Hello, I need help writing a research essay, 3 - 4 pages long, MLA format. I've attached the instructions for the essay. please read the instructions carefully.
This Essay 3 assignment page is somewhat long, so I made this little video to read through the assignment with you and elaborate on a few points. Viewing this video is optional; if you prefer, just scroll down and read through the assignment on your own. If you want to watch me reading the assignment/talking in a bit more detail about it, then watch this!
https://youtu.be/8wYHMK-x9OY
Essay 3: Writing an Editorial about a Current Issue of Controversy (A Research Essay)
An editorial is an article that presents a newspaper’s opinion on a current issue. Much in the same manner of a lawyer, editorial writers build on an argument and try to persuade readers to agree with their point of view. Editorials are meant to influence public opinion, promote critical thinking, and sometimes cause people to take action on an issue. In essence, an editorial is an opinionated news story backed by credible research.
Editorials have…
1. An introduction, body, and conclusion like other news stories (or essays).
2. An objective explanation of the issue, especially complex issues (necessary background information).
3. A timely news angle (it addresses a current issue of controversy).
4. Opinions from the opposing viewpoint that refute directly the same issues the writer addresses (this is called counterargument).
5. Opinions of the writer delivered in a professional manner (premises, backed up by quality evidence, to support your conclusion). Good editorials engage issues, not personalities, and refrain from name-calling or other petty tactics of persuasion (logical fallacies).
6. Alternative solutions to the problem or issue being criticized. Anyone can gripe about a problem, but a good editorial should take a proactive approach to making the situation better by using constructive criticism and offering solutions.
7. A solid and concise conclusion that powerfully summarizes the writer’s opinion.
For Essay 3, I would like you to write an editorial-style research paper on a controversial topic of interest (to you). If you need inspiration on which topic to choose, browse the editorial section of some current newspapers, especially ones that reflect varying viewpoints. I will also provide a list of potential topics to choose from. Your editorial should be 4-5 pages long (double-spaced, MLA format). I will be strictly enforcing the essay length for this assignment (writing within the confines of a page limit forces you to determine an appropriate scope for your thesis, and to be selective about what to include—and not include—in your argument).
Some tips on how to proceed…
1. Pick a significant topic that has a current news angle and would interest readers.
2. Collect information and facts about this topic; include objective reporting; do quality research (though most editorials don’t include a works cited list, yours will need one).
3. State your opinion briefly in the fashion of a thesis statement.
4. Explain the issue objectively as a reporter would and tell why this situation is important.
5. Give opposing viewpoint(s) with direct quotations and facts.
6. Refute (reject) the other side’s position and develop your case using facts, details, figures, quotations from experts, etc.
7. Concede a point of the opposition — they will likely have some good points you can acknowledge that would make you look rational/balanced.
8. Give a realistic solution(s) to the problem that goes beyond common knowledge. Encourage critical thinking and pro-active reaction.
9. Wrap it up with a concluding punch that restates your opening remark in a fresh way (thesis statement).
10. Keep it to 4-5 pages; make every word count.
1. Choose your topic wisely
For maximum impact, choose an issue that has been making the headlines recently. For instance, if the Presidential elections are around the corner, focus on a particular political topic. Additionally, be very specific about the issue you wish to focus on. You might have a lot to say about a dozen issues, but save your knowledge for later. Narrow down your area of interest with as much precision as is possible.
2. Declare your agenda outright
An editorial without an unequivocal opinion is bound to fall flat on its face. Right at the very beginning, define your agenda in clear terms. Make sure that you state your opinion or thesis coherently. Remember those research papers and thesis statements you wrote in college. It’s time to refresh your memory and concentrate on thesis statement writing skills. The essential structure of a thesis statement in an editorial remains the same, only the language is more informal and journalistic.
3. Build your argument
A good editorial expresses your point of view while a great one manages to persuade others to join your camp. In order to persuade people, you need to have a sound argument based on facts and analogies, not vitriol and diatribe. Once you have stated your thesis, acknowledge contradictory opinions and explain why you disagree with them. Use facts, statistics, quotations and theoretical explanations for criticizing your opponents’ views. Rejecting them outright without any explanation screams of cowardice and unprofessional ethics.
To build a foolproof argument, you will need to achieve a balance between content and style. Not only will you need substantial data, you will also need to structure it coherently.
4. Strengthen your argument with analogies
Nothing disarms your opponents better than cultural, social or political analogies. For instance, if you are writing about a controversial issue like secret surveillance, look for similar instances in other countries and how they tackled the problem. You can use such an analogy to your benefit by highlighting both the similarities and the differences. This will also be a good time to speak about the ultimate consequences of a policy/law if appropriate action is not taken by concerned agencies.
5. Provide possible solutions
So, you have made a case for your views and demolished your opponents’ claims. The journey doesn’t end here. An editorial is primarily meant to indulge in constructive criticism i.e. even though it critiques one point of view, it must be able to provide a possible alternative. Say, your editorial attacked the efficacy of steps taken by the government to curb domestic violence in a particular region, conclude your piece by discussing other viable options. Once again, build an argument and talk about why these proposed steps are better than the ones already in place. Don’t mistake an editorial for an opportunity to indulge in mindless criticism; instead, use it to offer a better vision for the future.
(From Udemy blog, How to Write an Editorial)
A Sample Structure (P.S. this is not the only way to structure an editorial essay, just one possible organizational strategy)
1. Lead with an Objective Explanation of the Issue/Controversy
Include the five W’s (who, what, where, when, why) and the H (how). (Members of Congress, in an effort to reduce the budget, are looking to cut funding from public television. Hearings were held …)
Pull in facts and quotations from relevant sources.
Additional research will be necessary (reference to a minimum of three outside sources is required)
Or, Consider Presenting Your Opposition First
As the writer, you disagree with these viewpoints. Identify the people specifically who oppose you. (Republicans feel that these cuts are necessary; other cable stations can pick them; only the rich watch public television.)
Use facts and quotations to objectively state their opinions.
Give a strong explanation of the opposition’s views. You gain nothing in refuting a weak position.
Or Directly Refute the Opposition's Beliefs
You can begin your article with a transition. (Republicans believe public television is a “sandbox for the rich”; however, statistics show most people who watch public television make less than $40,000 per year.)
Pull in other facts and quotations from people who support your position.
Concede a valid point of the opposition which will make you appear rational, one who has considered all the options (fiscal times are tough, and we can cut some of the funding for the arts; however…).
2. Develop the Body of Your Argument
In defense of your position on the issue you've chosen, give reasons (premises) that support your view, then back up those premises with evidence that shows the value or truth of your claims. (E.g. Taking money away from public television is robbing children of their education. A study on this issue from the University of Blah shows that...) While there is no formulaic prescription for how many premises an argument must have, for an argument of this length (4-5 pages), you'll like have between 2-4 premises.
3. Conclude With Some Punch
Give solutions to the problem or challenge the reader to be informed. (Congress should look to where real wastes exist — perhaps in defense and entitlements — to find ways to save money. Digging into public television's pocket hurts us all.)
A quotation can be effective, especially if from a respected source.
A rhetorical question can be an effective concluder as well (If the government doesn't defend the interests of children, who will?)
SAMPLE CURRENT EDITORIALS
FOX News Editorial, "California Ignores Current Problems, Comes Up with Illogical Reparations Bill" (Oct, 2020) (Links to an external site.)
CNN Editorial, "Four Words Can Save America: Donald Trump, You're Fired" (Oct, 2020) (Links to an external site.)
Some Older Sample Editorials
“Vote. That’s Just What They Don’t Want You to Do.” (New York Times, March 10th, 2018)
This is a fragile moment for the nation. The integrity of democratic institutions is under assault from without and within, and basic standards of honesty and decency in public life are corroding. If you are horrified at what is happening in Washington and in many states, you can march in the streets, you can go to town halls and demand more from your representatives, you can share the latest outrageous news on your social media feed — all worthwhile activities. But none of it matters if you don’t go out and vote.
It’s a perennial conundrum for the world’s oldest democracy: Why do so many Americans fail to go to the polls? Some abstainers think that they’re registering a protest against the awful choices. They’re fooling themselves. Nonvoters aren’t protesting anything; they’re just putting their lives and futures in the hands of the people who probably don’t want them to vote. We’ve seen recently what can happen when people choose instead to take their protest to the ballot box. We saw it in Virginia in November. We saw it, to our astonishment, in Alabama in December (Links to an external site.). We may see it this week in western Pennsylvania. Voting matters.
Casting a ballot is the best opportunity most of us will ever get to have a say in who will represent us, what issues they will address and how they will spend our money. The right to vote is so basic, President Lyndon Johnson said in 1965, that without it “all others are meaningless.”
And yet every election, tens of millions of Americans stay home. Studies of turnout among developed nations consistently rank the United States near the bottom (Links to an external site.). In the most recent midterms, in 2014, less than 37 percent of eligible voters (Links to an external site.) went to the polls — the lowest turnout in more than 70 years. In 2016, 102 million people didn’t vote (Links to an external site.), far more than voted for any single candidate.
The problem isn’t just apathy, of course. Keeping people from voting has been an American tradition from the nation’s earliest days, when the franchise was restricted to white male landowners. It took a civil war, constitutional amendments, violently suppressed activism against discrimination and a federal act enforcing the guarantees of those amendments to extend this basic right to every adult. With each expansion of voting rights, the nation inched closer to being a truly representative democracy. Today, only one group of Americans may be legally barred from voting — those with felony records, a cruel and pointless restriction (Links to an external site.) that disproportionately silences people of color.
In the months leading up to the midterm elections on Nov. 6, when the House, Senate and statehouses around the country are up for grabs, the editorial board will explore the complicated question (Links to an external site.) of why Americans don’t vote, and what can be done to overcome the problem. The explanations fall into three broad categories.
SUPPRESSION: A 96-year-old woman in Tennessee was denied a voter-ID card (Links to an external site.) despite presenting four forms of identification, including her birth certificate. A World War II veteran was turned away (Links to an external site.) in Ohio because his Department of Veterans Affairs photo ID didn’t include his address. Andrea Anthony, a 37-year-old black woman from Wisconsin who had voted in every major election since she was 18, c (Links to an external site.)o (Links to an external site.)uldn’t vote in 2016 (Links to an external site.) because she had lost her driver’s license a few days before.
Stories like these are distressingly familiar, as more and more states pass laws that make voting harder for certain groups of voters, usually minorities, but also poor people, students and the elderly. They require forms of photo identification that minorities are much less likely to have or be able to get — purportedly to reduce fraud, of which there is virtually no evidence (Links to an external site.). They eliminate same-day registration, close polling stations in minority areas and cut back early-voting hours and Sunday voting.
These new laws may not be as explicitly discriminatory as the poll taxes or literacy tests of the 20th century, but they are part of the same long-term project to keep minorities from the ballot box. And because African-Americans vote overwhelmingly for Democrats, the laws are nearly always passed by Republican-dominated legislatures.
In a lawsuit challenging Wisconsin’s strict new voter-ID law, a former staff member for a Republican lawmaker testified that Republicans were “politically frothing at the mouth” (Links to an external site.) at the prospect that the law would drive down Democratic turnout. It worked: After the 2016 election, one survey found (Links to an external site.) that the law prevented possibly more than 17,000 registered voters, disproportionately poor and minority, from voting. Donald Trump carried the state by fewer than 23,000 votes.
The legitimacy of an election is only as good as the reliability of the machines that count the votes (Links to an external site.). And yet 43 states use voting machines (Links to an external site.) that are no longer being made, and are at or near the end of their useful life. Many states still manage their voter-registration rolls using software programs from the 1990s. It’s no surprise that this sort of infrastructure failure hits poorer and minority areas harder (Links to an external site.), often creating hours-long lines at the polls and discouraging many voters from coming out at all. Upgrading these machines nationwide would cost at least $1 billion, maybe much more, and Congress has consistently failed to provide anything close to sufficient funding to speed along the process.
Elections are hard to run with aging voting technology, but at least those problems aren’t intentional. Hacking and other types of interference are. (Links to an external site.) In 2016, Russian hackers were able to breach voter registration systems in Illinois and several other states, and targeted dozens more (Links to an external site.). They are interfering again in advance of the 2018 midterms, according to intelligence officials, who are demanding better cybersecurity measures. These include (Links to an external site.) conducting regular threat assessments, using voting machines that create paper trails and conducting postelection audits. Yet President Trump, who sees any invocation of Russian interference as a challenge to the legitimacy of his election, consistently downplays or dismisses these threats. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s State Department has not spent a dime (Links to an external site.)of the $120 million Congress allocated to it to fight disinformation campaigns by Russia and other countries.
DISILLUSIONMENT: Some people wouldn’t vote if you put a ballot box in their living room. Whether they believe there is no meaningful difference between the major parties or that the government doesn’t care what they think regardless of who is in power, they have detached themselves from the political process.
That attitude is encouraged by many in government, up to and including the current president, who cynically foster feelings of disillusionment by hawking fake tales of rigged systems and illegal voters, even as they raise millions of dollars from wealthy donors and draw legislative maps to entrench their power.
The disillusionment is understandable, and to some degree it’s justified. But it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. When large numbers of people don’t vote, elections are indeed decided by narrow, unrepresentative groups and in the interests of wealth and power. The public can then say, See? We were right. They don’t care about us. But when more people vote, the winning candidates are more broadly representative and that improves government responsiveness to the public and enhances democratic legitimacy.
These obstacles to voting and political participation are very real, and we don’t discount their impact on turnout. The good news is there are fixes for all of them.
The most important and straightforward fix is to make it easier for people to register and vote. Automatic voter registration, which first passed in Oregon just three years ago, is now the law or practice in nine states, both red and blue, and the District of Columbia. Washington State is on the cusp (Links to an external site.) of becoming the tenth, and New Jersey and Nevada may be close behind. More people also turn out when states increase voting opportunities, such as by providing mail-in ballots or by expanding voting hours and days.
The courts should be a bulwark protecting voting rights, and many lower federal courts have been just that in recent years, blocking the most egregious attacks on voting in states from North Carolina to Wisconsin. But the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. has made this task much harder, mainly by gutting a key provision of the Voting Rights Act (Links to an external site.) in a 2013 case. Decisions like that one, which split 5 to 4, depend heavily on who is sitting in those nine seats — yet another reason people should care who gets elected.
In the end, the biggest obstacle to more Americans voting is their own sense of powerlessness. It’s true: Voting is a profound act of faith, a belief that even if your voice can’t change policy on its own, it makes a difference. Consider the attitude of Andrea Anthony (Links to an external site.), the Wisconsin woman who was deterred by the state’s harsh new voter-ID law after voting her whole adult life. “Voting is important to me because I know I have a little, teeny, tiny voice, but that is a way for it to be heard,” Ms. Anthony said. “Even though it’s one vote, I feel it needs to count.”
She’s right. The future of America is in your hands. More people voting would not only mean “different political parties with different platforms and different candidates,” the writer Rebecca Solnit said (Links to an external site.). “It would change the story. It would change who gets to tell the story.”
There are a lot of stories desperately needing to be told right now, but they won’t be as long as millions of Americans continue to sit out elections. Lament the state of the nation as much as you want. Then get out and vote.
(Word Count: 1605)
“A Male Backlash against #MeToo Is Brewing” (Fox News, February 4th, 2018)
Men are scared, and feminists are delighted. But the urge to call out and punish male sexual transgression is bound to clash with an inescapable truth: We’re all in this together, men and women.
Consider what’s happening in the capital of Florida. Female staffers and lobbyists have found “many male legislators will no longer meet with them privately,” reported The Miami Herald (Links to an external site.). “I had a senator say, ‘I need my aide here in the room because I need a chaperone,’ ” lobbyist Jennifer Green told the paper. “I said, ‘Senator, why do you need a chaperone? . . . Do you feel uncomfortable around me?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘anyone can say anything with the door shut.’ ”
“I’m getting the feeling that we’re going back 20 years as female professionals,” said Green, who owns her company. “I fully anticipate I’m going to be competing with another firm that is currently owned by some male, and the deciding factor is going to be: ‘You don’t want to hire a female lobbying firm in this environment.’ ”
This kind of thinking is catching on in aggressively P.C. Silicon Valley, where men are taking to message boards like Reddit to express interest in sex segregation — sometimes labeled “Men Going Their Own Way,” or the “Man-o-Sphere.” How will that work out for women in the tech industry, where they already face substantial challenges?
Across industries, “Several major companies have told us they are now limiting travel between the genders,” Johnny Taylor, president of the Society for Human Resource Management, told the Chicago Tribune, citing execs who tell men not to go on business trips or share rental cars with women co-workers. UCLA psychologist Kim Elsesser, the author of “Sex and the Office,” sees a nascent “sex partition.” If men start to back away from women, at least in professional settings, it’s difficult to see how that will aid the feminist cause.
Turning men and women into hostile opposing camps is not going to be good for either sex.
As is characteristic of movements led by the left in general, #MeToo faces the prospect of being seen to push too far, too fast. Not long ago, the British magazine The Spectator depicted the cause a feminist Reformation, with a modern woman nailing her demands to the door of a church like Martin Luther. These days the entirely justified anger and calls for change are venturing into iconoclasm: Let’s knock over some innocent statues and shatter all those stained-glass windows!
Outraged feminists triggered by “Thérèse Dreaming,” a suggestive 1938 painting of a clothed pubescent girl by the Polish-French artist Balthus, demanded the Metropolitan Museum of Art remove it. (The Met refused, to its credit). Moms are dressing their sons in humiliating “the Future is Female” T-shirts. The women’s Web site Bustle banned the word “flattering” because it implies there’s an ideal shape for a woman, and we all know women aren’t interested in looks.
Companies are firing perverts and sexual harassers, which is great, but those who can’t find any bad behavior to punish are casting around angrily looking for random things to attack. Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto professor and author of the bestseller “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” who has become a YouTube sensation by rebutting crazy left-wing students, has been lambasted on social media for citing sociological studies that say women are more agreeable in the workplace and suffer some salary repercussions because of it. Although this is essentially a restatement of the thinking behind “Lean In” — if you want it, push for it — Peterson found himself being subjected to an absurdly hostile interview by British broadcaster Cathy Newman in a confrontation that went viral and led to more abuse being heaped on Peterson.
Writing in The American Interest, Claire Berlinski calls the #MeToo movement “a frenzied extrajudicial warlock hunt that does not pause to parse the difference between rape and stupidity” and “a classic moral panic, one that is ultimately as dangerous to women as to men.” She tells a story about how she just discovered she has a new power: the power to ruin the career of a professor she knew at Oxford who grabbed her butt 20 years ago while drunk at a party. “I was amused and flattered,” she writes, saying, “I knew full well he’d been dying to do that. Our tutorials — which took place one-on-one with no chaperones — were livelier intellectually for that sublimated undercurrent. He was an Oxford don and so had power over me . . . But I also had power over him — power sufficient to cause a venerable don to make a perfect fool of himself at a Christmas party. Unsurprisingly, I loved having that power.”
Reformers should keep her underlying point in mind: Change may be good, but be wary of unintended consequences. Turning men and women into hostile opposing camps is not going to be good for either sex.
