Here are
your GG’s:
1. FANBOYS
2. supposed, used to
3. their, they're, there
4. you're, your
5. quotation punctuation
6. compound pronouns
7. semi-colon (Rules 314-318)
8. a lot, a little
9. names
10. numbers (Rules 345-346)
In the sentences below, circle as many of the 25 errors as you can. Go over it
at least three times.
A. This work is suppose to help you catch errors in you’re
own work.
B. Pat screamed Back up and keep your eye on the ball!
Perfect!”
C. No matter how much you and him try, your chances of
winning the lottery are slim to none.
D.We invited 60
famous people to you’re party but only Cleave made it.
E.There favorite
music uses alot of bass and a little synthesizer; cool.
F.Lopez made the
audience laugh with jokes my friend and me actually wrote and sent in 3 years
ago.
G. Darla’s 5 pets all have the exact same birthday; November
seventeenth!
H. Last year them and I went rafting on the American River a
lot, like 15 times.
I.Never give up says
the Dalai Lama. Develop the heart. Be compassionate.”
This research
paper should present a thesis that is specific, manageable, provable, and
contestable—in other words, the thesis should offer a clear position,
stand, or opinion that will be proven with research.You should analyze and prove your
thesis using examples and quotes from a variety of sources.
You need to research and cite from at
leastfive sources.You must use at least 3 different types
of sources.
oAt
least one source must be from a library database.
oAt
least one source must be a book, anthology or textbook.
oAt
least one source must be from a credible website, appropriate for academic use.
oThe
paper should not over-rely on one main source for most of the information.
Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in
them.
This paper will be approximately 6-8
pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required.This means at least 6 full pages of
text.The Works Cited page does NOT
count towards length requirement.
You must use MLA
format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.
You must
integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or
commentary.
You must sustain
your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar,
spelling, and punctuation.
Your paper must
be logically organized and focused.
This means it presents an opinion, an argument, or an illustration of a view or experience. It is not a mere statement of fact.
It must ADDRESS the TOPIC.
While this element seems obvious too, writers often get going and one thought leads to another and another and the topic gets left behind. Re-read the prompt several times to make sure you haven’t gone off topic beyond the parameters of the assignment.
It must be specific enough to be covered in the paper.
What is the length of the assignment: two pages? ten pages? The length determines how broad or narrow the scope of your thesis will be. Adjust accordingly.
It must MAKE SENSE.
This is the catch-all element that asks you to re-consider your wording, syntax, diction, and grammar. Make changes as you see fit.
Make a note of the article titles and presentation dates that you sign up for below.
You will be presenting your analysis in class along with two to five of your classmates. The class will be counting on you to be on top of the article you are covering, so please be prepared!
To receive credit, you must participate in the presentation of your analysis. You will be graded primarily on your written analysis (breakdown of scoring below), but outstanding presentations will be rewarded.
Before you begin your work, examine the Evaluating Arguments handout.
Read the article you will be analyzing carefully. If possible, read it twice. On your first reading, just try to identify the main idea(s) and get a feel for the writer’s approach and the flow of the piece. On your second reading, go over the text more carefully; notice how the writer constructs his or her argument. You will probably want to mark up your text and/or take notes.
To prepare your written analysis:
Identify the author’s name and the title of the article. Answer the following questions. Put your answers in outline form (see sample analysis on the reverse side of this sheet).
1.What is the central claim (or thesis) of the selection? Your answer should be a complete sentence in your own words (not a quote!). Be as specific as possible, but remember that your claim should cover the whole article. (10 points)
2.Is the central claim expressed explicitly or implicitly? The claim is explicit if the writer spells out what it is. The claim is implicit if the writer only implies the claim but does not state it outright. (1 point)
3.What reasons link the evidence to the claim? In other words, why does the evidence support the claim? Reasons may be presented explicitly or implied. (7 points)
4.What evidence does the writer present to support his or her claim? Specify and categorize the evidence (e.g. examples, personal experiences, analogy, authoritative opinion, facts, statistical data, cause-effect reasoning, results of scientific experiments, comparison, interviews, etc. – see sample on back). Do not answer this question with detailed quotes or paraphrases from the article! For additional guidance, see the table of Kinds of Evidence on pp. 91-4 of your textbook Writing Arguments. (7 points)
5.Comment briefly on the persuasiveness of the article by answering one or more of the following questions. (5 points)
·Is the argument convincing? Does it rely on emotional, ethical, and/or logical appeals?
·Are there flaws in the reasoning of the argument? Does it rely on questionable sources?
·Does understanding the argument require knowledge of the historical or cultural context in which it was written?
·How do the style, organization, and/or tone contribute or detract from the persuasiveness of the argument?
·What is your personal reaction to the article?
Guidelines for Reading Analysis Presentations 3 & 4 on The Ethics of What We Eat
Sign-up for one set of chapters for Weeks 9, 10, or 11 and one set of chapters for Weeks 12, 13, or 14. Make a note of the chapter numbers and presentation dates that you sign up for below.
You will be presenting your analysis in class along with two to five of your classmates. The class will be counting on you to be on top of the chapters you are covering, so please be prepared!
This assignment is worth 30 points – to receive credit, you must participate in the presentation of your analysis. You will be graded primarily on your written analysis (breakdown of scoring below), but outstanding presentations will be rewarded.
Before you begin your work, examine the sample analysis on the back of this sheet.
Read the chapters you will be analyzing carefully. If possible, read them twice. On your first reading, just try to identify the main idea(s) and get a feel for the writer’s approach and the flow of the piece. On your second reading, go over the text more carefully; notice how the writer constructs his argument. You will probably want to mark up your text and/or take notes.
To prepare your written analysis:
Identify the author’s name and the title of the article. Answer the following questions. Put your answers in outline form (see sample analysis on the reverse side of this sheet).
6.What is the central claim (or thesis) of the selection? Your answer should be a complete sentence in your own words (not a quote!). Be as specific as possible, but remember that your claim should cover the whole article. (10 points)
7.Is the central claim expressed explicitly or implicitly? The claim is explicit if the writer spells out what it is. The claim is implicit if the writer only implies the claim but does not state it outright. (1 point)
8.What reasons link the evidence to the claim? In other words, why does the evidence support the claim? Reasons may be presented explicitly or implied. (7 points)
9.What evidence does the writer present to support his or her claim? Specify and categorize the evidence (e.g. examples, personal experiences, analogy, authoritative opinion, facts, statistical data, cause-effect reasoning, results of scientific experiments, comparison, interviews, etc. – see sample on back). Do not answer this question with detailed quotes or paraphrases from the article! For additional guidance, see the table of Kinds of Evidence on pp. 91-4 of your textbook Writing Arguments. (7 points)
10.Comment briefly on the persuasiveness of the article by answering one or more of the following questions. (5 points)
·Is the argument convincing? Does it rely on emotional, ethical, and/or logical appeals?
·Are there flaws in the reasoning of the argument? Does it rely on questionable sources?
·Does understanding the argument require knowledge of the historical or cultural context in which it was written?
·How do the style, organization, and/or tone contribute or detract from the persuasiveness of the argument?
In August 1965, the Watts area of Los Angeles exploded as Black Americans expressed pent-up rage for second-class status in America. The event that triggered the so-called Watts Riots was a simple traffic stop of young man by a Highway Patrol motorcycle officer for reckless driving. A crowd gathered, the driver’s mother was called to come witness the event and within 24 hours Police Chief William Parker called in the National Guard to patrol the streets of Los Angeles. A simple traffic stop had become a national stand-off about civil rights and a community-wide release of decades of anger. The Watts Riots changed Los Angeles - and America - for ever.
Your assignment is to write a 5-6 page paper describing the underlying causes that caused Black citizens of Los Angeles to explode. Examine the vicious treatment they faced at the hands of the police of L.A. But don’t dwell just on that, investigate the more subtle ways discrimination play a role in enforcing inequality. Investigate the restrictive covenants that prevented Black people from buying houses beyond certain boundaries. Examine the impact such “ghettoization” had on educational and health opportunities. Look into workers rights and access to good, union jobs. Find one or two aspects of this brutally enforced double standard and investigate carefully. Write a paper that uses what you find out to explain what caused people to explode into a few days of fury, risking their lives in the process.
Class, I thought that this newspaper article would help us in our discussions about race, Easy Rawlins, and Daphne Monet/Ruby Hanks. It's long, it's deep, and it's very interesting.
What ‘White Privilege’ Really Means
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
This is the first in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s conversation is with Naomi Zack, a professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon and the author of “The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality After the History of Philosophy.” The interview was conducted by email and edited. — George Yancy
George Yancy: What motivates you to work as a philosopher in the area of race?
Photo
Naomi ZackCredit
Naomi Zack: I am mainly motivated by a great need to work and not to be bored, and I have a critical bent. I think there is a lot of work to be done concerning race in the United States, and a lot of ignorance and unfairness that still needs to be uncovered and corrected. I received my doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University in 1970 and then became absent from academia until 1990. When I returned it had become possible to write about real issues and apply analytic skills to social ills and other practical forms of injustice. My first book, “Race and Mixed Race” (1991) was an analysis of the incoherence of U.S. black/white racial categories in their failure to allow for mixed race. In “Philosophy of Science and Race,” I examined the lack of a scientific foundation for biological notions of human races, and in “The Ethics and Mores of Race,” I turned to the absence of ideas of universal human equality in the Western philosophical tradition.
I’m also interested in the role of the university in homelessness and have begun to organize an ongoing project for the University of Oregon’s Community Philosophy Institute, with a unique website.
G.Y.: How can critical philosophy of race shed unique light on what has happened, and is still happening, in Ferguson, Mo.?
N.Z.: Critical philosophy of race, like critical race theory in legal studies, seeks to understand the disadvantages of nonwhite racial groups in society (blacks especially) by understanding social customs, laws, and legal practices. What’s happening in Ferguson is the result of several recent historical factors and deeply entrenched racial attitudes, as well as a breakdown in participatory democracy.
G.Y.: Would you put this in more concrete terms?
N.Z.: Let’s work backwards on this. Middle-class and poor blacks in the United States do less well than whites with the same income on many measures of human well-being: educational attainment, family wealth, employment, health, longevity, infant mortality. You would think that in a democracy, people in such circumstances would vote for political representatives on all levels of government who would be their advocates. But the United States, along with other rich Western consumer societies, has lost its active electorate (for a number of reasons that I won’t go into here). So when something goes wrong, when a blatant race-related injustice occurs, people get involved in whatever political action is accessible to them. They take to the streets, and if they do that persistently and in large enough numbers, first the talking heads and then the big media start to pay attention. And that gets the attention of politicians who want to stay in office.
It’s too soon to tell, but “Don’t Shoot” could become a real political movement — or it could peter out as the morally outraged self-expression of the moment, like Occupy Wall Street.
‘In the fullness of time, these differences will even out. But the sudden killings of innocent, unarmed youth bring it all to a head.’
But the value of money pales in contrast to the tragedy this country is now forced to deal with. A tragedy is the result of a mistake, of an error in judgment that is based on habit and character, which brings ruin. In recent years, it seems as though more unarmed young black men are shot by local police who believe they are doing their duty and whose actions are for the most part within established law.
In Ferguson, the American public has awakened to images of local police, fully decked out in surplus military gear from our recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who are deploying all that in accordance with a now widespread “broken windows” policy, which was established on the hypothesis that if small crimes and misdemeanors are checked in certain neighborhoods, more serious crimes will be deterred. But this policy quickly intersected with police racial profiling already in existence to result in what has recently become evident as a propensity to shoot first. All of that surplus military gear now stands behind such actions, and should offend members of the public who protest.
Photo
Demonstrators outside the Ferguson, Mo., police station on Oct. 13.Credit Scott Olson/Getty Images
G.Y.: How does this “broken windows” policy relate to the tragic deaths of young black men/boys?
N.Z.:People are now stopped by the police for suspicion of misdemeanor offenses and those encounters quickly escalate. The death of Michael Brown, like the death of Trayvon Martin before him and the death of Oscar Grant before him, may be but the tip of an iceberg.
Young black men are the convenient target of choice in the tragic intersection of the broken windows policy, the domestic effects of the war on terror and police racial profiling.
G.Y.: Why do you think that young black men are disproportionately targeted?
N.Z.: Exactly why unarmed young black men are the target of choice, as opposed to unarmed young white women, or unarmed old black women, or even unarmed middle-aged college professors, is an expression of a long American tradition of suspicion and terrorization of members of those groups who have the lowest status in our society and have suffered the most extreme forms of oppression, for centuries. What’s happening now in Ferguson is the crystallization of our grief. Don’t Shoot!
We also need to understand the basic motives of whole human beings, especially those with power. The local police have a lot of power — they are “the law” for all practical purposes.
Police in the United States are mostly white and mostly male. Some confuse their work roles with their own characters. As young males, they naturally pick out other young male opponents. They have to win, because they are the law, and they have the moral charge of protecting. So young black males, who have less status than they do, and are already more likely to be imprisoned than young white males, are natural suspects.
G.Y.: But aren’t young black males also stereotyped according to white racist assumptions?
N.Z.: Yes. Besides the police, a large segment of the white American public believes they are in danger from blacks, especially young black men, who they think want to rape young white women. This is an old piece of American mythology that has been invoked to justify crimes against black men, going back to lynching. The perceived danger of blacks becomes very intense when blacks are harmed. And so today, whenever an unarmed black man is shot by a police officer and the black community protests, whites in the area buy more guns.
This whole scenario is insane. The recent unarmed young black male victims of police and auxiliary police shootings have not been criminals. Their initial reactions to being confronted by police are surprise and outrage, because they cannot believe they are suspects or that merely looking black makes them suspicious. Maybe their grandfathers told them terrible stories, but after the Civil Rights movements and advancement for middle-class blacks, we are supposed to be beyond legally sanctioned racial persecution. Their parents may not have taught them the protocol for surviving police intervention. And right now the airwaves and Internet are buzzing with the anxiety of parents of young black men. They now have to caution their sons: “Yes, I know you don’t get into trouble, and I know you are going to college, but you have to listen to me about what to do and what not to do if you are ever stopped by the police. Your life depends on it. . . Don’t roll your eyes at me, have you heard what happened to Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown?”
G.Y.: We can safely assume white parents don’t need to have this talk with their children. Do you think white privilege is at work in this context?
N.Z.: The term “white privilege” is misleading. A privilege is special treatment that goes beyond a right. It’s not so much that being white confers privilege but that not being white means being without rights in many cases. Not fearing that the police will kill your child for no reason isn’t a privilege. It’s a right. But I think that is what “white privilege” is meant to convey, that whites don’t have many of the worries nonwhites, especially blacks, do. I was talking to a white friend of mine earlier today. He has always lived in the New York City area. He couldn’t see how the Michael Brown case had anything to do with him. I guess that would be an example of white privilege.
Other examples of white privilege include all of the ways that whites are unlikely to end up in prison for some of the same things blacks do, not having to worry about skin-color bias, not having to worry about being pulled over by the police while driving or stopped and frisked while walking in predominantly white neighborhoods, having more family wealth because your parents and other forebears were not subject to Jim Crow and slavery. Probably all of the ways in which whites are better off than blacks in our society are forms of white privilege. In the normal course of events, in the fullness of time, these differences will even out. But the sudden killings of innocent, unarmed youth bring it all to a head.
G.Y.: The fear of black bodies — the racist mythopoetic constructions of black bodies — has been perpetuated throughout the history of America. The myth of the black male rapist, for example, in “Birth of a Nation.” But even after the civil rights movements and other instances of raised awareness and progress, black bodies continue to be considered “phobogenic objects,” as Frantz Fanon would say.
N.Z.: Fanon, in his “Black Skin, White Masks,” first published in France, in 1952, quoted the reaction of a white child to him: “Look, a Negro! . . . Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Over half a century later, it hasn’t changed much in the United States. Black people are still imagined to have a hyper-physicality in sports, entertainment, crime, sex, politics, and on the street. Black people are not seen as people with hearts and minds and hopes and skills but as cyphers that can stand in for anything whites themselves don’t want to be or think they can’t be. And so, from a black perspective, the black self that whites serve up to them is not who they are as human beings. This exaggeration of black physicality is dehumanizing.
G.Y.: Given this, why have so many adopted the idea that we live in a post-racial moment in America?
N.Z.: I don’t know where the idea of “post-racial” America came from. It may have begun when minorities were encouraged to buy homes they could not afford so that bankers could bet against their ability to make their mortgage payments, before the real estate crash of 2007-08. It sounds like media hype to make black people feel more secure so that they will be more predictable consumers — if they can forget about the fact blacks are about four times as likely as whites to be in the criminal justice system. If America is going to become post-racial, it will be important to get the police on board with that. But it’s not that difficult to do. A number of minority communities have peaceful and respectful relations with their local police. Usually it requires negotiation, bargaining, dialogue — all of which can be set up at very little cost. In addition, police departments could use intelligent camera-equipped robots or drones to question suspects before human police officers approach them. It’s the human contact that is deadly here, because it lacks humanity. Indeed, the whole American system of race has always lacked humanity because it’s based on fantastic biological speculations that scientists have now discarded, for all empirical purposes.
G.Y.: So is it your position that race is a social construct? If so, why don’t we just abandon the concept?
N.Z.:Yes, race is through and through a social construct, previously constructed by science, now by society, including its most extreme victims. But, we cannot abandon race, because people would still discriminate and there would be no nonwhite identities from which to resist. Also, many people just don’t want to abandon race and they have a fundamental right to their beliefs. So race remains with us as something that needs to be put right.
George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Duquesne University. He has written, edited and co-edited numerous books, including “Black Bodies, White Gazes,” “Look, a White!” and “Pursuing Trayvon Martin,” co-edited with Janine Jones.
We have spent a number of classes discussing the forces that shape the actions and imaginations of the characters in Devil In A Blue Dress. For this assignment you will choose one of the prompts below, and share your thoughts on one of the questions asked. You are not being asked to summarize what happened in the book. Rather you are being asked to dig below the surface to consider why people act as they do. You must back up your thoughts with specific examples from the text. Your grade will be determined by your insights in the book as well as your ability to write clearly and persuasively.
1. Many characters in Devil mean well, and yet often do wrong. Examine the forces that shape the actions and ideas of these characters, in particular the effect of violence on them.
2. Easy calls Mr. Carter “the worst kind of racist.” Do you agree with this? Defend you position using examples from the book, the context in 1948, and what you know from the world you live in.
3. Daphne Monet drove men crazy, and yet she was a figment of the characters in Devil’s imaginations. How could a character who existed only as a fantasy cause so much real upheaval in the book?
Your paper will be 400-500 words long. You must format it using MLA guidelines (see the “cheat sheet” that is posted)
