HW: Sleep-away camp as a child is an experience

For many Americans, going to a summer sleep-away camp as a child is an experience to be treasured well into adulthood. Present and former campers often speak of the experiences and the friendships that resulted from their time at sleep-away camp as some of the most important and meaningful ones of their lives. Critics, however, often view summer sleep-away camps in a very different way, insisting that they are elitist and that the children who are sent there miss out on valuable bonding time with their parents and the friends who live in their hometowns.

Assignment: On the whole, is going to a summer sleep-away camp as a child a positive experience or a negative one? Why? Plan and write a response in which you state your position and persuade readers to agree with you. Support your opinions with reasons and examples drawn from your personal experiences, if you have attended such camps, or your knowledge of the experience of friends and siblings.

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