Reasons to Criminalize Drug Use. Social Sciences Essay

CRITICAL WORK (30 ITEMS)


You will be required to submit a critical essay on ONE of the required reading assignments that will be discussed in class. However, your critique must be on a different text than the one you will be presenting in the video.

Number of words: Please indicate the number of words at the end of your work.

In your final work, you will need to :
a) Identify an important thesis defended in the text
b) Reconstruct/explain an argument of the author(s) in support of this thesis
c) Critically evaluate*

* Critically evaluating does not necessarily mean disagreeing with the author. Critically evaluating is: writing what you think and, more importantly, why - that is, defending your point of view with good arguments, or making a relevant connection between the author's thesis and/or argument and something else, such as a legal or social controversy or personal experience or a political or other debate. More specifically, then, you have three options for the critical appraisal part:

1. You may argue that the author's argument is not convincing (or is incomplete) and explain why you think this. For example, you might argue that the premises of the argument do not support the conclusion, or that some of the premises are wrong.
2. You can argue that the argument is good/convincing and explain why you think that. For example, you may argue that the argument is better than other arguments supporting the same thesis, or that the argument is better than arguments supporting the opposite thesis. You can also explain how the argument could be made even stronger, i.e., more solid and convincing.
3. You may choose to identify a relevant connection between the thesis/argument you have chosen to discuss and something outside the course, and clearly explain the connection you see between the two. The connection may be between the text and: something you learned in another university course, or something that concerns your personal life, or current events, or a political/social debate, or a legal matter (in Canada or elsewhere). Here's a tip: ask yourself, 'What issue does this text illuminate, or what does this text help me think more deeply about? (This will probably require you to think deeply about the issue and research to make a relevant connection).

Your critical work must include a minimum of 2 secondary references. References will be very useful for the critical evaluation part of your text. Feel free to use them to support your ideas. Always add your references clearly in the text (in brackets or footnotes, as well as in the bibliography).

The evaluation criteria for critical work are the following: clarity, conciseness, precision and structure of the text, intellectual charity in the presentation of ideas and critical evaluation, relevance of the ideas discussed to the text under study and the objectives of your analysis, presence and relevant use of secondary references and concrete examples to illustrate the ideas, absence of verbiage or comments that are not necessary to your analysis or topic. If you choose the third option for the critical appraisal portion, you will be evaluated for the quality, accuracy and relevance of the link you make and your explanation of that link.

In addition to the "absolute" quality of your critical work, you will also be evaluated on the basis of the relative improvement between your first draft and the final version of your work. (See the "Word on how your final work will be assessed" in the next section for more details).