Paper Five: Argument and your Profession (Research Based Argument)

For you final paper of the course, you will explore argument in your own professional field. Within any profession there are issues that are actively debated and discussed and having the ability to take part in that professional debate, in an intelligent and knowledgeable way, is important to your professional success.

For this essay you will take an issue on which people in your profession actively disagree and take a clear position on that issue. You will support your position with reasons, and you will support your reasons with evidence, the elements of argument that you have been studying all semester. Your audience for this paper will be others in your professional field as well as the general public. Terms commonly used inside the profession that may be new to a general audience will need to be explained. You are the author of this paper, so the arguments you present will be your own (without using “I” or referring to yourself), and sources will be used only to provide the facts, statistics, expert opinion or examples needed to support your own arguments. You will need to introduce and comment on source material throughout the paper, since the reader will need to understand how and why source material help prove your individual reasons and your overall thesis. You may also use the arguments that contradict your position in order to refute them or qualify your own reasons/arguments. Chapter 6 will be your guide for writing Research Based Arguments, and you will find a sample essay and MLA citation information in that chapter.

This essay will be seven to ten pages long in MLA format (not counting Works Cited page). You will have a minimum of five sources, with at least four of those sources being from books, professional journals, magazines or newspapers. You may use internet and other types of non-print sources as long as they are credible and current, but only in addition to the four required sources from books, or journals, magazines or newspapers