Brainstorming Op-Ed Topics

Unit One- Common Read Synthesis:

  • college
    • social vs. academic life
    • out of state troubles
  • quest
  • race
    • hate crimes
    • election
    • Black Lives Matter
  • Native Americans
    • pipeline protests

Unit Two- Rhetorical Analysis of Op-Ed:

  • global warming
  • importance of endangered species
  • make less of a footprint
    • walking
    • palm oil

Unit There- Argument:

  • parenting style
  • is everyone a winner?
  • spoiled generation

Btdubs

Side Note: I don’t even know what I’ve been posting where lately so sorry ’bout that ………

Anywho, the rhetoric triangle helped me a lot. It showed me that although it is a research paper, I don’t have to shy away from any sense of pathos. Some logos are pathos within themselves and that is okay. Also it was encouraging to hear that my intro didn’t suck. So yay me. Boo me because my sources do suck and I actually need to really focus and use one search rather than typing my topic into google. Damn you, sophisticated technology.

Timed Writing

There is a lot of opinions out about participation trophies. However, opinions don’t help me much. Participation trophies are highly controversial and really depend a lot of parenting style. Thus, I feel a lot of my sources contain too much opinion. I would like to dig deeper and find more legit studies about what giving kids trophies for showing up actually does to them later in their life, as well as what it does at an early age. The era of trophies for breathing is fairly new which makes these elongated studies difficult to find. My sister is a fourth grade teacher, though, and I am going to ask her to record responses from her students when only the “winning” team receives an award.

“Dream Catchers”

I think I am going to write on option four. I ruled out number three because I am white and do not romanticize Native Americans and I am not sure I even understand what Corliss means when she says that. Prompt two is a touchy subject for me since my boyfriend is African American and my dad does not approve of our relationship and therefore I don’t want my paper to get too opinionated and focused on my specific situation instead of the United States as a whole. I really like both the first and last prompts. The first however, focuses on quests, which includes my personal quest, but quests imply a gain of self knowledge at the end and I have yet to reach the end of my quest and therefore lack the quest-enlightened self knowledge and would rather write on this prompt at the end of senior year perhaps. The final choice instructs me to write on what it means to be college-educated, and with the passing of my grandmother today I am already starting to realize I am learning a lot more in college than book smarts. I am concerned simply about writing my first real college paper and relating all three elements(Ten Little Indians, Dream Catchers video, and my own person testimony) in a cohesive manner that flows properly.