Are Too Many People Going to College?
Analyzing Murray Reading and Responding
Academic formatting requirements: five double-spaced pages in 12 point Times New Roman font with one inch margins all around. On the top right hand corner include your name, the draft number and date. Also include page numbers in a footer on the bottom right hand corner of the document.
Purpose
Response papers allow you to engage with the ideas of others. In this case you will engage Charles Murray argument that “too many people are going to college.” Do you think Murray is right? Are too many people going to college? If you disagree, explain why? Your purpose in writing a response paper is to critically examine what a particular text says and then to articulate your response by giving your own and other writers’ reasons for agreeing, disagreeing, or both agreeing and disagreeing with the text’s claims.
Audience
Your audience is your professor and the class. You should consider that most readers will not be as familiar with your article as you are, so summarize carefully, being sure to include the writer’s main point and to highlight the content that will spin us towards your thesis (I say). This is the summary that “exerts a quiet influence—is fair and accurate, but focuses on setting up your thesis. Your reader should have a sense, form your summary of where you essay is going, what you found interesting and engaging. Readers will also want to be able to find sources you use, so be sure to include citations for all sources (see MLA Guidelines in the OWL at Purdue website).
Content
To do this you will
- Summarize Charles Murray’s “Are Too Many People Going to College”
- State your thesis (I say)– your position of agreeing, disagreeing or both. For this particular essay you are to agree, disagree, or both with the Murray’s argument that tooo many people are going to
- Explain your position with reasons and evidence not only from your own knowledge and experience, but also from what Ungar and Wallace have to say about this.
Of course you can, if you wish, also bring in Tough, Rose, Anyon, Kozol (article and video), Rebecca Cox’s “The Student Fear Factor,” and Marina Krakovsky “The Effort Effect.” Once you have a “shitty first draft” go back to these readings and see how you might put them to work in support of your position in this essay.
Structure
Here is an example of how you might organize your response:
-
- Introduce the issue (the problem of college completion and who gets to graduate), identify the larger issues (conversation) surrounding it, and then introduce the article and its particular focus on the issue.
- Summarize your article and state your thesis (your main point/your “I say”)—agree/ disagree/ both– about the article’s argument. Feel free to let “your own response exert a quiet influence” (p. 33) on the summary (as explained above as well).
- THEN, in whichever order you think most effective (using the moves from Chapter 4) support your thesis in several paragraphs as follows:
- If you are agreeing: Identify points you tend to agree with and explain why by using the moves of Chapter 4 and other writers in the chapter, your research, as well as reasons based on your own knowledge/experience; OR
- If you are agreeing and disagreeing: Identify points you both agree and disagree with and explain why. . .; OR
- If you are disagreeing Identify points you disagree with and explain why. . .
Throughout this part of your paper, make sure you develop your reasons with supporting evidence–examples, anecdotes, studies, and so on. Don’t forget that you must include support that goes beyond your own knowledge/experience. You have to use more than personal knowledge and experience, you have to also use the sources listed above to support and develop each paragraph.
NOTE: If you are agreeing with the author in the first two paragraphs of your essay; begin each of these body paragraph where you are agreeing with the WHY you are agreeing part not with the author’s ideas/words because if you begin with the author your “reason paragraph” will sound like a summary of the author. In other words, make sure you have a strong topic sentence that frames each body paragraph as a reason. If you are agreeing begin by telling us why—because of your experience or because of what this other author says. (note: your reason can be more than one paragraph long, in fact this would be a good thing, the point I am making here is to make sure you are carefully framing each body paragraph with a TS).
- Conclude by explaining the significance of your position, answering the questions “So what?” or “Who cares?” Read Chapter 7 (92) about how to do this. You might, in your conclusion think about why this discussion is important to you and also why it is important to those students who will follow in your footsteps. You might even think of what you could say, what advice you might give future UCSC students now in their senior year at your high school back home.
Essay Checklist:
Follow the paper assignment carefully as described above.
- Make sure to use the templates from Chapter 4 to help you set up and develop your points of agreement, both agreement and disagreement, or disagreement. Develop your views with evidence.
- Make sure you use everything you’ve learned in Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5, especially appropriate, strong signal verbs (Chapter 2) that “fit the action” (p. 38-40) as you introduce others’ ideas so we know at all times who is speaking and how, exactly, they are responding to the issue. If you quote, make sure you choose relevant quotations that you “frame” and explain (use “quotation sandwiches”) as described in Chapter 3, to help you develop your response. Don’t over quote.
- You have to include a works cited page that is formatted correctly following MLA style
Writing 21 Essay Grading Criteria
A distinguished essay will:
•Present a thoughtful thesis or purpose (what we also call a controlling idea)
•The thesis will be developed with well-chosen examples
•The essay should demonstrate the intersection between your ideas/experiences and the text (s) discussed
•The essay is developed with sensible reasoningfollows a logical ordermakes sense
•The essay demonstrates the student’s ability to revise successfully in response to instructor and peer-review feedback
•The essay demonstrates that its writer can choose words accurately, vary sentences effectively, and observe the conventions of written English
•The essay as a whole demonstrates insightful development and mature style
A satisfactory (passing) essay will:
•Present a thoughtful thesis or purpose (what we also call a controlling idea)
•The thesis is developed with sufficient examples
•The essay demonstrate the intersection between your ideas/experiences and the text (s) discussed
•The essay is developed with acceptable reasoningit generally follows a logical ordergenerally makes sense
•The essay shows the student’s ability to revise appropriately in response to instructor and peer-review feedback
•The essay shows an adequate command of academic writing, even though its style may be less effective or fluent that that of a distinguished essay
•The essay demonstrates that its writer can usually choose words of sufficient precision, control sentences of reasonable variety, and observe the conventions of written English.
A not passing essay will:
•The essay lacks a clear purpose/thesis
•The essay presents an illogical purpose or thesis
•The essay is not text text-based
•The essay lacks a coherent structure
•The essay is not sufficiently developed with examples
•The essay presents a simplistic, inappropriate, or incoherent response to the text
•The essay does not demonstrate the student is able to revise appropriately in response to instructor and peer-review feedback
•The essay demonstrates an incomplete understanding of academic writing
•Not passing essays are also characterized by one or more of the following: frequently imprecise word choice; or pervasive patterns of minor errors