Find an article or book chapter on a topic of your choice and compose an argument that refutes the main claim of the piece.  For the purposes of this assignment, the article or chapter that you refute

1. must be published in a respectable book, magazine, journal, or newspaper (no tabloids, pamphlets, brochures, or television shows),
2. must be more than a single page in length,
3. must argue a claim (rather than merely inform, summarize, or report), and
4. must have been published in the last three years.

In essence, your task is to repeat what you did in your first essay for this course with the difference that you get to choose the topic, as well as the actual piece of writing that you will refute.  NOTE: You will be required to submit a xeroxed copy of the article or chapter that you are refuting with your paper.

Keep in mind that your essay will be graded based on my usual grading criteria for papers.

For your first speech in this course, you will present to the class the argument that you constructed to refute the article or book chapter that you chose for ESSAY 2.

In essence, you will make exactly the same argument as you made in ESSAY 2, but you will have to adapt the argument to fit a new medium -- oral presentation.  Among other things, you should consider how to make your speech spontaneous, clear, and interesting in an oral format.  You might think about visuals that might help your audience to appreciate your evidence or to follow your argument better.  You will not be permitted to read your essay or to memorize and recite it, so you should give considerable thought to ways of remembering the material that you wish to cover in your speech (e.g., mnemonic devices, notecards, a memorized outline).  You might also consider that your audience for ESSAY 2 is primarily your professor, but your audience for your speech will be both your professor and your fellow classmates.  How might you change your essay's argument to appeal more effectively to this larger audience?

Keep in mind that your speech will be graded based on my usual grading criteria for speeches.

As your third essay for class, revise your ESSAY 2.

We will discuss revision in class over the next few class meetings. By revision, I do not mean merely editing (that is, cleaning up typos, misspellings, or punctuation problems). You should certainly edit for such errors in your revision, but you should also make more substantial changes. If you turn in exactly the same paper for ESSAY 3 as for ESSAY 2, you will get at least one full letter grade lower on ESSAY 3 than you did on ESSAY 2. The purpose of ESSAY 3's assignment is to help you to develop your revision skills. As a result, ESSAY 3 will be graded as much on the effectiveness and significance of the revisions you make as on the paper's inherent merits by itself.

As a way to revise, you may choose to do research in order to support your claims better. You may choose to reorganize your paper to improve its efficiency, coherence, or appeal. You may decide to experiment with more risky arguments than you used in ESSAY 2. You may re-think the logic of your paper to refine and sharpen your reasoning better.  You may decide to change or narrow your main claim in order to focus more specifically on the real heart of the issue in your paper. You may choose to work on and modify your writing style for clarity, elegance, and "flow." Whatever revisions you choose to make, they must represent a significant change from your original paper and a serious re-thinking/re-seeing (that is, re-vision) of ESSAY 2.