Academic essay
The academic essay assignment is due on November 17. It must be submitted through SafeAssign as well
as in paper. You are expected to bring to class a complete or nearly complete draft of your essay on November 10.
Choose one of the topics below. Write a six-page argumentative essay that responds to at least one academic essay. Essays shorter
than five full pages or longer than seven pages will be returned unread and ungraded. You must follow one of the following
presentation and documentation styles: MLA, APA, or Chicago. Bibliographies and title pages do not count towards the page count
of your essay.
Your essay must use the Times New Roman font, 12-point in size. There must be one inch (2.5 cm) margins on all four
sides of the essay. The essay must have double-spaced lineation. The essay should not have a title page if one is not
required. (Do not include an abstract page.) The essay should be justified on the left margin only: no full justification.
Your essay is an argumentative essay. Your main argument (your thesis) must be based on your research, especially as a response
to another academic argument, not on your personal opinion. It will probably be a response to the main academic source you are
using for this essay.
Your essay must use at least one peer-reviewed, academic source. Academic essays from peer-reviewed journals are the most common
type of source for this. Your essay must include a brief summary of this academic source and must engage with the scholars’
arguments in some way. Note that it is not sufficient with regards to using this source to use a quotation or two to justify one
of your own statements: you must respond to its arguments. Nor is it sufficient to use information from the source: you must respond
to its arguments.
For all the topics, you are required also to use Blueprint for Revolution in some way. A good way to use the book is to
establish some context for what you will write about. You can also draw upon various sections of the book for examples of what
your essay is discussing.
You must use at least one other source of information. Remember that the value of your essay is partly based on your choice of
appropriate, reliable sources of information and quotations. You are of course welcome to use the two sources from your
annotated bibliography assignment, assuming they were valid resources.
Penalty: 30 points if the essay does not use at least one academic, peer-reviewed source.
Penalty: 10 points if the essay does not use Blueprint for Revolution.
Penalty: up to 20 points for inaccurate quotations.
Penalty: 20 points for a missing bibliography (Works Cited / References).
Penalty: 2 points if the margins are incorrect.
Penalty: 2 points if the font (type and/or size) is incorrect.
Penalty: 2 points if the lineation (spacing between lines) is incorrect.
Penalty: 1 point if one or more paragraphs are not indented properly.
Penalty: 2 points for two or more errors with indicating titles in the text.
Penalty: 3 points for poor adherence to one of the style guides for the presentation of the essay.
Penalty: 3 points for poor adherence to one of the style guides for the presentation of the bibliography / list of references / works cited.
Here is the list of topics from which you must choose one. You will probably want to narrow/focus the topic for your essay.
- Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and modern civil protest
- passive resistance and anarchy
- criticism of Gandhi’s passive resistance
- the ethics of hunger strikes
- digital media and political protests
- passive resistance in Canada
- the health concerns surrounding hunger strikes and forced feeding
- the roles of health professionals in large-scale political revolutions