claim paper

A successful paper will demonstrate a detailed awareness of the position(s) of the author(s) you draw on in your paper, as well as provide sound reasoning and evidence in support of your argument. To develop your claim, you might choose to challenge an author (in other words, disagree with their argument), add to the argument an author makes (in other words, agree with their argument), or redefine a problem that an author poses (in other words, both agree and disagree at the same time).

Summary of Requirements:

Your paper will need a clear claim (thesis statement) that makes an arguable assertion about one or more texts from our second unit. You may either develop your claim in response to the texts or in response to a larger issue that that the texts address. The claim should be consistent throughout the entire paper and be complex, personal, and persuasive.

To support your assertion, the paper must use evidence and examples from the course text(s) and/or your personal experience. The paper must include at least three substantial, meaningful quotes from either Graff, Kohl, Precious Knowledge, or Freire (or some combination of those). Evidence provided in support of the argument must be persuasive and thoughtful.

Your essay should be organized into proper paragraphs, with a cohesive and focused introduction, body, and conclusion. Each paragraph should focus on only one main idea per paragraph. Transitions should be used to connect ideas in the paper, and there should be clear topic sentences and concluding sentences in each body paragraph.

Since you will be incorporating quotes and paraphrases in your essay, you will need to include in-text citations and a works cited page in MLA format. Quotes should be integrated into the essay using the “quote sandwich” method and paraphrases should have clear signal phrases introducing them. Quotes and paraphrases should have in-text citations following them.

Finally, your essay should be formatted in MLA page formatting and utilize academic tone, wording and sentence structure. It should also be polished and free of sentence-level grammar, spelling, or syntactical errors. The paper must meet the full minimum page requirement.