Background: For this unit, you have read eight important essays on the topic of The Myth of Individual Opportunity: Gregory Mantsios’ “Class in America,” Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Serving in Florida,” Alan Aja’s “From a Tangle of Black Pathology to a Race-Fair America,” Mehrsa Baradaran’s From How the Other Half Banks, Diana Kendall’s “Framing Class, Vicarious Living, and Conspicuous Consumption,” Ellen K. Pao’s From Reset: My Fight for Inclusion and Lasting Change, Kate Aronoff’s, “Thank God It’s Monday,” and Rutger Bregman’s “Why We Should Give Free Money to Everyone.” You have also watched four videos of interviews with some of these authors. And now it is time for you to compose your own ideas.
Directions: In a thesis-driven essay of approximately four pages (1,000 words), please respond to the following prompt:
Argue for your definition of the term “individual success,” and explain how the articles in this unit of Rereading America have influenced your attitudes toward work and success.
Grading Criteria and Requirements:
Your essay must show:
How clearly you can communicate your argument (thesis).
How well-structured your paper is with a clear introduction, thesis, body paragraphs, transitions, and a conclusion that answers the “So what?” question.
How effectively you can use the tools of analysis that you have been practicing this semester to help make sense of what the articles in this unit say.
How well you can use textual evidence (at least four quotations from the articles in our textbook) to support the claims you’re making in your analysis.
How well you can use one of this unit’s videos with the authors to help elucidate and support the claims you are making in your analysis (you can just refer to the video or a line from the video).
How polished and professional your paper is with few sentence-level errors, following the MLA format.
How well you can use one of the videos in this section with the author to explain and support the claims made by the analysis (you can only refer to the video or one line of the video).
1. Barbara Ehrenreich and Jia Tolentino – Economic Inequality in Times of Crisis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD4ydMy_-1c
2. Prof Mehrsa Baradaran | It Is Immoral To Be A Billionaire (7/8) | Oxford Union https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5KyYPG7Uac
3. Ellen Pao at the 2015 MA Conference for Women https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAG17RM4IRg
4. We could all work 15-hour weeks, and get away with it – videohttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2016/jun/15/we-could-all-work-15-hour-weeks-and-get-away-with-it-video
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