Technology and its Impact to the Traditional Families

For the past 13 weeks, we’ve discussed a variety of themes: technology and the individual in society, the idea of traditional family situations, and the concept of non-traditional marriages and families. Though these themes overlap, they can be disparate. For instance, Turkle’s notions of personal conversations do not situate well with Pemberton’s memoir. After all, he wasn’t glued to his cellphone. He was trying to make sense of his life. Likewise, Coban’s position that parents need to protect their children by using spyware doesn’t necessarily link to Solnit’s article. Not to mention, the research you have done these past weeks may not all connect. Therefore, this assignment requires you to carefully select comparable or linkable texts from these weeks.
What you should not do is merely find connections from the first three texts and ignore everything else. Doing so would result in an F. You should be able to make sense of all the texts you have read and find connections among most of them. Those that are not linkable should be accounted for in some meaningful way. Clearly, you cannot connect all of them to the memoir; however, the memoir does figure in some way.
In essence, this final assignment is your last chance to show that you know how to make meaningful (not personal) connections. Meaningful connections demonstrate a broader understanding of how texts and writing situations work, how the issues written on have importance to the larger society. Thus, in order for you to achieve this insight, you should make connections of at least six texts (including those you’ve used for your research).
Goals:
Apply metacognition and critical thinking strategies to complete reading and writing tasks
Implement the writing process, including pre-writing, drafting, and revising
Demonstrate an awareness of the relationship among writer, audience, and purpose
Organize essays logically and appropriately for a variety of purposes
Audience: your professor and future ENG 099 students
Purpose: to convince your readers that you know how to connect various texts to broader issues. This purpose requires you to demonstrate your thoughts in written form.
Organization:
When you’re putting your ideas together in an essay, you want to remember to consider your readers’ needs and how readers interact with a text. A simple organizational plan includes the following: an engaging introduction that presents the topic and includes a thesis; focused body paragraphs that support or explain your thesis by presenting information from multiple sources; and a meaningful conclusion that helps readers reconsider the ideas in your report.
You have three objectives in your introduction
Capture the readers’ attention (your hook)
Introduce your topic – demonstrating why it is an important issue
State your thesis
You have many options for capturing your readers’ attention:
Use a quotation or an idea from your research that might interest a reader
Tell a brief story (an anecdote)
Present an interesting fact
For this assignment, we want you to avoid the rhetorical question – try something new!
For your body paragraphs, aim to draw from multiple sources in each one--this way, you know you’re drawing connections between your sources and engaged in successful research. A good strategy for this is to find 2-4 sub-topics or themes that are common among your sources. What issues do two or more of your sources address? What common concerns do you see? What facts, research, or findings do some or all of your sources examine? Additionally, it is important to pinpoint where texts diverge or where ideas differ. A convincing paper like this should include multiple perspectives.
Once you’ve made connections, you can start to construct your body paragraphs. Each paragraph should carefully present how the authors address or discuss one idea, issue, concern, etc. Note: You may need to include a paragraph that summarizes the texts to help your reader follow along.
Also remember – you want to give readers a full picture: background information on the topic, context about issues relevant today, stories that bring the topic to life, and statistics and evidence that demonstrate the severity, intensity, and/or wide-spread nature of the issue.
Remember: Transitions should be used within and between paragraphs to connect ideas and help steer your readers. Also, clear signal phrases and signal verbs will help you clarify what ideas come from which sources.
The conclusion of the essay should wrap up everything you’ve discussed within the introduction and body of your work. Wrap up—not restate! Don’t summarize your essay or restate your thesis. Find a new way to discuss your ideas—one strategy is to revisit the “hook” at the beginning of your essay and discuss it in a new way.
Essay Requirements:
All passing essays must:
be at least 3 ½ pages
be properly formatted (MLA) with a Works Cited page
have an appropriate, original title
have an engaging introductory paragraph(s) with a clear thesis statement that states focus of essay (what you’re informing readers about)
have multiple body paragraphs that each begin with a topic sentence
contain specific examples, explanations, and evidence from your readings to support each topic sentence
use a variety of quotations and paraphrases
use signal phrases to introduce all quotes and paraphrases
draw from 2+ sources in body paragraphs
avoid plagiarism by using citations that clearly connect to the Works Cited page
have a concluding paragraph that brings the essay to a close
have been spell-checked and proofread
goals for this unit: edited for repetition, and typos/error, proper comma use