This document provides an agenda for a class on writing concept essays. It includes sections on essay structure, conclusions, using appositives, citing sources, plagiarism, quoting and summarizing, integrating quotations, and tips for writing the draft. The document offers examples and advice for each section to help students understand how to write a successful concept essay.

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Class 12
EWRT 1A

2. +
AGENDA
 Essay Review
 Conclusions
 Appositives
 How and When to cite
 Plagiarism
 Quoting and Summarizing
 Integrating Quotations
 Writing the draft
 Tips for writing your essay

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Essay Review
 An attempt to gain readers’ interest could take as little as two or
three sentences or as many as four or five paragraphs.
 The thesis statement and definition are usually quite brief—
sometimes only a few sentences.
 A topic illustration may occupy one or several paragraphs, and
there can be few or many topics, depending on how the
information has been divided up.
 A conclusion might summarize the information presented, give
advice about how to use or apply the information, or speculate
about the future of the concept.

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Conclusions

5. +
Should I end with speculation, as Ngo
does?
Members of developed societies in general practice
none of these forms of cannibalism, with the
occasional exception of survival cannibalism when the
only alternative is starvation. It is possible, however,
that our distant-past ancestors were cannibals who
through the eons turned away from the practice. We
are, after all, descended from the same ancestors as
the Miyanmin, the Alligator, and the Leopard people,
and survival cannibalism shows that people are
capable of eating human flesh when they have no
other choice.

6. +Should I frame the essay by relating the ending to the beginning,
as Toufexis does?
 O.K., let’s cut out all this nonsense about romantic love. Let’s bring some
scientific precision to the party. Let’s put love under a microscope. When
rigorous people with Ph.D.s after their names do that, what they see is not
some silly, senseless thing. No, their probe reveals that love rests firmly on
the foundations of evolution, biology and chemistry. What seems on the
surface to be irrational, intoxicated behavior is in fact part of nature’s master
strategy—a vital force that has helped humans survive, thrive and multiply
through thousands of years. Says Michael Mills, a psychology professor at
Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles: “Love is our ancestors
whispering in our ears.”
 O.K., that’s the scientific point of view. Satisfied? Probably not. To most
people—with or without Ph.D.s—love will always be more than the sum of its
natural parts. It’s a commingling of body and soul, reality and imagination,
poetry and phenylethylamine. In our deepest hearts, most of us harbor the
hope that love will never fully yield up its secrets, that it will always elude our
grasp.

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Spend five minutes crafting a conclusion. It won’t be
perfect, buy you will have a good start on what you want
to do!

8. +
Sentence Strategy
Appositives

9. + A Sentence Strategy: Appositives
SMG 177-79
 As you draft an essay explaining a concept, you have a lot of
information to present, such as definitions of terms and
credentials of experts. Appositives provide an efficient, clear
way to integrate these kinds of information into your
sentences. An appositive is a noun or pronoun that, along with
modifiers, gives more information about another noun or
pronoun. Here is an example from Ngo’s concept essay (the
appositive is in italics and the noun it refers to is underlined):
 Cannibalism, the act of human beings eating human
flesh(Sagan 2), has a long history and continues to hold
interest and create controversy. (Ngo paragraph 5)

10. +By placing the definition in an appositive phrase right after
the word it defines, this sentence locates the definition
exactly where readers need it. Writers explaining concepts
rely on appositives because they serve many different
purposes needed in concept essays, as the following
examples demonstrate. (Again, the appositive is in italics
and the noun it refers to is underlined.)
Defining a New Term
 Some researchers believe hyperthymics may be at
increased risk of depression or hypomania, a mild variant
of mania (Friedman, Paragraph 5).
 Cannibalism can be broken down into two main
categories: exocannibalism, the eating of outsiders of
foreigners, and endocannibalism, the eating of members
of one’s own social group (Shipman 70). (Ngo paragraph,
6)

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Each person carries in his or her mind a unique
subliminal guide to the ideal partner, a “love
map.” (Toufexis, paragraph 17)
Introducing a New Term
“Love is a natural high,” observes Anthony Walsh, author
of The Science of Love: Understanding Love and Its
Effects on Mind and Body. (Toufexis, paragraph 10)
Giving Credentials of Experts

12. Identifying People and Things
When I was in high school I read the Robert Browning
Poem ‘My Last Duchess.’ In it, the narrator said he killed
is wife, the duchess, because . . .(Friedman, Paragraph
2).
Giving Examples or Specifics
Some 2,400 years ago, Hippocrates proposed that a
mixture of four basic humors—blood, phlegm, yellow
bile, and black bile—determined human
temperament…(Friedman, paragraph 6)

13. +
Try it!
Try writing several appositive
phrases.
 Defining a term
 Introducing a new term
 Giving the credentials of experts
 Identifying people and things
 Giving examples or specifics
Use the examples as models.

14. +
How and When to Cite
Sources
Avoiding Plagiarism

15. +MLA format: on our website Under “MLA Guidelines”
MLA (Modern Language Association) style is most commonly used to
write papers and cite sources within the liberal arts and humanities.
MLA style specifies guidelines for formatting manuscripts and using the
English language in writing. MLA style also provides writers with a
system for referencing their sources through parenthetical citation in
their essays and Works Cited pages.
Writers who properly use MLA also build their credibility by
demonstrating accountability to their source material. Most importantly,
the use of MLA style can protect writers from accusations of plagiarism,
which is the purposeful or accidental uncredited use of source material
by other writers.
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/

16.  Avoiding Plagiarism: Writers — students and professionals alike —
occasionally fail to acknowledge sources properly. The word plagiarism, which
derives from the Latin word for “kidnapping, ”refers to the unacknowledged use of
another’s words, ideas, or information. Students sometimes mistakenly assume
that plagiarizing occurs only when another writer’s exact words are used without
acknowledgment. In fact, plagiarism also applies to such diverse forms of
expression as musical compositions and visual images as well as ideas and
statistics. Therefore, keep in mind that you must indicate the source of
any borrowed information or ideas you use in your essay, whether you have
paraphrased, summarized, or quoted directly from the source or have reproduced
it or referred to it in some other way. Remember especially the need to document
electronic sources fully and accurately. Information, ideas, and images from
electronic sources require acknowledgment in even more detail than those from
print sources (and are often easier to detect as plagiarism if they are not
acknowledged). Some people plagiarize simply because they do not know the
conventions for using and acknowledging sources. Others plagiarize because
they keep sloppy notes and thus fail to distinguish between their own and their
sources’ ideas. If you keep careful notes, you will not make this serious mistake.
Another reason some people plagiarize is that they feel intimidated by the writing
task or the deadline. If you experience this anxiety about your work, speak to me.
Do not run the risk of failing the course or being expelled from school because of
plagiarism. If you are confused about what is and what is not plagiarism, be sure
to ask me.

17. Quoting and Summarizing:
Writers use sources by quoting directly and by summarizing.
Deciding Whether to Quote or Summarize
As a general rule, quote only in these situations:
(1) when the wording of the source is particularly memorable or vivid or
expresses a point so well that you cannot improve it.
(2) when the words of reliable and respected authorities would lend
support to your position.
(3) when you wish to cite an author whose opinions challenge or vary
greatly from those of other experts.
(4) when you are going to discuss the source’s choice of words.
• Summarize any long passages whose main points you wish to
record as support for a point you are making.

18. +
Short Quotations
 To indicate short quotations (fewer than four typed lines of
prose or three lines of verse) in your text, enclose the quotation
within double quotation marks. Provide the author and specific
page citation (in the case of verse, provide line numbers) in the
text, and include a complete reference on the Works Cited
page. Punctuation marks such as periods, commas, and
semicolons should appear after the parenthetical citation.
Question marks and exclamation points should appear within
the quotation marks if they are a part of the quoted passage but
after the parenthetical citation if they are a part of your text.

20. Example: In-text citations

21. Example: In-text Citations: online (credible)
sources

22. +Integrating Quotations
Depending on its length, a quotation may be incorporated into your text by being
enclosed in quotation marks or set off from your text in a block without quotation
marks. In either case, be sure to integrate the quotation into the language of your
essay.
In-Text Quotations: Incorporate brief quotations (no more than four typed lines of
prose or three lines of poetry) into your text. You may place the quotation virtually
anywhere in your sentence:
 At the Beginning:
 “To live a life is not to cross a field,” Sutherland writes at the beginning of her narrative
(11).
 In the Middle
 Woolf begins and ends by speaking of the need of the woman writer to have “money
and a room of her own” (4)--an idea that certainly spoke to Plath’s condition.
 At the End
 In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir describes such an experience as one
in which the girl “becomes an object, and she sees herself as object” (378).

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Long Quotations
For quotations that extend to more than four lines of
verse or prose, place quotations in a free-standing block of text
and omit quotation marks:
Start the quotation on a new line, with the entire
quote indented one inch (10 spaces) from the
left margin; maintain double-spacing. Only indent
the first line of the quotation by an additional
quarter inch if you are citing multiple paragraphs.
Your parenthetical citation should come after the
closing punctuation mark. (Smith 142)
When quoting verse, maintain original line breaks. (You should
maintain double-spacing throughout your essay.)

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Citing Summarized Material
 In Randall Kennedy’s article “Racial Passing” in
the Ohio State Law Journal, he discusses such a
case in the journey of Ellen Craft, a black woman
who passed not only as white but as a white man
in order to smuggle her husband north to avoid
slavery (1).

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xAc4yZ8VSA

26. +
 1” all around
 Go to “Layout” and adjust
margins or use custom
settings
 Times New Roman 12
 Indent body paragraphs ½
inch from the margin
 Double Click in Header Area
 Type your last name
 Justify right
 Go to “insert” and click on
“page number”
Margins and Formatting Header: Last Name 1

27. +
Your Name
Dr. Kim Palmore
EWRT 1A
15 April 2015
 Original Title (not the
title of the novel we
read)
 No italics, bold,
underline, or quotation
marks
 Centered on the page
 No extra spaces (just
double spaced after
your heading and
before the body of your
text)
Heading: Double Spaced Title

28. +

29. +
Tips for writing your essay
 Begin with a long anecdote to draw the reader into your essay.
 Write a thesis that includes all of the categories you will
discuss.
 Use examples and definitions to make your point.
 Use appositives to describe nouns and eliminate wordiness.
 Introduce and cite your in-text quotations.
 Enter your sources on your Works Cited list.

30. +
Homework
 Read: HG through chapter 24
 Post #15: Post a list of five appositive phrases you have
included in your essay.
 Post #16: Draft of your complete concept essay
 Study: Vocab (1-24)
 Bring: Working three copies of your complete draft