This is the final essay for the class! Like the papers preceding it, the purpose is to help you continue to hone your skills of arguing points in writing by precisely stating a stance and defending it with evidence in a clear, easy-to-follow manner.

Timeline

Friday 11/29	Brainstorming Due
Monday 12/9	First draft due
Tuesday 12/10, Wednesday 12/11	Paper Meetings
Sunday 12/15	Final Draft Due

Audience

Ursinus College's academic/intellectual community, including your fellow students, instructors, mentors, etc. You'll want to strike a balance between being thought provoking and exacting, but also accessible to people outside of our class but in our community who may not have read the works you're citing.

Format

• Approximately 1500-1800 words. You may format your paper any way you want with whatever spacing you want (I personally use Overleaf to craft PDF documents in LaTeX, though most people probably prefer Microsoft Word). But regardless, in addition to the text, you should include
  • Your name
  • The title of the paper (you do not need a title page)
  • The date

Writing Goals

• Taking a stance with a clear thesis statement and well-organized, easy-to-follow text
• Lively, distinctive, original voice
• Appropriate and frequent references to text, including passages we haven't explicitly discussed in class, and perhaps new passages that you find on your own
• Thoughtful, provocative, creative, nuanced interpretations of your textual references

Evaluation

We'll be splitting the paper grade into several categories, where you'll be graded on a 10 point scale on each category. Point assignments can be interpreted as follows

9-10	Exemplary; exceeds the goal; a model example for future students
8	Very good; met the goal fully
7	Met the goal minimally
6	Just barely acceptable, but fell short of the mark and needs improvement
0-5	Unsatisfactory; does not meet goal

Below are the categories to which points are assigned

Category	Goal
Main Idea / Thesis Statement	The main idea is clear, concise, debatable, specific, and interesting, and is expressed via a precise thesis statement. Thesis statement connects to the prompt
Creativity / Making It Your Own	Takes a unique, creative approach with a lively, original voice
Textual references	Carefully chosen, frequent, detailed, skillfully integrated references to the texts. Selects several passages that were not discussed in class.
Interpretation of Texts	Student shows interpretations of the text that are creative, nuanced, thought provoking, and/or just plain provocative.
Organization	Each paragraph has clear topic sentences, the document flows from idea to idea and paragraph to paragraph, and the reader avoids "getting lost"
Sentence Level	Sentences should be clear, with varied diction, and edited/polished without grammar and spelling mistakes.
Revisions	There is evidence that the student made an earnest, good faith attempt to address comments from me and/or the writing fellow in their final revision.
Bonus Points (+0.5)	Includes an informative and entertaining title

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Essay Topics (Choose One!)

CIE Authors + Generative AI

Pick one of the texts that we've looked at recently, and imagine what the author would have to say about "generative AI," such as (but not limited to) ChatGPT, image synthesis systems like Midjourney, or generative music systems like Suno. Would the author have an exclusively positive view on it or a negative view on it, or would they have a more nuanced position? Articulate specifically in light of the values communicated in the text, and use quotes/paraphrasing to support your position. To spice things up, you may even consider writing in the style of the author when arguing your points, imagining it as a 2024 appendix to their work.

The Price of "Freedom"

One of the last sentences in Persepolis is "freedom always has a price." First, establish the extent to which you feel you are free in your life. Then, draw on at least two texts to comment on the price of that freedom. Possible things to think about include (but are not limited to):

• Do you agree with how these texts characterize the price?
• Is it worth it in your view?
• Could we preserve the freedoms you've identified without such a steep price?

A CIE Character Runs for Office

NOTE: The extremely cool and creative essay idea below was by student Alex Kolb in Professor Aipperspach's CIE class this fall!

Choose a "character" (inclusive of authors or person in a text) from one of the texts that we have read in CIE to run for president in the 2024 election. Consider how this person would lead the country. What values do they have? What personal qualities would they bring? How would their decisions affect the nation - positively or negatively? Would their leadership be beneficial, harmful, or a mix of both? Use citations and specific references to CIE texts to support your claim.

A Struggle with Abrahamic Faith

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Vine Deloria, Marjane Satrapi, and Charles Darwin all have encounters that challenge any would-be faith in one of the Abrahamic religions in their environment. Expand upon one of these struggles, drawing upon quotes from the text. From what you understand, how would each of the panelists at the CIE interfaith panel respond to their struggle? You may even want to email one of the panelists! Then, once you have established that response, tie it all together with an empathetic response to the author, either affirming that their life experience precludes faith in these religions, or passing on the wisdom from the interfaith panel in your own words.

Generalizations About Race in The US

This essay topic basically hits up all of the Ursinus open questions simultaneously.

In Between The World And Me, Ta-Nehisi Coats makes generalizations about race at some points of the text, but at other points, he also explains the specificity of individual experiences of being both White (e.g. "The new people were something else before they were white - Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish" (Pg. 7)) and Black ("I saw everything I knew of my black self multiplied out into seemingly endless variations [in The Yard at Howard]" (Pg. 40)). Conversely, in class, we talked about how, in spite of these variations, there are things that are appropriately generalizable to all of the members in one such "group," like the fact that people with darker skin tones are much more likely to experience discrimination and harrassing behavior, as in this video, due to the legacy of slavery in the US.

Clearly, though, there is a tension between understanding specific identities and variations and generalizing experiences to a simple dichotomy of "Black or not," and the "correct" answer (if there is one) is probably somewhere in between. To what extent can we generalize notions of "White" and "Black" in the US, and how might this help us to understand what we need to do to improve racial harmony beyond its current state? Draw upon moments where you feel Coates generalizes and specifies appropriately, and moments where you think he does not, and synthesize your own understanding of how we ought to live together with this understanding.