留学生论文写作建议：怎么写ESSAY?
时间:2011-04-11 11:04:48 来源:www.ukthesis.org 作者：英国论文网 点击:407次
History 100 [Spring 2010]: Growth of American Civilization (3 units) Instructor: Dr. Matthew Mooney Office: IDC 350 Email: Send email to Dr. Mooney through the EMAIL function in Moodle only Skype address: prof_mooney (necessary if you choose to take advantage of the optional on-line office hour) Course Description, Course Objectives, Required Assignments, Methods of Evaluation, Required text 2 Course Description: Survey of leading social, economic, political and diplomatic traditions which have shaped American civilization from colonial origins to the present. Course Objectives: By the end of this course, the student will be able to: 350 Total possible points: Required text and materials: Due Dates: I will accept assignments early and am happy to read drafts during my office hours. I only accept late assignments in the event of medical emergencies that can be documented. Be prepared to produce the necessary documentation. Issues with technology do NOT qualify. Let’s face it: technology breaks. Servers go down, transfers time out, files become corrupt. The list goes on and on. These are not considered emergencies. An issue you may have with technology is no excuse for late work. You need to protect yourself by managing your time, backing up your work, and not waiting until the last minute to turn it in. Makeup opportunities for missed exams / in-class work: Enrollment: It is your responsibility to drop this class if you stop attending. Failure to drop the class may result in a Fail at the end of the semester. Academic Dishonesty will not be tolerated. Sanctions per institutional policy will apply. “PURSUANT TO THE AUTHORITY contained in Education Code sections 76030-32, the Board of Trustees permits an instructor to remove a student, for good cause, from his or her class for the day of removal and the next class meeting. Removal shall be reported in writing, within one day, to the Administrator in charge of disciplinary matters. DSPS: SBCC Students with disabilities who are requesting accommodations should use the following SBCC procedure: contact the DSPS office, submit documentation of your disability to the DSPS office, communicate with a DSPS specialist regarding options for services and accommodations, and reach written accommodation agreement not only with the DSPS specialist but also with your instructor. SBCC requests you complete this process at least ten working days before your accommodation is needed, in order to allow DSPS staff and SBCC instructors time to provide your accommodation.”
Each week’s assigned textbook reading in Nash corresponds to the Essential Question for that week. The textbook reading will help you to comprehend and discuss the Essential Question in more depth. http://www.ukthesis.org/Thesis_Tips/Proposal/You will notice that certain Questions seem to have an inordinately large amount of textbook reading assigned. For example, the assigned reading for the Essential Question “How and why was a system of racial slavery built in British North America?” is in textbook chapters: 1, 2, 3, and 4. Does this mean the professor expects you to read and remember every single word contained in those four chapters? Answer: no, he does not. These four textbook chapters cover many topics but the topic you are to focus on is slavery. Note again the Essential Question for this topic: “How and why was a system of racial slavery built in British North America?” Therefore, you should skim through these chapters looking for information about slavery.#p#分页标题#e# This is active, as opposed to passive, reading. You should actively seek out that information in the textbook that is most relevant to the Essential Question for that topic. Do not attempt to read and remember everything. This is unrealistic, impractical, and a waste of your precious time. In-class ROUGH DRAFT ESSAY: See detailed instructions that follow beginning on page 6 FINAL DRAFT ESSAY: See detailed instructions that follow beginning on page 13 If, for a particular Essential Question during the semester, you have been assigned to compose a Rough Draft (see schedule posted in Moodle for assignments) please follow the directions that follow carefully: After completing all of the assigned reading in the Nash textbook compose a 500-word minimum Rough Draft that answers the Essential Question. Your Rough Draft must use specific information derived from the textbook. Stipulations for Rough Draft [failure to follow these instructions will reduce your score]: To post a Rough Draft: For example: Subject: e) Type (or – recommended – copy and paste) your Rough Draft into the “Message” box. Each Rough Draft will be worth a possible 10 points and your grade on the Rough Draft will be based upon your ability to discuss it in class. Unsure of how to start their essay, many students begin their essays with phrases like "Throughout history" or "From the beginning of time" or "People have always wondered about..." You should avoid broad generalizations like these. First, you cannot prove that they are true: How do you know what people have always thought or done? Second, these statements are so broad that they are virtually meaningless; they offer no specific points or details to interest readers. Finally, such statements are so general that they give readers no clue about the subject of your essay. In general, it is much more effective to begin with material that is specific to your topic. For example, the following opening sentence comes from a student's first draft of an essay on William Harvey, the seventeenth-century physician who discovered the circulation of blood: INEFFECTIVE OPENING SENTENCE Although, strictly speaking, there is nothing wrong with this sentence, it is not a particularly effective opening. For one thing, it is such a general statement that readers will be inclined to ask, "So what?" In addition, it gives readers no indication of what the essay is about. Will the essay examine ancient Greek medical theory? Chinese acupuncture? Sex education in twentieth-century American schools? In revising the sentence, the student eliminated the general statement altogether and began instead with a description of the intellectual context of Harvey's work: EFFECTIVE OPENING SENTENCE From this short sentence, readers learn four things about the subject of the essay: the time frame of the discussion (the seventeenth century), the place (Europe), the people involved (scholars and physicians), and the topic (the relationship between authority and experience in the study of human physiology). Readers' curiosity is also piqued by the questions implied in the opening statement: Why did experimentation begin to replace authoritative texts? Was this change a subject of controversy? Who was involved? How did this change in method affect the science of biology and the practice of medicine? In other words, this opening sentence makes readers want to continue reading. As you read works by professional historians, you may notice that the introduction to a journal article or book may be long, even several paragraphs, and the author's thesis may appear anywhere within it. Until you become skilled in writing about history, however, it is best to keep your introduction short and to state your thesis in the last line of the introductory paragraph. The following is the first draft of the introductory paragraph for the paper on Harvey: INEFFECTIVE INTRODUCTORY PARAGRAPH#p#分页标题#e# This introduction begins with the ineffective opening sentence we looked at above. There is no clear connection established between the ideas contained in the opening sentence and Harvey. From this first paragraph, a reader would not have a clear idea what the paper was about, what its central point might be, or what to expect in the pages that follow. In the final version of this introductory paragraph, the student uses the revised opening sentence and incorporates a solid thesis statement, which is underlined here: (TWO) Thesis Statement: this should appear at the conclusion of your introductory paragraph and, in one sentence, answer the Essential Question that you are addressing. Keep in mind that: * A thesis statement is not a description of your paper topic. Instead, your thesis statement should reflect what you have concluded about Essential Question, based on a critical analysis and interpretation of the source materials (textbook and Media Clips) that you have examined. Moreover, a thesis is always an arguable or debatable point. In fact, the purpose of a history essay is to present the reader with enough evidence to convince him or her that your thesis statement is correct. As a result, the thesis is the central point to which all the information in the essay relates. As Edward Proffltt, author of The Organized Writer, puts it, "A essay is about its thesis and nothing else." The following is the first draft of a thesis statement from a student essay on Samuel George Morton, a nineteenth-century physician and scientist who wrote several influential treatises on craniometry, the nineteenth-century pseudo- science of measuring the human skull: INEFFECTIVE THESIS STATEMENT: EFFECTIVE THESIS STATEMENT: (THREE) Answer the question that is asked. In your introduction, you present your subject and state your thesis. In subsequent paragraphs, you provide evidence for your thesis statement and answer any objections that could be made to it. Each paragraph in the body of your essay should support your Thesis Statement. The following advice will help you to write well-organized paragraphs and make your argument clear and convincing. Begin each paragraph with a topic sentence. Each paragraph should have one driving idea, which is usually asserted in the first sentence, or topic sentence. If you have made an outline, your topic sentences will be drawn from the list you made of the main points you wish to cover in your essay. Make clear connections between ideas. Each body paragraph provides evidence for your thesis statement in the form of examples, statistics, and so on. To be convincing, however, your evidence must be clear and well organized. Make sure you choose examples that provide clear and sufficient support for your thesis statement. If you are using a direct quote as evidence, make sure you explain to the reader why you are including this quote by integrating it grammatically into your text and framing it in a way that shows how it supports your point. Do not wander off-topic. If you include a lot of irrelevant information, you will lose momentum, and your readers will lose the thread of your argument. Be ruthless: eliminate all extraneous material. For instance, if you are writing about the role that Chinese laborers played in the westward expansion of the American railroads, do not spend three paragraphs discussing the construction of the steam locomotive. If your essay concerns the American government's treatment of Japanese citizens during World War II, do not digress into a discussion of naval tactics in the Pacific theater. Similarly, you should avoid repetition and wordy sentences.#p#分页标题#e# Here is a paragraph from the first draft of an essay on Chinese relationships with foreigners during the Ming period: INEFFECTIVE PARAGRAPH Although each sentence is grammatically correct, this paragraph as a whole is very confusing. In the first place, it has no clear topic sentence; readers have to guess what the writer's main point is. This confusion is compounded by unclear connections between ideas; the paragraph lacks transitional words or phrases that alert readers to the connections that the writer sees between ideas or events. The paragraph is also poorly organized; the writer seems to move at random from topic to topic. The following is a revised version of the same paragraph: EFFECTIVE PARAGRAPH This paragraph has been improved in several ways. First, a topic sentence has been added to the beginning. Readers no longer need to guess that this paragraph will address the apparent contrast between sixteenth-century Chinese suspicion of foreigners and the imperial court's acceptance of Jesuit missionaries. Second, the author has clarified the connections between ideas by including transitional words and phrases. These transitions illustrate several different kinds of relationships—including contrast, cause and effect, and sequence—and allow readers to follow the writer's argument. Third, the paragraph has been reorganized so that the relationships between events are clearer. For example, the revised paragraph states explicitly that the Jesuits' adaptation to Chinese customs was the key reason for the success of European missionaries during the Ming dynasty; this connection is obscured in the original paragraph by poor organization. Finally, the writer has removed references to foot binding and to European interest in China during the Enlightenment. Both are interesting but irrelevant in a paragraph that deals with Chinese attitudes toward Europeans.#p#分页标题#e# INEFFECTIVE CONCLUSION This conclusion is ineffective for several reasons. First, there are no verbal clues to indicate that this is, in fact, the conclusion. In addition, it is too general and vague; which missionaries had good relationships with the emperor, and which didn't? Moreover, while it lists some of the key elements of the essay, it fails to indicate how these ideas are connected. Most important, perhaps, this conclusion does not suggest why the various ideas presented in the essay are important; it fails, in other words, to answer the questions "So what? Why is this important?" Finally, a new topic is introduced in the last sentence. In the revised version of the conclusion, these problems have been addressed: EFFECTIVE CONCLUSION This conclusion has been improved in several ways. In the first place, it includes key transitional words (thus, then) that indicate that the writer is drawing conclusions. It reiterates the important elements of the essay's argument but leaves out information that is either very general ("the Jesuit missionaries were sent to China in the Ming period") or too vague ("some had good relationships with the emperor, but others didn't"). Moreover, unlike the earlier version, it is explicit about how the key topics in the essay —the flexibility of the Jesuit missionaries in adapting to Chinese culture, the parallels the missionaries drew between Christianity and Confucianism, and the institution of more conservative policies — are related. It does not add any new topics, however interesting those topics might be. And, most important, this version, unlike the first draft, clearly outlines the significance of the conclusions that the writer has reached: the Jesuit experience in China tells us something about the relationship between culture and religious belief.#p#分页标题#e#
Essay Assignment After carefully considering the lecture notes that you have taken during the week about the particular Essential Question that you addressed in your Rough Draft you will need to revise your essay and post a Final Draft that improves upon your Rough Draft by incorporating at least four new, substantial, pieces of information from the week’s in-class lecture into your Final Draft. You must rewrite your essay, incorporating this additional information, and post a Final Draft by Sunday night at 11 PM. Stipulations for Final Draft (you cannot post a Final Draft unless you have posted a Rough draft): a) New information from in-class lecture [#1]: [brief description of the first piece of new information derived from the in-class lecture(s) that you have included and an explanation of why this information was important enough to incorporate into your Final Draft] b) New information from in-class lecture [#2]: [brief description of the second piece of new information derived from the in-class lecture(s) that you have included and an explanation of why this information was important enough to incorporate into your Final Draft] c) New information from in-class lecture [#3]: [brief description of the third piece of new information derived from the in-class lecture(s) that you have included and an explanation of why this information was important enough to incorporate into your Final Draft] d) New information from in-class lecture [#4]: [brief description of the fourth piece of new information derived from the in-class lecture(s) that you have included and an explanation of why this information was important enough to incorporate into your Final Draft] [begin text of Final Draft…] 2) You must also – within the body of your Final Draft - cite the new information that you have incorporated into your Final Draft. Your citation should be in the following format: (“History 100 lecture, [date]”) For example: Note carefully that: • You should always contextualize, or introduce to your reader, the source of your information. For example: “According to Professor Mooney…” • The formal citation, or source information, always belongs at the end of the sentence containing the new information. • You must follow the citation format above or points will be deducted from your overall score! 7) Your Final Draft must be, at minimum, 500 words. 8) Separate each paragraph of your Final Draft with a single blank line. 9) Make sure to post your Final Draft on time – Sunday at 11 PM PST [exactly ONE WEEK after the due date for your Rough draft]! Late Final Drafts will not be graded. [Directions for posting each Final Draft are detailed below]. To post a Final Draft: For example: Subject: e) Type (or – recommended – copy and paste) your Final Draft into the “Message” box. Each Final Draft will be worth a possible 40 points. The Midterm and Final Exam will each consist of one question for which you must compose an essay response. The questions for both your Midterm and Final Exam will be drawn from one of the Essential Questions listed in the syllabus and addressed in class and in the assigned readings. Important dates to remember http://www.ukthesis.org/Thesis_Tips/Proposal/Week of January 25 - January 31 15 February 17 March March 29 - April 4 May 17-22
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