Academic essay

The academic essay assignment is due on November 14. 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 7.

Choose one of the topics below. Write a six-page argumentative essay that includes a response 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 you are using MLA style. Do not include an abstract page if you are using APA style. The essay should be justified on the left margin only: no full justification. Always include full URLs (or DOIs) in lists of references and works cited (unless using standard academic databases).

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 resource you are using for this essay.

Your essay must use at least one peer-reviewed, academic resource. Academic essays from peer-reviewed journals are the most common type of resource for this. Your essay must include a brief summary of this academic resource and must engage with the scholars’ arguments in some way. Note that it is not sufficient with regards to using this resource 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 resource: you must respond to its arguments. Please use PDF versions of journal articles, where available, not web pages. You are welcome to use “Enhancing Floral Resources for Pollinators in Productive Agricultural Grasslands” by Woodcock et al., but it does not count as the one peer-reviewed, academic resource.

For all the topics, you are required also to use Bee Quest 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 resources from your annotated bibliography assignment, assuming they were valid resources. While you are welcome to use them, reference resources, including Wikipedia, do not count for this requirement.

Penalty: 30 points if the essay does not use at least one academic, peer-reviewed resource.
Penalty: 10 points if the essay does not use Bee Quest.
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: up to 5 points for poor adherence to one of the style guides for the presentation of the essay.
Penalty: up to 5 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. Remember to write an argumentative essay, not one that just recounts facts and information.

• solutions to declining bee populations in Canada
• theories and practices of rewilding
• brownfields and their ecological challenges
• the use of the outdoor classroom in secondary education
• the economics of bees (including the bee industry, food farming / production, etc.)
• the state of the insect population of the Amazon rainforest
• citizen science
• the use of nature in treating addiction
• the use of nature in treating depression
• the use of bees in European philosophy
• the use of bees in English literature
• the use of bees in one or two world religions