question archive Anti-Intellectualism Essay Prompt Background This assignment invites you to explore anti-intellectualism, a salient but insufficiently discussed feature of American life—Hofstadter, Bradbury, Scott, Baverlin, and others argue—that informs and shapes our entertainment, our art, our politics, our schools and curricula, our religious practices, our social affiliations, and our individual and national identities
Anti-Intellectualism Essay Prompt Background This assignment invites you to explore anti-intellectualism, a salient but insufficiently discussed feature of American life—Hofstadter, Bradbury, Scott, Baverlin, and others argue—that informs and shapes our entertainment, our art, our politics, our schools and curricula, our religious practices, our social affiliations, and our individual and national identities
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Anti-Intellectualism Essay Prompt
Background
This assignment invites you to explore anti-intellectualism, a salient but insufficiently discussed feature of American life—Hofstadter, Bradbury, Scott, Baverlin, and others argue—that informs and shapes our entertainment, our art, our politics, our schools and curricula, our religious practices, our social affiliations, and our individual and national identities.
As you have in the first two essays, you will enter into a conversation, engage with other writers’ ideas on a subject and integrate their ideas into your own writing. This time, however, you will conduct and incorporate into your work more extensive research. You will aim to become an expert in the focused and manageable topic that you choose as your focus as you explore the topic of anti-intellectualism. In the process of conducting this research and composing your essay, you can expect to learn something about the role the media play in creating an informed/uninformed citizenry, about U.S. history and the national character, about your own responsibilities as a student and as a citizen, and about how culture helps shape your attitudes and assumptions. Most importantly, you can expect to learn and discover.
Getting Started
To begin this work, you must first select a topic—one that is researchable (that is, one you can investigate by consulting materials in Briggs Library). You may write upon any topic you wish that addresses issues of anti-intellectualism in American life. You might, for instance, consider the academic or career path you intend to follow and explore the salience of intellectualism and/or anti-intellectualism in that field. You might investigate literacy rates or the effects of television viewing upon literacy, or ongoing concerns about the fate of the newspaper or book publishing industries, or shifts in educational policies or high school or college curricula, or debates about free speech or censorship or political correctness, or discussions about how the media or new communication technologies shape public discourse, or the fate of serious art in a cultural climate many argue is hostile to or indifferent to such art, or the current state of/or the effects of mass entertainment, or the effects of our obsession with athletes and celebrities. These are but a few of the possibilities.
To initiate your work on this project, please compose a short proposal (1-2 typed pages) that 1) announces your topic (one that invites debate) and explains why you wish to write about it; 2) identifies your present assumptions about the topic and identifies your target audience as well as their attitudes and assumptions about the topic; and 3) clearly states your research question(s). As outlined in the course schedule, you will then submit drafts of your works cited and an outline/draft for peer review, before submitting a draft to the instructor feedback, and then, finally, your final essay for grading.
Requirements
Basic requirements for the essay are as follows. Its minimum length is 8-9 pages, not including the Works Cited. It must be typed and follow MLA documentation style (see The St. Martin’s Handbook). It must incorporate information from at least five different types of sources (that is, from books, journals, magazines, newspapers, reference texts, government documents, electronic sources, interviews, and so on). So that I may assess fairly your use of source materials, you must include with your final essay scanned copies of all passages from print media (not available on the Internet) that you have paraphrased or summarized. You should sequence these passages in the order in which the paraphrases/summaries appear in your text and highlight the appropriate passages. (Please note: I will not read any essay that does not fulfill these requirements.)
Remember that you must submit all drafts (topic proposal, works cited draft, peer review draft, and revised draft for instructor feedback) in order to be eligible to submit the final draft for grading.
In the Week 16 folder for this unit, you will see three sample papers that you can read for inspiration. You can also contact me any time during the writing and research process with questions or to arrange a ZOOM conference with me.
