Argumentative Essay 1 Assignment

Assignment task: Write an argumentative essay of 750-1,000 or more words that makes an
original claim derived from your synthesis of Madison, Laser, and Neill. Support your thesis
using argumentative and rhetorical strategies such as those found in RW, pp. 574-90.

 Rough draft due: 15 September (750-word minimum)

 Peer Review: 15 September
 Final draft due: 22 September (750-word minimum, revised and edited)

PREWRITING: Read James Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious

Assessments,” RW, pp. 335-40.

Read Rachel Laser’s “What Your Friends May Not Know” (Handout Folder 1), and Debra
Neill’s “The Disestablishment of Religion in Virginia” (Handout Folder 2).

Annotate and summarize the texts.

Synthesize ideas from the readings: look for relationships between ideas and practices presented
by each author. Use RW, pp. 596-608, as a guide for tips on how to synthesize to create thesis
statements. Also helpful: Purdue Online Writing Lab: https://owl.purdue.edu. Search
“Synthesizing Sources.”

DRAFTING:

Draft your essay by proposing a tentative thesis, a debatable claim, that you can support with
your own critical thinking and material from the three documents you have read. Avoid using
material from other sources. These will distract you from your purpose and undermine focus.
One purpose in this exercise is to learn how to narrow focus to one idea that can be supported by
lines of reasoning and argumentative appeals.

REVISING:

Revise your essay by rewriting your draft based upon comments from your peers and instructor.
Revision of a rough draft involves rewriting much of the original draft—writing a stronger thesis
statement, further developing paragraphs, reorganizing paragraphs, deleting material that is
unnecessary, or adding specificity to vague ideas.

EDITING:

Editing is the final task of a writing assignment and includes working on tone and language for
consistency. See the academic tone handout (Handout 3) for tips on how to maintain consistency
in your revision. Cleaning up errors in grammar and mechanics is also part of the editing process.

Assessment of submitted work:

The rough draft you hand in for credit will be a completed essay, although not a final draft. To
receive credit for the rough draft, you will need to include the following:

 title
 introduction with a debatable thesis statement
 body paragraphs that support the thesis
 counterargument or arguments
 conclusion
 Works Cited

The rough draft will be scored based upon the quality of invention, development, and
arrangement of ideas.

The final draft will be scored based upon the quality of invention, development, and arrangement
of ideas as well as language and format. To receive credit, the final draft should show significant
revision of the rough draft. Essays that are not revised and edited will receive a zero.

For assessment criteria used to score final essays in the Freshman Writing Program, see “Course
Assessment” under “Coursework” on the Blackboard menu bar.

Paper style

Use the MLA 8th edition format for your essay. You can find a sample MLA essay under
“Coursework” on your Blackboard menu bar in the “Rhetoric and Composition Resources”
folder.

Since you will be citing text, you will need a Works Cited page at the end of the essay. Copy the
following information into your Works Cited, the last page of your essay:

Laser, Rachel. “What Your Friends May Not Know About Separation of Church And State.”

Church & State, vol. 76, no. 1, Jan. 2023, p. n.pag. EBSCOhost.

Madison, James. “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments.” Reading the

World, edited by Michael Austin, 4th ed., Norton, 2020, pp.334-41.

Neill, Debra R. “The Disestablishment of Religion in Virginia: Dissenters, Individual Rights, and

the Separation of Church and State.” Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, vol.

127, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 2–41. EBSCOhost.

In this essay, you will cite passages from the three texts. To cite a passage, follow MLA 8th
edition:

 Use a lead-in, quotation marks around quoted material, and then after the closing
quotation mark, put a parenthesis, a page number, and a closing parenthesis —ex.
Madison argues that the proposed assessment bill “violates the equality which ought to be
the basis of every law” (336).

Use Microsoft Word to draft and revise your essay. PDF's are not accepted.