MSE1: Purpose and Foci

By , February 1, 2010 8:32 am

Your MSE1 topic needs to accomplish a few objectives that, if I get you thinking about them sooner rather than later, can greatly enhance the quality of your proposal, RD, FD, and therefore your grade.

Think early and often about what you hope to achieve in your MSE. Specifically, how do you want readers’ minds to change as a result of reading your essay? There are several types of foci you may want to consider:

Making An Argument is simple straightforward, and clear: consider all the opinions people can have on an issue, and then advocate the stance you find most logical, providing reasons for supporting that stance. Your counterargument (CA) would be a paragraph about how others could disagree with you and how you refute or concede that perspective.

Proposing a Solution requires you to (1) identify a problem in the world, demonstrating its existence, then (2) argue for the implementation of a solution (or series of solutions) that will reduce/eliminate that problem and then (3) exploring the benefits of that solution’s implementation. CA could be about a less-effective solution that others may take and why it’s not as logical as yours.

In a Searching for Causes purpose, you’d demonstrate the existence of a trend—something that’s happening more (or less) over the last 10 years or so—then providing speculative paragraphs about where that trend came from. CA would be a cause to the trend you don’t buy into and why you don’t.

An Evaluative essay is like the Critique, just on a grander scale. You could apply specific, appropriate criteria in order to evaluate a text (anything that can be researched, really: a written text, a movie, an artist, consumer electronics, a video game, etc.) and then heavily support your judgments with synthesized research.

There are certainly ways you can blend these different approaches, too. For instance, you could explore the causes of a problem before proposing a solution, or you could evaluate a text then argue that it’s good/bad for our culture, and so on. I don’t want to be too pedantic about topics, but I also thought I’d give you some food for thought. Email me any questions you have, and happy proposing!

3 thoughts on “MSE1: Purpose and Foci

  1. cindy
    9:37 am - 2-1-2010

    Good morning Steve
    For the MSE1 proposal are we to fill that sheet out and answer the questions. When done than does that get sent back to you or posted on balckboard were MSE proposals is listed? About topics, keeping prayer in school?
    Thanks, Cindy

  2. esteve
    9:50 am - 2-1-2010

    Not sure I follow your questions, Cindy, but I’ll try to answer: your MSE1 proposal will be uploaded to Assignments while your topic testing post will be posted to the discussion board by Wednesday night.

    Keeping prayer in school is a good start to a topic, but doesn’t the separation of church and state actually prohibit prayer in school?

  3. cindy
    11:38 am - 2-1-2010

    Steve you are correct. What about the hurricane in Haiti. The diesater , why peolpe should help and my family being close to the situation due to the fact we do a lot of missionary work there. Also why some people think it is not right for us to help and donate money because of the economy we are in and peolpe without work. i went back to the writing again today about my critique. I am having problems with talking about his article instead of talking about his style. Let me know what you think after reading it. i know I need a lot of help with writing and style.
    I understand that blackboard is like a sounding block to throw out ideas what we talk about but the assignment sheet is for what we will actually be writing about. Thanks again.
    Cindy
    p.s. when do you use SKYPE? I am curious how it works. 🙂

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