formal) essay that asserts the value of your chosen charity's work and why supporting this charity over others is important. Try to convince readers that your chosen charity is worthy of volunteer hours and donations.
   1. Use facts from your website source and the charity's own webpage.
   2. Explain the need being addressed or describe the community being served.
   3. Explain the charity's need for volunteers and/or donations (goods, money, etc.), but avoid directly speaking to the reader using "you" or by starting sentences with verbs.
   4. Use in-text citations for all information taken from a source, even if you rewrite it into your own words.
8. Complete your essay, and then proofread carefully.
9. Submit your essay to this assignment folder. It will automatically be submitted to Turnitin.com.
10. Upload your letter to the Peer Review (Professional Letter) folder in Perusall. You will click here: Perusall 1.3 and then select the Library at the top of the page to get to the folder you will need.

Specifications

This essay should: 

• be 3-4 pages long
• advocate for a specific charity and the importance of the need it tries to alleviate
• address all bullets from #7 above
• incorporate facts from reliable outside sources that provide evidence for the argument 
• exclude information on the topic that is not relevant to the argument being made
• only include information from reliable sources (The minimum is one GALILEO source and one website, but more sources are welcome.)
• be clearly organized
• read smoothly (effective transitions between paragraphs)
• include an introduction and a conclusion
• include an argumentative thesis statement in the introduction
• be written in a formal tone, using 3rd person point-of-view and excluding 1st and 2nd points of view (I, we, us, our, you, your)
• be an MLA formatted document (Times New Roman, size 12 font, 1 inch margins, double-spaced, author block in top left of first page only, no title page, centered informative title, header and page number in top right,) For more information and a picture of an MLA formatted document, visit "MLA General Format" @ Purdue OWL
• provide MLA-style in-text citations for facts taken from outside sources, even when they are rewritten into your own words
• provide an MLA-style Works Cited list in the same computer file as the essay
• be free of grammatic and spelling errors, especially those that cloud the meaning of what has been written
• be submitted to the Peer Review folder in Perusall