Essay Purpose:
As the internet has grown in popularity, it has slowly infiltrated every part of day to day life, and had wide reaching effects that people never could have predicted when it was it was first developing. For our third essay, you will be looking into one of the more problematic aspects of the internet and asserting an argument about how to address that problem. You will also be required to respond to some sort of counterargument.
Requirements:
- A strong thesis statement
- 2 sources that support your argument, drawn from our databases
- A counterargument
- 12 point font, double spaced, Times New Roman
- 4-6 pages for the final draft
- at least 3 pages for the rough draft
Due Dates and Length Requirements
- Rough Draft Due July 17th, at least 3 pages
- Final Draft Due July 21st, at least 4 full pages
Prompt:
Brainstorm on what you think is the most problematic, difficult, or dangerous thing about the Internet. In a 4-to-6-page paper, you should explain this problem and how we can address it.
This essay should do the following, in approximately this order:
- Explain the problem, with examples, in detail.
- Explain, with examples, the extent and nature of the problem.
- Explain whether you think the problem is caused by the internet or made worse by it, and why.
- Provide one or more reasonable and achievable solutions.
Somewhere in the essay, you also need to provide a counterargument. Where you do so and how will depend on your argument.
Keep in mind that none of the internet’s problems exist in isolation of each other. You should pick one problem to focus on, but will likely address more than one problem as they connect to each other over the course of your essay.
Research to Look for and Where to Include it:
Unlike in previous essays, I’m leaving it up to you to use the scaffold to structure your essay and arranged your paragraphs.
This time, I am going to give some basic information about the kinds of research sources you might find and where to use them.
News reports
Newspaper articles, journalism, and similar sources are great for providing specific details that show how your chosen problem has real world impact. Consider including these early to talk about specific people and the specific ways they’ve encountered your problem.
Personal Accounts
You can share your own personal stories of internet misadventures, or those of people you know, to show how your problem works and has negative effects on people. This should not be your strongest, and especially not your only, source of examples. Rather, personal examples of the problem should be used to add to, support, or otherwise work alongside other, higher tier evidence.
Scientific and Psychiatric Research
The strongest type of evidence you can include in this essay, data-driven scientific and psychiatric research is best used in the part of your essay where you establish the specific details about how and why your problem IS a problem.
In this essay, it’s very easy to present a problem as self-evidently bad, like “kids these days are always on their phones,” “the internet rots your brains,” or “young children are on the internet too young.” Many of these ARE problems, but also easy to take for granted as such. Use scientific evidence to establish specifically HOW and WHY your problem is a problem, rather than relying on your audience to simply agree that it is so.
Websites and Blogs
There are plenty of websites out there that can provide journalistic quality evidence and should be used as described in the news section above.
Additionally, consider including websites that, rather than explain the problem, are themselves examples of it. This can be anything from a website that perpetuates a conspiracy theory, social media spreading false information, or shows an example of cyberbullying, just to name a couple examples. Even a bad website can be a useful piece of evidence, provided you present it in that context. As long as you’re clear that the website is bad and shouldn’t be trusted, you can use it as an example of that bad thing.
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