take a position on a current issue/event, direct your position toward a target audience, and attempt to persuade this audience of the legitimacy of your position.

This project serves as the final stage of our exploration into rhetoric and argument. You are required to take a position on a current issue/event, direct your position toward a target audience, and attempt to persuade this audience of the legitimacy of your position. This project asks you to put into practice the major objectives of the course:

• Analyzing the ways in which ideas are presented through rhetorical designs;
• Recognizing rhetorical designs in an effort to encourage refutation (dialectic);
• Using rhetorical designs to engage in argument;
• Considering how argument can function as “meaningful disagreement”;
• Using argument as “meaningful disagreement” to learn more about our own identities and commitments and to perform acts of community;
• Achieving “meaningful disagreement” through the effective assessment and incorporation of research (“ongoing conversation”).

You are required to use no LESS than five and no MORE than six sources (at least two of your sources must come from the HCC databases). Please keep in mind that you will need to locate, examine, and evaluate roughly triple this amount in order to find five to six relevant, on-topic, reliable, and authoritative sources. You will pull the bulk of these sources from databases such as ProQuest Research Library, Academic Search Complete, Academic OneFile, and Project Muse. You will create a works-cited page for this project, following MLA (9^th edition) formatting style.

To put yourself in position to complete this essay, you need to choose an appropriate topic and start working toward developing an argumentative approach to it as soon as possible. To help you achieve such a goal, this week’s Discussion Forum requires you to 1) commit to a topic; 2) come to terms with what you know about it; 3) examine potential secondary sources in relation to the topic; 4) develop a working thesis for your argument. See the Discussion Forum exercise in Eagle Online for details and the due date.

Potential topics, but by no way a comprehensive list, taken from research papers written by 1302 students over the last several semesters:

• Environment (Houston or nation water quality/supply, a recent EPA rollback of an environmental regulation, cap and trade, drilling in the arctic refuge, hydraulic fracturing, climate change issues [not the general issue itself, but instead some specific element intrinsic or related to the issue], etc.)
• Immigration (militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border [perhaps the recent deployment of the National Guard to the southern border], the Dream Act, temporary guest worker program, asylum protocol, sanctuary cities, deportation policies, the H-1B Visa program, the border wall, etc.)
• Sports (race in professional and collegiate sports, compensation for student athletes [NIL and other measures], NBA’s age eligibility rule, use of technology in the officiating of professional sports, unionization in collegiate sports, expansion of college football playoff, etc.)
• Black Lives Matter and #MeToo Movements (areas of applicability, political impetus, capacity to produce various types of reform [such as criminal justice], etc.)
• United States Supreme Court (number of justices on [“court packing”], term limits, etc.)
• The impact of social media on politics/democracy (government regulation of Facebook, foreign government troll farms, etc.)
• The impact of social media, particularly Facebook/Instagram, on the mental health of young people
• Outsourcing (Offshoring)
• Farming practices (use of antibiotics in livestock, laws that criminalize the documentation of animal abuse, federal subsidies, etc.)
• Houston’s approach to zoning policies/historic preservation
• Houston post-Harvey (home buy-out programs, re-establishment of flood plains, construction of new reservoirs, etc.)
• Inner-city revitalization projects (in Houston, consider the build-up in the East End and the Wards)
• Gerrymandering (redrawing of congressional districts that occurs with each census)
• Education (potential changes being made to standardized testing in Texas, Common Core, Robin Hood [“re-capturing”], dress codes, recent decisions of the Texas Education Board [including the recent takeover of HISD], state of primary, top ten/eight/seven percent rule, charter schools, vanguard and magnet programs [especially as they are being assessed by HISD], use of technology in teaching, role of public school pre-k programs [Head Start, for example], critical race theory, teacher shortage, the four-day school week, etc.)
• Incarceration practices in the U.S. (public/private, purpose [punishment/rehabilitation], racial dimensions, sentencing practices [reform], solitary confinement policies, etc.)
• Law enforcement practices in the U.S. (stun guns, body cameras, training, types of policing, defunding, etc.)
• High-speed rail in Texas
• NASA/American space program (perhaps Houston’s continued role in)

Considerations:

As the first line of the prompt asserts, Essay 2 is meant to be an argumentative position paper. It is not intended to function as a report on or review of a topic/issue. On occasion you might have to review/report on an aspect of your topic in an effort to provide sufficient context, but the central goal of the essay should be argumentative—taking a position on an issue, or more particularly an aspect of an issue, and developing a persuasive argument around your position.

It is a good idea to choose a topic you already know something about or want to learn more about. In general, the more engaged you are in the topic, the smoother the process will play out. You also want to make sure to choose a topic that is argumentative by default (many topics/issues are amenable to a variety of viable argumentative positions, such as dress codes in schools, or the privacy practices of social media platforms) or that can be made to be argumentative (some topics/issues are not exactly amenable to a variety of argumentative positions, such as humans should eat healthy food [who would disagree, offer an antithetical position, here?] or murder is not good for society [again, who would you be trying to convince of this?]). In the case of the first type, you will just need to build a solid base of knowledge on the topic/issue, establish a specific argumentative approach to it, and set out to develop this approach—using your own critical voice and the voices of your sources—over the course of your essay. In the case of the second, you will need to massage the topic/issue a bit to locate a suitable entry point for your argument (perhaps arguing for a government program that makes healthy food more accessible to certain communities, or arguing for a type of educational intervention that reduces the rate of murder in certain communities).

Work to set specific parameters for your approach to your chosen topic. Avoid any attempt to approach a topic in a broad, wholesale way (such an approach will almost certainly end up becoming a review/report on the topic, which is not what Essay 2 calls for). Instead, identify a specific aspect of an issue on which to focus your argumentative attention. For example, let’s say that you want to craft an argument around law enforcement practices. Your first step should be to winnow down that topic to a manageable focus, such as increased training for community policing programs. Your next step should be to narrow down that topic/approach even further, perhaps looking at a specific type of program, or limiting your approach to the community policing practices for a certain state or city or even neighborhood in a city. In short, specific topic parameters lead to a specific argumentative approach.

Identify a specific audience that you plan to target with your argument. It is up to you to decide whom this audience will be. For example, if you choose a topic in the field of education, depending on what your topic is and how you plan to approach it, you might target public school board members, or perhaps school administrators, or maybe even federal or state legislators, on and on. You should work under the assumption that your target audience disagrees with your position (holds an antithetical view to yours, to phrase it according to dialectic) on the issue. As a result, your argumentative objective is to draw this target audience into your argument and attempt to convince this audience of the legitimacy of your position. You should also seek to practice prolepsis (one of the rhetorical moves we examined, which is an act that attempts to anticipate the target audience’s responses to the claims being raised in the argument) on your audience in an effort to demonstrate both your awareness of the issue and your proficiencies in acts of communication.