Essay Assignment: (covering topics from 1865-1920)
My topic is : How did technology shape the west?
Use the American yawp and other text book text.
http://www.americanyawp.com/text/17-conquering-the-west/
This assignment requires you to do THREE main things:
- Accurately present the importance of a key figure, group, event, or idea in American history in the years 1865-1920.
- Present PRIMARY source documentation to support and illustrate your description.
- Reflect the views of two, different SECONDARY sources about the meaning or importance of the key term, and present your own view in response.
Essay format:
- The essay must be five pages long
- Create a Works Cited bibliography list for all the sources used in the essay, and use in-text citation to refer to these sources. In-text citations occur in your own essay text, and require you to have a Works Cited section for the essay. do not include URLs in-text. To learn the rules of in-text citation go here. All notes providing additional information must be given as footnotes. Footnotes are single-spaced.
- Use a 12-point, Times New Roman font, one-inch margins on all sides, double-spaced throughout (only use double-spacing—in no cases will triple spacing be necessary)
- Upload a single file for the essay: do not upload a link.
Some Tips:
- Your essay should mention the question or key term in the first paragraph, but not necessarily in the first sentence.
- Your first paragraph should mention your ARGUMENT. This is the point of view you want the reader to consider. Try using a “They Say / I Say” or “On the one hand / On the other hand” approach to this argument (I will explain this in class). You want to engage your reader by showing that history can be understood in new and challenging ways.
- The main body of your essay should follow a structure, but please choose a specific structure to make it successful. You can be CHRONOLOGICAL and move with events in time, ANALYTIC by looking closely at causes, consequences, and significance, or ARGUMENTATIVE by considering competing interpretations of the subject. Or you could some otherrhetorical structure that reflects you use of historical evidence, comparisons, contextualizations, causes, change over time, interpretation, argumentation, and synthesis (we will cover these basic thinking skills in class). An essay structure is a “rhetoric” because it is a way of convincing an audience of the truth of a proposition by choosing the ordering of information carefully and with a purpose.
