Legalization of marijuana Week 2 Essay

This essay explores the persuasive mode, one of the more common kinds of writing you’ll experience throughout your college and professional career. Your goal is to persuade your audience to consider your position on a controversial subject. Understand, there is seldom a definitive right or wrong answer in anything. You should anticipate the real possibility that some of your readers will not initially agree with you on your stance. Part of this essay requires that you take opposing viewpoints into consideration when making your argument. By truthfully representing the strengths of your opponent’s point of view, you show that you have considered more than one option when making your decision. This gives you more clout with your audience.

Criteria

The rough draft of your essay should contain the following basic features:

A well-defined issue that is controversial by nature

A clear thesis statement that demonstrates the position you will be taking throughout the essay

A treatment of at least three reputable sources, at least one drawn from the EBSCO database, and at least one of them supporting your claim

A counter argument with at least one credible source defending the opposing viewpoint

A refutation to or compromise with the counter argument

If you have any difficulty finding sources in EBSCO, please contact the Grantham librarian at library@grantham.edu

In addition to the above, the rough draft of your essay should be:

From 900 words in length, typed in Times New Roman, 12pt. font, double-spaced, with one inch margins

Written primarily in third person

Edited for spelling, mechanical, grammatical, and typing errors

Please note: you will have the opportunity to revise and perfect this essay, but you should do your best to make this draft as complete as possible so you can receive more relevant feedback from your instructor.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.