Essay 1: Thesis Statement Review / Very Brief Outline – KF

This is part of 2: 10274134

For the link to the article that was chosen;

Part 1:

Essay 1: Thesis Statement Review (3-4 sentences)

For this assignment, post a brief summary of the article you have chosen to respond to for the first essay and your thesis statement. You may also want to provide a brief explanation about your thesis if you have chosen to focus on only one specific point in the article you have selected.

Part 2: (1-2 sentences)

Once part 1 is done, I will add 2 classmates discussion post that you can respond to.

Part 3: Very Brief Outline

For this assignment, write up a bullet point list of the main ideas from your essay. Each bullet point should represent no more than a full paragraph, but you may want to break your ideas down even further and list two or three points from each paragraph. Only one idea per paragraph is required. As such, if your essay is going to be seven paragraphs long, you should have seven bullet points.

Then, between each bullet point, place a word or words that clearly explains the connection between the ideas. For example, I might have the following two ideas listed on my brief outline:

• The political climate in America today is deeply divided.
• Many of society’s biggest problems are not being solved.

Each of these points represents a full paragraph in my essay. As such, I will have several other sentences in my paragraphs explaining each point. However, the topic of each paragraph is summarized by the idea presented. But if you really think about it, it isn’t entirely clear how I have decided that these two ideas are related. So instead of just a list of several bullet points, also include a word in between each of the ideas that clearly explains how these ideas are related. For example:

• The political climate in America today is deeply divided.
• As a result
• Many of society’s biggest problems are not being solved.

Making clear the logical connections between your ideas is called developing your line of reasoning, and it is one of the three central things your essay will be graded on.

Some of the words you can include between your bullet points are conjunctions. The most common are the coordinating conjunctions (FANBOYS, for those who remember that acronym): For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So. However, there are also quite a few others. The conjunctive adverbs do exactly the same thing as the coordinating conjunctions, but they “sound” a lot “smarter.” I often use the acronym HOTSHOTCAT to help my students remember some of them: However, Otherwise, Therefore, Hence, On the other hand, Thus, Consequently, As a result, Then. Obviously (there’s another one!), there are a lot of these conjunctive adverbs and they can consist of more than one word. Here’s

, but there are many, many more. You don’t have to watch it, but a decent (and relatively short) video on this topic is below:

Part 4: 1-2 sentences

Once part 3 is complete, I will add classmates discussion post that you can respond to.