Essay #4: Evaluation Purpose This assignment affords you the opportunity to practice your critical thinking skills as you evaluate the relative merits of proposed solutions to the problem you identified for Essay 2. You will apply thee criteria you developed for Essay 3 to solutions that others have devised. In doing so, you will continue to practice your library research skills, as well as continue to evaluate sources. We will focus on thesis development and organization. Required Readings Review Units 5 and 6 on Canvas Read Unit 8 on Canvas Conduct your own research from a variety of sources (such as Internet, journals, books, magazines, newspapers, interviews, government documents) Background For your informative essay, you identified a problem, discussed the nature and scope of the problem (who it impacts and to what degree) and argued that the problem is significant enough to require a solution. Then you developed criteria for evaluating solutions to the problem. Now you will do further research to find out what types of solutions have already been tried. As you research these solutions, you will evaluate each using the criteria you developed. Inherent in your thesis to this essay is a judgment about what a good solution is. You can strengthen your thesis by making that warrant explicit in your argument. A warrant here means the underlying belief, value, or judgment of an argument. It connects the claim to the support. If you explicitly state your assumptionswhere you are coming fromit is easier for a reader to see the connection between your claims and your reasons. (See https://sites.google.com/site/writingwithpete/warrants (Links to an external site.) for a great explanation of warrants and how they work.) Your evaluation will apply the criteria you developed for Essay 3 and will include a comparison of three solutions that have already been proposed or attempted. This will deepen your understanding of what is possible and what does or does not work. Writing Task Please write a thesis-driven essay of 800 to 1,200 words in which you EVALUATE SOLUTIONS THAT HAVE ALREADY BEEN PROPOSED FOR THE PROBLEM YOU HAVE IDENTIFIED. Please remember as you incorporate sources that you need to do so in a way that does not give up control of your argument to those sources. Review the Unit 5 module for help with this.
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