Rough Draft Essay #1 Guidelines

Thursday, 2/28, bring two printed copies of your rough draft to class for workshop. While your final draft needs to be 4-5 full pages (so, that means, minimum four FULL pages), the rough draft may be as brief as 3 full pages. Just don't forget to make the final draft at least four FULL pages.

Other requirements to the rough draft include: at least three outside sources, plus Kindred, must be used in the draft (not simply listed on the Works Cited page) and also listed on a separate Works Cited page. Make sure that the Works Cited page is its own page and note that it does not count toward the overall page requirement.

Use 12 pt font, one inch  margins (no more), and double-space the draft. 

Two thoughts to consider for your paper:

1) No matter which prompt you selected, you should have one to three topics you will cover in your paper. These should be listed in your thesis or first paragraph, and then your paper should focus on them and only them throughout.

These may be topics such as mass incarceration or police brutality or housing discrimination. Ideally, these topics will connect together in some way. Hint: all forms of discrimination against African Americans are a result of a larger system of white supremacy, so everything does on some level connect--but not everything is easy to connect. For example, it's easy to connect problems of housing discrimination and educational disadvantages because our public school system is funded by property taxes, so those who live in low income housing do not have as much access to good schooling, which then perpetuates the cycle of poverty.

Also, a good place to start is with the book Kindred. Pick forms of discrimination in that book that you can connect to discrimination in the world today, even though it doesn't manifest in exactly the same way. For example, the patrollers in the novel can be connected to modern day police brutality and racial profiling.

So, when considering your topics, try and think of things you can connect together. And remember, you can take one topic (say, housing discrimination) and elaborate on that topic in detail instead of picking more than one. Beware of covering too much territory, too lightly, instead of really unpacking one or two things. Less really is more. Go deeper instead of wider/shallower.

 2) Unless you are one of people who chose Prompt 1, you need an internal organizational structure to your essay that incorporates past and present in an orderly fashion.

One way to do that is to begin each paragraph with a clear topic sentence, then you discuss how that discrimination played out in the the time of slavery, and then how it plays out in contemporary times. Then do that again in the next paragraph, and so on, for the majority of your body paragraphs.

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