Essay 1 assignment

Essay #1: The School Lunch Wars

All academic writing involves responding to the writing of others. Academic writing is like a long-running conversation, in which each essay answers a previous text in some way, either to agree with it, disagree with it, analyze it, or apply it to some new situation. As you might imagine, the most important first step in responding to another text is to make sure you understand that text. Writing a summary is one of the best ways to prove to yourself and others that you understand a piece of writing.

For our first essay this quarter, I’d like you to summarize a recent The Wilson Quarterly article titled “The School Lunch Wars.”  This article was written by Kristen Hinman and appeared in the Spring 2011 issue of the magazine; using this information, it should be easy for you to find the article using EBSCO (and, by the way, I would like you to use EBSCO to find the article, even though you can also find the article just by googling it).

After reading Hinman’s article, I would like you to write a summary of her argument in 1000 words or less. An essay of 1000 words is less than three pages long in double-spaced 12-point type, so your response will need to be both focused and economical. 

In grading this paper, I will look at all six criteria on the “What Makes a Good English 101 Essay?” section in the syllabus: focus, development, audience awareness, organization, correctness, and citations. I expect your paper to be word processed, using 12 point type, double-spaced, in an academic font such as Times New Roman, and proofread. Note, by the way, that proofreading is different from spell checking: your paper is likely to have more spelling and grammar errors if all you do is turn on the spell checker after writing your paper. I will also be evaluating your sentence grammar (that is, whether you are able to produce complete sentences), as well as your correct use of commas. At this point, I won’t be too much of a stickler on the finer points of MLA citations; however, to do well on this essay you need to understand the difference between a direct quote and a paraphrase, and you need to give a signal phrase for any outside piece of information you use.

DUE: ____________________________