English Homework Help

MINI ESSAY #2: Practicing Development

1. Read the following page on the history and rationale for the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals for the year 2030: https://sdgs.un.org/goals

2.  Watch the following video: https://youtu.be/Qc_w8zNTQzQ

3. Freewrite, for 10 minutes, in response to the video and the webpage.  Consider whether you have ever experienced a great injustice or been witness to an injustice.  Try to allow yourself to sink into the details of your memories.  Channel “Tiffany.”  Go. 

4.  Pulling from the freewrite (above), draft, channeling “Aunt Bea,” a mini essay responding to the following prompt: 

Describe ONE time in your life when you experienced what you believe to be an injustice (either as a victim or a witness). Be specific.  AND describe how the UN’s plan might affect the existence of such an injustice.  Would this plan have helped? Could it have helped eliminate such an injustice in the future?

Your draft should follow these guidelines: 

1. Introduction: In 2-3 sentences, create the context for the discussion that will follow, in your body. 

A. The last sentence of your introductory paragraph should be a THESIS, or a TELL sentence that states the idea the whole mini essay develops (though this comes before the body, you might consider actually writing it after you draft your body). 

2. Body: 

A. In one paragraph, DESCRIBE, in 3 sentences, ONE specific, particular experience you have had that felt like a great injustice.  Maybe you were a witness to the injustice, or maybe you were the victim of injustice.  Maybe you were even the cause of the injustice.  In this paragraph, you should DEVELOP your memory with specific details from the experience.  UNIFY that paragraph with a TOPIC SENTENCE (at the beginning of the paragraph) that states the overall idea that paragraph develops. 

B. In another body paragraph, ANALYZE that same experience, explaining, in just three sentences, how you think the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 might impact or might have impacted such an injustice.  You’ll be explaining the meaning you attribute to the experience. UNIFY that paragraph with a TOPIC SENTENCE that states the overall idea that paragraph develops. 

3. Conclusion: Creatively emphasize, in 2-3 sentences, the idea you’ve developed in the body (above). 

4.  Title your essay creatively.  

It’s important to be specific in both your description and your analysis. 

This means to UNIFY your ideas by organizing them into body paragraphs represented by topic sentences.  A topic sentence states the claim each body paragraph develops.  Each paragraph should develop one step towards your overall realization (the big macro idea).  

UNITY comes from the Latin word for ONE.  In the context of essay writing, the idea of UNITY helps us organize the presentation of our ideas.  

As you may have noticed, language helps us create ideas (dive in and discover).  And it also helps us to deliver those ideas (communicate them) to a reader.  Writing both creates and communicates ideas.    This week we are practicing diving in, discovering, and delivering.  

Learning about UNITY helps us to do that because UNITY asks us to develop ONE idea at a time, in ONE direction, toward ONE overall thesis idea.  Think of it like building a house, brick by brick, wall by wall.  Each sentence or word is a brick.  Each body paragraph is a wall.  The essay is a house.  The essay, in this sense, is a structure.  Every brick, because of the way it is structured, works to build that house.  In the same way, each sentence in your essay, each paragraph, should be working together to hold up the thesis.  

You may review the instructional video below to help you understanding the difference between TELLING and SHOWING in essay writing:  

**TELL statements (topic sentences) organize your developed ideas.  Each body paragraph idea should build from the last and toward the next, until you reach your thesis idea.  

**SHOW statements develop those topic sentences by explaining why they are valid/true (how you arrived at those particular conclusions).