Call to Action

What to do:

The purpose of communication is to change the audience’s thinking, the audience’s behavior, or both. For this Essay, your purpose is to motivate people to take action. Your goal, then, is to change both the audience’s thinking and behavior.

 Call your fellow members of the UW-Stout community to take action on some issue directly relevant to members of the UW-Stout community.

Audience:

The audience of your essay depends on which option you choose. Your essay’s audience will be either members of the UW-Stout community.

Challenges:

·         Defining the problem and describing in detail how it occurs in the Stout community.

·         Establishing the significance of the problem to your audience

·         Informing your audience about what the problem is

·         Using research to support your claims about what the problem is, how important taking action is, and how the action you propose will help solve or combat the problem

·         Engaging compelling or popular solutions that compete with your own

·         Providing a clear vision of what you think your audience can help achieve by taking action

·           Conducting research, including utilizing databases and the library catalogue and evaluating sources for credibility and relevance

·           Integrating research into your writing

Research requirement:

Support your argument with research–at least 1 book source, at least 1 scholarly journal article, at least 1 news item, and at least 1 internet source.

Citation Requirement: As always, use MLA in-text citations and include a works cited page that contains MLA works cited entries for all of your sources.

Checklist of traits of a well-written academic essay:

__Introduction that establishes topic, purpose, significance, and main idea      

__Clear, articulate thesis that forecasts with precision what you argue in the body of the essay

__Effective topic/transition sentences                 

__Sufficient evidence to support your claims and to illustrate the claims of counterarguments

__Clear and thorough interpretation of the evidence

__Paragraphs with clear focus (they develop their main idea and don’t wander into other discussions)

__Fulfillment of length requirement and research requirement

__Effective and correct introduction of quoted material

__Signal phrases establishing author and title 

__Conclusion that echoes your main idea and somehow makes it memorable

__MLA in-text citations used each time you use something specific from a source

__Works cited page with properly formatted works cited entries

__Correct MLA formatting