english essays

In general, this was a really strong round of essays, so great work. I do have a couple things for you to keep in mind for next time, though. 

1. Make sure to include a header with your name and class. Also give your essay a title. 
2. I still noticed a lot of confusion with when to use quotes with a title and when to use italics. Again, put titles of articles, essays, and other short works in quotation marks. Put the titles of longer works, such as full books or the name of an entire website or magazine, in italics.
3. Also make sure to meet the full length requirement when I give you one. Your grade immediately drops on the assignment if it's not long enough. Feel free to go over the length requirement, though. 

Next, I want to move into our second unit. For this portion, you're going to select an issue from the list below. We'll then be focusing a lot on how to find credible sources. The unit will culminate in your final essay, which will be due July 28th. For Sunday, July 9th, I want you to pick an issue you think you'd like to explore in a full essay. Consider the list below, and then write a response that says which issue you plan to pick and why you think it's interesting.

• Police brutality/profiling - How could their training be different?

• Representation in pop culture - How could we, as consumers, help to make the media landscape more diverse? Why is it problematic when we don’t see diversity in popular culture?

• Tuition and student loans - How could college become more affordable? What would the government (state, federal, or both) need to do? Is free college tuition a good idea?

• The electoral college - What are the problems of this system? Why do we have it? How could we change it?

• Moving away from oil - What is a plausible and cost-effective way we could move beyond a system that revolves around this fuel?

In addition to that response, I want you to read the following article about source credibility very closely. Fake news and source credibility has morphed into a huge issue that we face today, making it particularly important to know how to find reliable information and conduct research online. Right off the bat, I want to make sure that you don't use Wikipedia as a source in your essays. Wikipedia is a good tool to learn about something, but it should be treated as a starting point in your research and not a source in itself. One way to use it is to look at the information and then use the references section at the bottom to find actual sources. 

Here's the article: https://mason.gmu.edu/~montecin/web-eval-sites.htm