Content

1.  Your primary focus should be the identification, analysis, and criticism of the primary themes and arguments advanced by the author.  You should not simply summarize the factual content of the book.  You will need to include some of the factual details that you find, but choose those that illustrate the author’s larger themes and arguments.

Answer these questions: Does he or she express these themes clearly and convince you that they have merit by citing relevant evidence?  What biases does he or she have?  Does he or she consider and respond to any potential objections that people with alternative viewpoints may raise?  What ideas, themes, or arguments does the author hope that you remember long after most readers have forgotten most of the factual details?

2.  While you should indeed focus on the author’s primary arguments, I do need to know that you read the book.  Thus, do not focus on the main theme so exclusively that you fail to discuss the more significant sub-themes.  A review of this length gives you the space to do this.

3.  Do not assume specialized knowledge on the part of your reader.  Write as if            the reader has not read the book and has only general knowledge of the subject      matter.  Be certain to include the author’s name and the title of the book in your essay

4.  Read the book’s preface and/or introduction carefully, as these often provide insights into the author’s motivation, purposes, and point of view.

5.  As you read, mark the most important portions of the text.  After you finish each chapter, make a few notes on the most important themes and conclusions.

6.  Pay particular attention to the preface or introduction and the beginning and end of each chapter, as authors often summarize themes and conclusions here.  Then, make an outline of your review based on this information.  Know what you want to say and have an organizational plan before you begin to write.

Quotations and Source Documentation

1.    Appropriating the words or original ideas of another author without documentation is plagiarism, which will earn you a zero on the assignment.  If you are unsure about what constitutes plagiarism, please consult or discuss it with me.

2.    As you paraphrase, keep the source out of your sight.  I want your words, not text that is copied save for a few transposed clauses and a few words replaced by means of a thesaurus.  If you do the latter, you have likely crossed the line into plagiarism.

3.    You must use quotations from the text, but you should use them relatively sparingly.  Synthesize material from other sources into your own words whenever possible.  Use quotations only when the words of another author are so eloquent or compelling that they cannot be paraphrased without sacrificing those qualities.

4.    You should provide some analytical commentary as to the significance of the quotations you have chosen.  Why are they significant?  What do they reveal about the author’s intentions, conclusions, beliefs, biases, or writing style?

5.    The recommended citation format is fairly standard.  Quotations from the book under review are cited in the body of the review by placing the page number of the quotation in parentheses immediately after the end of the sentence in which the quotation is used.  The citation is placed at the end of the sentence, not at the end of the quote itself, and the period is placed after the close of the parentheses.

Example 1:    “The prominence of W. J. Cash in southern intellectual life might be measured by the stature and diversity of his critics,” states Fred Hobson (p. 247).

Example 2:    Todd Gitlin urges imperial historians to “capture the interplay of local and global interests” (p. 74).

6.    If you cite a book review or any source other than the text you are reviewing, use an endnote or footnote composed according to either the Chicago/Turabian or MLA formats.  The use of sources other than the text under review is neither expected nor required.

Format

1.    Papers must be typed.  Please submit your paper via the DROPBOX function on Springboard (discussion section).

2.    Double-space your paper.

3.    Your paper should have a title page containing the title of your paper, your name, the days and time of your class section, and the date upon which you turn the paper in.

Stylistic Suggestions

1.    The central stylistic rule of thumb is to write in as clear and direct a manner as possible.  Many students use too many convoluted sentences containing a confusing array of independent and dependent clauses.  Make sure that your writing style delivers your ideas in as concise a manner as possible. Eliminate unnecessary words and phrases whenever possible so as not to burden your reader with an overly complex prose style that obscures the ideas you are trying to convey.  However, you should not go to the other extreme and write in a choppy, overly simplistic style.  Long sentences per se are not inappropriate.  Complex sentences often are required to express complex ideas.

2.    The most straightforward type of introductory paragraph contains the title of the book, the name of the author, a brief overview of the subject matter, and the theme or themes that you consider most important.  A more creative and ambitious opening paragraph that includes a narrative or the posing of rhetorical questions can be great, but you must include the above information in a second or third paragraph.

3.    Active verbs are usually better than passive verbs.

4.    Verb tense: the text under review speak to the reader in present tense, historical events are described in past tense.  Example:  Mary Beth Norton asserts, “the nature of the witchcraft episode had changed dramatically.” [italics added to indicate verb tense]

5.    Names:  the first time that you mention an individual, identify him or her by first and last name.  Subsequent references generally utilize the surname only, although you might use first and last name more than once for stylistic variety.  You should generally avoid referring to anyone by first name only unless you need to do this to distinguish among people with the same surname.

6.    Think before you capitalize a word.  Is it truly a proper noun that should be capitalized?

7.    Proofread your work.  A paper full of misspellings and grammatical errors indicates laziness and negligence on the part of the writer. A spell-check program is useful, but it is not a substitute for proofreading.

Books list to choose:

Rush Limbaugh “The way thing ought to be”

Sam Seder “F.U.B.A.R.: American right wing nightmare”

Richard Nixon “No more viet nam”

Calvin Trillin “A heck of a job”

David Rees “Get you war on 2”

Michael Moore “Dude, where’s my country?”

Noam Chomsky “Hegemony of survival: America’s quest for global dominance”

Michael Savage “Political zoo”

Ann Coulter “Godless”

Peter Schweizer “Do as I say, not as I do”

Ann Coulter “How to talk to a liberal if you must”

Ann Coulter “Slander, liberal lies about the American right”

Morris Fiorina “Culture war: the myth of a polarized America”

Michal Savage “Liberalism is a mental disorder”

Steven Levitt “Freakonomics”

Marx and Engels “The communist manifesto”

Richard Hofstadter “The paranoid style in American politics”

Raphael Ezekial “The racist mind”

Joe Klein “Primary colors”

Alan Drury “Advise and consent”

David Hardy “Michael Moore is a big fat stupid white man”

Ramesh Ponnuru “The party of death”

Philip E. Converse, “Researching Electoral Politics”

Sue Tolleson-Rinehart and Susan J. Carroll, “‘Far from Ideal’: The Gender Politics of Political Science”

Kenneth D. Wald and Clyde Wilcox, “Getting Religion: Has Political Science Rediscovered the Faith Factor?”

David Brock “The republican noise machine”

Jerry Lembcke “The spitting image”

Brian Anderson “South park conservatives”

David Brock “The seduction of Hillary Rodham”

Ron Suskind “The price of loyalty”

Bruce Oppenheimer “Sizing up the senate”

Christopher Hitchens “The trial of Henry Kissinger”

Becky Garrison “Red and blue god, black and blue church”

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge “The right nation”

Eric Alterman “What liberal media?”

Christopher Ruddy “The strange death of Vince Foster”

Dan Flynn “Why the left hates America”

Brent Bozell “Weapons of mass distortion”

Donald Kagan “Why America sleeps”

Stephen Carter “The culture of disbelief”

Mark Smith “The official handbook of the vast right wing conspiracy”

Zell Miller “A national party no more”

George Lakoff “Moral politics: how liberals and conservatives think”

David Brock “Blinded by the right: the conscience of an ex-conservative”

Henry Kissinger “Diplomacy”

Bill Clinton “My life”

Hilary Clinton “Living history”

Dick Morris “Rewriting history”

Dick Morris “Because he could”

Keith Olberman “The worst person in the world”

Robert Buzz Patterson “Dereliction of duty”

Peggy Noonan “The case against Hilary Clinton”

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr “Madame Hilary: The dark road to the White House”

Joe Klein “The Natural: the misunderstood presidency of Bill Clinton”

George Stephanopoulos “All too human”

Mary Matalin and James Carville “All’s fair: Love, war and running for president”

James Carville “We’re right, they’re wrong”

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To Kill A Mockingbird

Write about the racism in the book “To Kill A Mockingbird” and how each of the main characters feel about the Tom Robinson case.

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Girl by Kincaid

For the purpose of your paper, you must consider and develop an insightful interpretation that you can build into a well-supported literary analysis argument based on Girl by Kincaid story. Some possibilities for interpretations include your choice to focus on of one or two of the following literary elements: characters, setting, plot, structure, point of view, style, theme, and symbol. I expect a concrete thesis statement, textual citations and logical and coherent that begin with topic sentences and use strong supporting evidence.

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Is America becoming a third world country

The final assignment (research project) has three predominant features:

understand the history of a problem in an international relations context, including the theories and concepts at play within it;
present a case study in which the problem is identifiable and compelling;
offer a solution or the practical application of a model.
For the most part, all three – history, case study, and practical application – may be accomplished using a tool that international relations scholars have borrowed from the “real world.”  For the executive summary, prepare the following:

Paper Length:  No more and no fewer than eight (8) pages

1 page – Introduction and background to the Problem – include thesis statement

1 page – Issues – What are at least three-four issues within the problem?

6 pages – Research and Analysis Pages

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invention and evolution of the polio vaccine

6 SOURCES needed..I want to mention President Roosevelt because of having polio and mentioning the trials and studies of both polio vaccines

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Great Unsolved Canadian Mysteries

The link to the story:

http://www.canadianmysteries.ca/sites/angelique/indexen.html

Other info:

What your essay will be about:

In each mystery there has been a crime or injustice committed. Your job is to make an argument about the crime and back it up with evidence. In some mysteries it may appear to be clear or obvious who committed the crime and even perhaps why; however, you will be judged on the merits of the case you present.

Your essay will be framed around two questions:

1. Who committed the crime and why?

2. What does the crime tell us about the society in which it happened?

Argument:

It is essential that you have an argument/thesis/main claim to your paper. Since there are two questions being asked, you can have two thesis statements or you can combine them into one.

In terms of the first question, who committed the crime and why, the second is more important that the first. In some mysteries it will be obvious who committed the crime, and perhaps somewhat less obvious why the crime was committed. However, you will be judged on the case you make for proving this. How well do you back up your claims/arguments with primary document evidence from the website. In another analogy, you might think of yourself like a prosecutor in a court case, trying to prove who committed the crime in question and the motive behind doing so. The judge and jury obviously would not take your word for but needs to be convinced of it by your reasoning, and most importantly, by the strength of the evidence you present.

The second question is a broader question than the first and should relate back to some of the themes discussed in the course, such as social or moral regulation; ethnicity; gender; class; religion and so on. For this discussion you can look at the documents in the section of your mystery variously called “Historical Contexts”, “Contexts”, or “Settings”.

Format:

Length: 1,500 – 1,750 words

Sources:
You should cite at least ten different primary documents in your essay, though the documents you choose should not be padding to your essay but rather the strength of your evidence to support your arguments. You should only use information on the mystery’s website itself. You must still, however, cite the source from which you take your information.
One of the reasons that the citation of sources is to vital to the historian’s craft is so that others find the information you cite as your source.

Attached is an essay I wrote for a previous class (to get an idea of my writing style).

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HealthCare Reform in the State of Michigan

Instructions are in the uploaded materials. The challenge:
Identify two important issues raised by healthcare providers in this article, and argue either for or against the position taken by the healthcare provider for each issue, and provide a research reference for each position.
You can argue for or against which ever one is simple.

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