...Thesis Statements Sunderman/English 1A Adapted from http://www.dartmouth.edu/~writing/resources/students/ac_paper/develop.html Why Is a Thesis Statement So Important? Good question. As we’ve stated in class, our goal as writers is to give information to our readers that is interesting and easily understood. The thesis statement is typically that one sentence that asserts the main point, and controls and structures the essay. Without a strong, thoughtful thesis, your paper might seem unfocused, weak, and not worth the reader’s time. How Do I Write a Good Thesis Statement? A good thesis statement will have the following characteristics: 1. A good thesis statement will make a claim. You need to develop an interesting perspective on a topic that you can support and defend. This perspective must be more than an observation. “America is violent” is an observation. “Americans are violent because they are fearful” posits an interesting perspective on violence in America. It gives a possible reason WHY America is violent—a reason that can be supported and defended with specific examples. You want to make sure that your claim is not too broad, and that you can successfully defend and support it in the required number of pages. “Disease has shaped human history” is an impossibly large thesis. It would be better narrowed down to a specific disease, a specific time period, and a specific way (or ways) that disease has shaped human history. “In the mid-1980s, AIDS...
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...gov/news-events/press-releases/2015/02/identity-theft-tops-ftcs-consumer-complaint-categories-again-2014 http://blog.fraudfighter.com/bid/94512/Aug-14-2013-Identity-Theft-The-Fastest-Growing-Crime-in-America How can I prevent identity theft? Some of the things you can do and not a victim yet is to monitor your credit and keeping your information safe. We talked about not only making sure your information is safe when you’re out in the public, such as only carrying one credit card when you really need it, not carrying your social security card and birth certificate just to name a few, We don’t need to have these things with us everyday. Just keep the common things you need with you every day, like your drive’s license, one credit card, just to be safe. Don’t carry your checking account if you don’t need to write a check because again someone could take that information and really start writing checks that aren’t yours and can start causing a lot of damage down the road. Another things is when you’re checking credit, make sure that you’re checking it on a regular basis. You can get one free copy of your credit report from each of the three credit bureaus each year. So if you want to check that systematically, you could pull your first one from Equifax, and then three or four months later pull the next one from Experian, and then three or four months later pull the next one from Trans Union. So keeping up to date with what’s going on is key when preventing or avoiding identity theft. Another...
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...problems with having a canon? Exclusionary, represents the hegemony (dominant power structure) Defining American Cool… “Cool figures are the successful rebels of American culture….to be cool is to have an original aesthetic approach or artistic vision—as an actor, musician, athlete, writer, activist….. that eithers becomes a permanent legacy or stands as a singular achievement Rebel is independent, goes against the grain, cool is the mainstream, yet you need to be “Edgy” un-mainstream to succeed. Live fast, die young Jazz is cool. It started as a marginalized expression that the dominant culture romanticized but once mainstream it lost lots of its coolness. “outsider as an insider” To define what is supremely “American” is to be a living contradiction. Cynicism is American Prude sexuality Ephemeral: catch it and it dies Talking shit is American Cause controversy is cool, but it is also cool to be above the controversy Cool is relative and ever changing. Satire is the new cool. Satire is a type of comedy, the use of irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and critique people’s stupidity or vices. Food of all mixture and availabilities Will the Clash of Identities Consume Us? “The cult of identity is a selfish and brutal vision of the world that can lead to the most terrible crimes” National vs. ethnic vs. religious vs. global identity “Culture means diversity… there is no definite truth” Without diversity, people fall on likemindness which...
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...you are interviewing. Make sure that your proposal clearly answers the following: (Integrate these answers in your paragraphs; don't make a list of your questions and answers.) What are you going to write about? Why did you choose this topic? Based on your topic, what are the main issues you will explore? What is the thesis (or the tentative thesis) of your final paper? Who are you interviewing for your paper? Why? What are your other sources? (Remember that there should be at least two sources in addition to your interview.) What do you intend to prove with this paper? What, in your view, is the relevance of your topic? I am going to write about being Asian and more specifically being Chinese in a particular part of the United States in the 21st century. I will explore the perception that some non-Chinese people have of Chinese people in the US and also explore the pros and cons, in terms of public perception, of being Chinese. I chose this topic because this would be a good study of stereotypes, as well as a venue to express the truth about my identity. The ttentative thesis of my final paper is to find the truth about my identity, it includes three parts, the first part is the perception that some non-Chinese people have of Chinese people in the...
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...have to face discrimination. Author-Title: Bharati Mukherjee’s American Dreamer urges that we must be alert to the dangers of an “us” vs “them” mentality. Thesis: This world is full of different people with different mentalities; everyone has different way of thinking and different way of looking at things. The quote used in the essay is making people aware of the wrong mentality that is happening in today’s society, if we take a close look at this kind of mentality we would find out that the mentality is separating “us” from others based on cultural differences, religion, and language. Paragraph 1: Topic Sentence: Mukherjee...
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...Clash of Civilizations In 1993 Samuel Huntington wrote an article titled “Is there a clash of civilizations”. The thesis was very much born in the context of the end of the cold war. The idea of “clash of civilizations” suggests that twenty-first century global order will be characterized by growing tension and conflict between rival cultures or civilizations, as opposed to the political, ideological or economic conflict of old. Huntington furthermore argued that the world was split into 9 different civilizational orders, and the West would clash with all of them, but in particular it would clash with the Islamic world, Japan and Russia. The realists have given little attention to the issue of identity or cultural politics. They focus on the behavior of states. However the liberals have recognized this thesis to some extent. Huntington’s view that the West would clash with the Islamic world was vindicated after the September 11th terrorist attacks, neoconservatives looking for a response distanced themselves from Huntington’s rhetoric. Neoconservative George W Bush was keen to emphasize that not all Muslims were to blame for 9/11, and indeed it was just a tiny minority of extremists holding the Islamic world back. Whereas Huntington had argued that the Islamic world was hostile to western ideas of liberal democracy, George W Bush ignored this insight and fought two wars to try and bring democracy to the Middle East, ignoring Huntington’s claim that there would be a backlash...
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...to people and practical matters are emptied of any spiritual significance. Secularisation according to Wilson is the process whereby ‘religious thinking, practice and institutions social significance,’ that people are more interested in leisurely pursuits and that society and religion has become more pluralistic as a result of globalisation. Exclusivists think that secularisation is definitely happening whilst inclusivists argue that it is not happening, rather that society is experiencing resacralisation, that there are other religions such as NRMS and New Age Spirituality which are equally valid. Woodhead and Heelas suggest that there are two versions of secularisation. Firstly the disappearance thesis states that modernity is bringing about the death of religion. This thesis tends to use Church statistics as evidence. Crockett found that in 1851 40% Church attendance and in 2007 2% attended. In 2002 2/3 attended a religious service such as weddings no more than once a year. However there are problems concerning the use of Church statistics, regarding their reliability and validity. Statistics tell us very little about the social meaning of religion as Davie suggests many people can believe without belonging. Bellah also notes that religion is now private and individualised, such qualitative beliefs may be invisible to the sociological eye and consequently difficult to measure using quantitative methods. Opinion polls are also problematic as it tells us very little about these...
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... Black Mecca Thesis: West African Muslims immigrants fit into the fabric of Harlem, New York, and how they have challenged established notions of Islam, race, and cultural difference in one of the centers of black culture, thought, and politics. Alain LeRoy Locke, The New Negro, 1925. This book provides a great look at the history of West African Muslims in Harlem. Also it talks about how those African were treated and referred as the new Negros among other black. This book supports my research by mainly talking about challenges that West African Muslims face in the U.S in general and in Harlem in particular. It also explains the culture difference between the new black arrivals and the African American who have already assimilated to the American culture. It also gives my thesis a clear sense of the prejudice and racism that was against those Western African Muslims. Zain abduallah, Black Mecca: The African Muslims of Harlem. This book talks about how West African immigrants were adapting to the new American culture and trying to reach the American dream. It also goes on talking about how many Americans ignored those West African Muslims’s identity because they were black, because they have always viewed Islam as an Arab religion. This books helps my thesis by providing information about the West African Muslims immigrants’s background...
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...first glimpse of what resembled a Bilingual education in California was with the Mexican-Americans. I will use the different projects Californian educational system created to help Mexican-Americans. I will also use a Master's thesis entitled “Bilingual Education in California” by T. Lesley to explain the history of Bilingual education in California. This thesis is very interesting because the author talks about the origins of Bilingual education in California and also how the Bilingual education is a very complex system. What I want to demonstrate is that the Californian legislation was concerned with the issue of Bilingual education but despite that, Bilingual educational system has failed in 1998 with the Proposition 227. The fail of Bilingual education in a state like California leads other states to question the efficiency of Bilingual education. I will see reasons that led people, both non-Hispanics and Hispanics, to vote the Proposition 227. The purpose of the Proposition is to instaure a monolingual teaching, that-is-to-say only English language would be used in teaching. It also proposes immersion programs. I will compare Bilingual programs with immersion programs. What is surprising is that Latino people are in favor of the Proposition 227 and to understand why, I will study the interviews of some Latino people....
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...the boundaries of religious identity: Native American religions and American legal culture. Numen, 43(2), 157-183. Retrieved from JSTOR database. Thesis Statement: This essay attempts to build on the insights of these two great scholars-Felix Cohen, the legal scholar and “father of federal Indian law” and Lawrence Sullivan, the encyclopedic and graceful historian of religion-with regard to “Native America,” which is no less an imagined and located social-historical place than is “America.” I attempt to build on their shared claim that, although Native American communities may mark boundaries of social, political, and cultural difference in the US, the histories of these communities are neither “other” to nor on the periphery of American history, but at its heart. I also attempt to build on the present tense and dynamic sense of agency with which Cohen and especially Sullivan speak of Native Americans-a dynamic present tense too often missing in the historical frameworks given voice in scholarship. The relationship between religion and the law in Native America is an ideal subject through which to view this historical dynamism and to evaluate contemporary scholarly and legal frameworks for interpretation. Article 2: Bialecki, J. (2008). Between stewardship and sacrifice: agency and economy in a Southern California charismatic church. Journal of The Royal Anthropological Institute, 14(2), 372-390. Retrieved from EBSCOhost database. Thesis Statement: Specifically, this...
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...As stated by John Winthrop in the 17th Century, Americans have committed the cardinal sin of putting their own good ahead of the common good of the nation. However, Americans of different races, classes, and genders have experienced a variety of obstacles in maintaining their own good. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these obstacles caused conflicting and changing meanings of individualism, community, and freedom according to Foner, Plunkitt, Etulain, Buder, Gilfoyle, Bernstein, Leuchtenburg, Degler, Friedan, and Horwitz. As stated by Eric Foner, in the 1860s after the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln, Congress ratified multiple new amendments and added them to the Constitution. First,...
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...African Americans have a dream If people want to learn about the real African-American life during the 1920s, undoubtedly, a good way is to read Langston Hughes’s works. Hughes writes lots of poetry about pursuing an American Spirit which realizes no discrimination, freedom and equality in the entire American society. Hughes hopes all African American can be respected by entire society. African Americans have relatively equal chances to compete with white people and have similar living condition as whites’ families which at least have a house and a car. The two poems of Hughes’ “I, Too” and “Theme for English B” describe Hughes’ desired American Spirit. In these two poems “ I, Too” and Theme for English B”, Hughes shares his experience as African American who lives under basic living condition, in hopes of encouraging more blacks to fight for equal rights. From the poem “I, too”, Hughes writes “I, too, sing America” (ln.1). As a common American people who learn American history and love American culture, although Hughes ’ancestry is African, he was born and grew up in the Unites States. Hughes also writes “I, too, am America” (ln.18). Although white people and black people have different skin color and background in the United States, they are all American. People can learn some idea about equality from Hughes. Hughes says when guests come to their home, white person can eat at the table but darker brother only can eat in the kitchen in the poem “I...
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...The article “The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality” is an excerpt from the book of the same title by Walter Benn Michaels and published by Henry Hodan Company in 2006. The author wrote this in response to what was happening at the time, which was the mandating of institution policies for diversity and the problems that were faced with them. He argues in this excerpt that diversity is based solely on culture, but that we should shift our focus to equality. It is important to examine a summary of the article, a discussion of the author’s thesis and supportive evidence, and a proposal to address the issue. This book is divided into four sections. In the introduction, Michaels presents two different...
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...to organize your thoughts and arguments. A good outline can make conducting research and then writing the paper very efficient. Your outline page must include your: * Paper Title * Thesis statement * Major points/arguments indicated by Roman numerals (i.e., I, II, III, IV, V, etc.) * Support for your major points, indicated by capital Arabic numerals (i.e., A, B, C, D, E, etc.) Roman numeral I should be your “Introduction”. In the introduction portion of your paper, you’ll want to tell your reader what your paper is about and then tell what your paper hopes to prove (your thesis). So an Introduction gives an overview of the topic and your thesis statement. The final Roman numeral should be your “Conclusion”. In the conclusion, you summarize what you have told your reader. Following are 3 sample outlines, from actual student papers. YOUR outline can be MORE detailed, or might be LESS detailed. Remember that a good outline makes writing easier and more efficient. Sample Outline #1 Title: Frederick Douglass Thesis: Frederick Douglass played a crucial role in securing the abolition of slavery and equality of African-American rights through his actions, ideas, and efforts as a lecturer, author/publisher, and politician. I. Introduction A. Thesis B. Roles/Arguments II. Douglass as Lecturer A. History as slave and acquisition of education 1) He “experienced slavery” 2) Literacy allowed expression B. Early...
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...in order to find my voice and identity. This in return inspired me to make my portfolio’s...
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