For this paper, you will develop and defend an argumentative thesis using at least seven primary and secondary sources. In this essay the emphasis is more on your ability to analyze primary and secondary texts for their main ideas and arguments, and less on your close reading skills (although you may well want to perform a few close readings as well, especially if you are responding to prompt three). The key here is to engage with several different sources in order to elucidate your own, distinct point of view. As such, you’re welcome to use personal pronouns and personal anecdotes in this essay; This essay is about how you, as an intelligent and thoughtful member of an intellectual community, approach a particular aspect of your world.

As we’ve discussed in class, you have several choices with regard to topic for this essay. Take a look at the readings tab for articles, tv seasons, and ideas that I think might get your creative juices flowing, but essentially this essay asks you to practice your research and argumentative skills while exploring any topic related to implicit or explicit rules as they operate in a society. The openness of this project is both good and bad: it offers you an opportunity to explore something of genuine interest to you, but it also means that it will be easy to choose a topic that is too diffuse. Try to ground your inquiry in one particular thing–an incident, a text, a word, a very specific place and time–and go from there.

A few sample topics:

1) Choose a particular word or phrase (flawless, the n-word, on fleek, Ms.) and explore its history and current usage in order to make an argument about how the word’s usage has changed over time or what people really mean when they say the word that might not be immediately clear.

2) Use your personal essay (or something from your daily life) as a jumping off point. Use your research to provide context for a particular rule you yourself observe in your daily life. It could have to do, for eample, with interactions in person, like how you demonstrate respect for elders, or online, like how your generation/demographic/etc uses Instagram. Make sure to choose a general cultural phenomenon (even if it is specific to one culture or subculture), as opposed to a practice that only your family or friends observe. Otherwise, it will be very difficult for you to find sources.

3) Explore a text of any kind in which the rules are tested or broken (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is currently my favorite example of this), examining either a particular rule or how a particular character encounters one or several rules.

4)  Here are a few articles (from the readings tab) that can be used as jumping off points to enter into a current debate:

• Kate Taylor, “At Success Academy Charter Schools, Polarizing Methods and Superior Results”: Do these ends (the high levels of student achievement) justify the means (shaming students, high teacher turnover, etc)?
• Ta-Nehesi Coates, “The Case for Reparations”: Should the country issue reparations?
• Ruth Padawer, “When Women Become Men at Wellesley”: Should all-women’s colleges accept Trans students?
• Asam Ahmad, “A Note on Call Out Culture”: How do the rules of political correctness operates, and when and how do people go too far?