Writer’s choice

List of topics:

1. Ethical and legal issues relating to withholding or withdrawing of life-sustaining treatment from patients in a critical condition
2. Ethical and legal issues relating to decision-making involving people who lack capacity
3. Ethical and legal issues relating to the treatment of people who lack capacity
4. Ethical and legal issues relating to medical assistance in dying
5. Ethical and legal issues relating to termination of pregnancy
6. Ethical and legal issues relating to Advance Healthcare Directives
7. Ethical issues relating to preimplantation genetic diagnosis
8. Ethical issues relating to prenatal genetic testing
9. Ethical issues associated with genetic testing of minors

Requirements:

Your essay should be no longer than 2,000 words and not shorter than 1,850 words (excluding references and bibliography). All direct quotations should be placed in quotation marks and the source of the quotation should be acknowledged. The source of any indirect quotation or paraphrase should also be acknowledged. Please use the Harvard referencing system and provide a full bibliography (no unaccompanied urls!). You may refer to websites as well as journal articles/ books as long as you use a proper system of referencing, but avoid Wikipedia as a source of information. A minimum of ten references should be consulted. 50% of your references should NOT be internet sources. I will have to deduct marks for essays which are more than 10% over the word limit.

In relation to your questions about referencing, the Hastings Center and AMA resources do count as ‘internet resources’. Any book chapter or journal article you cite does not count as an internet resource.

What you are being asked to do in this assignment is to gather, analyse and synthesise information. In other words, in addition to searching for the information, you need to be able to edit the information you have found in order to present it in a coherent fashion. You need to show me why you consider that the information you have decided to include is important. In an essay of 2,000 words, this means approximately six main paragraphs (excluding your introduction), each dealing with one main issue or a related cluster of issues. The opening paragraph should provide a general background to the issue you have chosen to discuss. For maximum coherence, you should state the main point of each paragraph in the first line and spend the rest of the paragraph backing that point up (with reference to the literature or to relevant arguments). Try to avoid making too many individual points as this will compromise the coherence of your discussion.

Marking criteria:

Your assignment will be marked according to the following criteria:

(i) Knowledge: you must demonstrate an understanding of the issues you are discussing.
(ii) Integration of information: within the word limit, you must be able to focus your discussion on the essential points at issue. To do this, you must be able to edit and synthesise the information you have gathered.
(iii) Clarity: you must express your points in clear English. Marks will be deducted for poor grammar and punctuation (please don’t put the onus on the reader – me – to try to interpret what you’re saying).
Authorship

Please provide a couple of lines at the end of the essay describing the role each of together the final product (researched what; wrote what; how planned it). This won’t be included in the word count.