Group: Lucy, Katie, Alex, Justin
1. The first essay, essay U, was better than essay L, and deserves an 8 because although it was well-written, there were still faults
2. We felt like ours were decent until we read the examples
3. Focus on the prompt, conclusions more concluding, spend a little more time on it
4. Rules: Incorporate sources, do a prewrite, know what the topic/prompt is
The $114.69 Speech Police”
Fact:
Claim: Limiting political activity does not, like some claim, make for more equal “access” to political advocacy.
Warrant: A student is fined for responding to someone else exercising their rights to speech. contradicts itself
Backing: The campus police probably just have the need to control more things.
Rebuttal: If the studentloses the case, the university students will learn a very skewed lesson on the limitations of their right to speech.
“Freedom’s Just Another Word”
Fact: We are a democracy, and think of ourselves as superior because of it
Claim: There should be more work put into encouraging participation in exercising democratic rights
Warrant: In Australia, where a fine is imposed for not voting, the voter turnout is over 90%. We are only at about 50%
Backing: Now political campaigns are about getting the favor of the public by manipulating the laws to satisfy an audience, not necessarily what the candidate believes.
Qualifier: Sure, we are a democracy, not a forced democracy, but letting people become apathetic to exercising their rights will mean the deterioration of democracy as we know it.
In Thoreau’s “Where I lived, and what I live for,” the argument of simplicity in presented. Thoreau starts out explaining himself so that people will not judge his persona from the get-go. He uses antithesis in the piece when he asks “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?” he is addressing the opposing side but still putting negative connotation with “hurry”. Notice he could’ve used the question “Why is life lived in a hurry?”. He follows his thesis with examples of the ways humans waste away their lives, such as the post office. He uses personal experience with this, not really any concrete data, “To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life — I wrote this some years ago — that were worth the postage.” This makes the argument weaker because he has no hard evidence to prove his point. This is true for some the rest of his data, too, like in speculation of accurate speculation. “the other day at one of the offices to learn the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the pressure — news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelve-month, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy.” He does improve his credibility by making any allusions to things considered “intellectual”, like Arabian Nights, The Odyssey, Saint Vitus Dance, etc. He uses parallelism in the title, repeating the verb “live”, and the phrase “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”