AUDIENCE and PURPOSE

• Who is your audience? Write your essay for a reader who is an educated adult who is not familiar with the issue and its opposing views.
• What is your purpose? To analyze a key difference between two opposing views on a single issue.

LENGHT and FORMAT

• How long should Essay 5 be? Essay 5 is made up of three paragraphs: two summaries and a thoroughly developed analysis paragraph that follows the MEAL plan and other closed-form prose conventions. Each of the summary paragraphs will be 100-150 words in length, considering the brevity of the source texts you are analyzing. Generally, an effective MEAL plan analysis paragraph will be 400-500 words long. 
• How should you format your essay?
  • Your essay must apply MLA paper formatting guidelines, but you don’t need a works cited page:
    • How to do MLA format in Word – Video link
    • How to do MLA format in Googledocs – Video link
    • How to do MLA format in Pages – Video link

CONTENT

• What is required in your two summary paragraphs?
  • Use attributive tags to attribute the ideas to the author:
    • use the author’s last name or he/she
    • use precise signal verbs (see Step 4 in Lesson 1 for a list of signal verbs),
  • Use transitions and other signposts to show the relationship between the ideas, capturing the structure and flow of the source’s ideas,
  • Represent the source’s ideas accurately, fairly, objectively, and comprehensively yet concisely,
  • And use quotations sparingly, if at all.
• What is required in the body paragraph?
  • Apply the MEAL Plan paragraphing strategy for effective development and structure
    • It must present one main idea that…
      • Presents one significant or key difference between the opposing views
      • Announces the importance of this difference
    • It must present evidence from both sources that difference exists (this could be one or more quotations)
    • It must sufficiently analyze the examples to make the case for your main idea: that difference is important and how it is important to the discussion
  • Apply the the Old/New Contract strategy for effective organization
  • Properly quote examples as covered in Lesson 7