20% of final grade
3-4-pages, double-spaced
using the article On Education: What’s Wrong With Vocational School?
by Charles Murray Wall Street Journal
In this assignment you’ll move from analyzing the course theme as it relates to you personally to analyzing someone else’s assessment of a particular issue related to the theme. Select one of the essays we have read and discussed as a class for this unit, read it again, and challenge yourself in this essay to critique the author’s arguments and primary points of support.
ESSAY REQUIREMENTS
Summarize the article briefly. You cannot assume your audience has read the article you are critiquing. Therefore, you should provide a brief summary of the article early on in the essay. Be sure to state what the author’s main argument is and mention his or her main points of support and evidence. You should also tell your audience when and where the article was published and who it was written by.
Critique the article. Consider the following questions as prompts for helping you critique the article: What has the author done well? What is weak, missing, or underdeveloped? Do you agree or disagree with the author’s points (remember, you can agree with some points, but disagree with others) and why? How has the author convinced you—or why hasn’t he or she convinced you of his or her argument? Does your personal experience contradict the author’s argument? How timely is the author’s argument? Is it current, or out of date? Is it still relevant? What about the writer’s tone or style? Is it humorous? sarcastic? academic? descriptive? etc? How do the style and tone affect the success (or lack of success) of the piece? You do not need to answer all of these questions. They should simply serve as prompts for getting you thinking critically about the article.
Provide support for your critique. Just as you want the author to provide examples and evidence to support his or her argument, you must provide support for your critique. Consider quoting or paraphrasing passages that are particularly poignant to your critique. Consider using outside examples or personal examples that demonstrate either the validity or questionability of the author’s arguments.
Document and integrate your source according to MLA guidelines. Because this essay is a critique of one article, you do not need to use an in-text parenthetical citation to document your overall summary of the piece. However, if you quote or paraphrase specific passages, you must cite those passages according to MLA guidelines. You can find MLA guidelines for in-text citations and Works Cited entries via the Diana Hacker website in “Syllabus and Important Course Links”.
GRADING CRITERIA
A strong essay will…
•Contain a brief introductory summary of the article.
•Contain a clear, well-supported argument about the strengths and/or weaknesses of the article.
•Include an engaging and thoughtful introduction and conclusion.
•Progress logically and smoothly with appropriate transitions indicating connections between ideas.
•Make appropriate use of sentence structure, word choice, grammar, spelling, and punctuation that enables rather than hinders clear and effective communication.
•Document and integrate source material correctly and effectively.
•Show significant revision of ideas, language, and style from first to final draft.
•Meet the minimum page requirement of 3-4 double-spaced pages.
So basically the instructions are while reading the article provided you must identify the pros and cons to the argument and what you agree or disagree with. The first paragraph should be the introduction where you state your argument and a good thesis, the second paragraph should be a brief summary about the article, the third, fourth and fifth paragraphs should all be different and identify what you agree with or disagree with in that article. You must use quotes from the article in your paragraphs and be able to unpack and identify what they mean to what your argue for in your paragraph. Finally write a conclusion to summarize all your points.
For one of my rough drafts I stated the thesis being : (In “What’s Wrong with Vocational School”, Charles Murray’s argument is relevant to most students of today’s era, but for others might be conducted as either too biased or too opinionated.) Take this and either use it or create a better thesis. and also use these bullet points to go by in the body paragraphs:
(With this thesis I will further explain the pros and cons of that article and how to some its great encouragement yet to others it could be a certain downfall of educational expectations. Such that “not only students with IQ of 115 or better should be the only ones to attend college” but everyone should get that same opportunity. On the same token, students who think they can not pull it through in college-level courses should be given other options such as vocational schools. I believe school is school and the educational expectations are in each and every one of the students’ hands. They have control of what level of education they personally feel they can finish may it be 2-year, 4-year, or vocational school. For Murray to input some of his biased opinions such as only certain “IQ levels” should attend college is very wrong.)
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