Diversity essay - Thesis and outline

  • Due Apr 9, 2021 by 11:59pm
  • Points 3
  • Submitting a file upload
  • File Types pdf, doc, and docx

  

Overview of Diversity Essay

Imagine you have secured your first full-time professional job after college, in your chosen career community.  Your supervisor was impressed by the essay you wrote about new technology last week.  Once again, at 5pm on Friday afternoon, your supervisor forwards you a recent news article, this time about some serious concerns over issues around diversity and inclusion in your field.  "Need your reactions for Monday's staff meeting!"  

Over the course of these assignments, you will write a four-page, double-spaced essay, making an argument about how a particular area of diversity and inclusion currently being discussed in the news might affect some aspect of your prospective career community -- and what to do about it.  

Your argument should not only be descriptive (what you think will happen and why) and normative (whether the consequences will be good or bad), but also advisory (pointing to a possible solution or way forward with the issue). Once again, you must use scholarly concepts and evidence in making your arguments.    

 

Part 3: Thesis and outline. Given the diversity/inclusion issue you picked as the seed of your paper in the last assignment, and the scholarly resources you have found, craft a thesis (overall argument) and outline (logical progression of evidence supporting your argument).  

 

Steps to follow

1. Write down your topic. Based on the news article that described your chosen diversity/inclusion issue, and the scholarly articles you found from subsequent searches, try to write down a succinct statement about what your paper is about -- for example, "Topic: The responsibility of the medical profession to address unequal access to health care based on income".  Your topic should clearly involve both a particular profession that you are interested in and a particular diversity/inclusion issue that is affecting that area of work.

2. Develop a thesis.  The argument that you are making about how diversity/inclusion might affect your career community is called your thesis.  It is relatively easy to create a descriptive thesis -- for example, "Women are disproportionately absent from top management jobs in the advertising industry."  But what we want you to do with this paper is to go farther and create a thesis that is also normative and advisory -- in other words, it talks not just about what the issue is, but why it matters and how to change or solve it.  An advisory version of the thesis above might be, "Only by changing the admissions criteria for college-level business management programs can we address the disproportionate absence of women from top management jobs in the advertising industry."

Your thesis does not have to be entirely novel; it can draw from or closely parallel an argument that you found in your news article or in your scholarly literature search.  You can make your thesis your own by narrowing its focus or adapting it to your own chosen career community.

3. Sketch out an outline.  Now plan how your support of that thesis will unfold in your paper.  You may format your outline any way you like.  However, your outline must include the following elements:

  • a description of the topic of your paper (the diversity/inclusion issue and career community combination that you chose earlier)
  • the intended thesis of your paper (the descriptive, normative, and advocacy argument your paper will make about how the diversity/inclusion issue affects your chosen career community). 
  • a detailed paragraph-by-paragraph map of the flow of your paper (indicating which scholarly articles you intend to use to help you make your argument, and how the concepts you explored earlier can help you make your argument)
  • a tentative conclusion (that should answer the "why does this matter?" question)

Effective papers often add one more element in their outline:

  • an acknowledgement of any obvious counter-claim that someone might invoke against your thesis, and how you might address that counter-claim

Articulating and addressing a counter-claim to your thesis almost always makes for a better all-around paper; thinking up and addressing a counter-claim inevitably helps students then go back and review and address any weaknesses in their own claims as well.  

Your written paper will only be four double-spaced pages , so you need to be concise!  Your outline should probably not be more than two pages, double-spaced.

4. Consider doing some more searching for sources.  Once you have drafted your outline you may see some opportunities for searching for new news articles or scholarly articles to bolster your arguments.  This iterative process -- find some sources, write down some ideas, find some more sources, do some more writing -- is key to any writing task dealing with evidence and argument.  Use the previous two assignments as a guide to doing some more searching, and see if you can come up with a total list of five or six useful sources.  

5. List your tentative sources.

Now is the time to start formatting all of your initial sources according to a proper citation style. Here is a quick reminder of how to format a list of sources using APA style:

Single-authored book:

  • Carley, M. J. (1999). 1939: The alliance that never was and
    the coming of World War II. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee.

Chapter in an edited book:

  • Melville, H. (1989). Hawthorne and his mosses. In N. Baym (Ed.), The Norton anthology of American literature (3rd ed., pp. 12-34). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.

Newspaper or magazine article:

  • Pressman, A. (2008, September 29). Bottom fishing in rough waters. BusinessWeek, 27.

Scholarly journal article:

  • Wallace, R. (1997). Monitor: Molecules and profiles. Drug Discovery Today, 2(10), 445-448. doi: 10.1016/S1359-6446(97)01095-7

Website:

Make sure your references are formatted correctly!  Do not simply include a web link to the UW Libraries database page where you found the source!

5. Turn it in. Upload your two-page outline to Canvas, along with your one-page list of the tentative news and scholarly references you intend to use, in order to receive credit for this assignment.

 

Writing on sensitive topics

This paper differs from your first paper (on technology) in that it is intended to be not only descriptive and normative, but also advisory -- in other words, arguing for a certain course of action, for the world as it "should" be in your opinion.  However, you still need to use authoritative, scholarly articles for ideas, concepts, evidence, arguments, and examples to support your claims.  

Questions about diversity and inclusion often spark debates that are personally and culturally sensitive. You may already have had personal experiences with these debates that are playing out in the relationships and activities you’ve begun to develop in your chosen areas of study. This assignment will involve synthesizing those debates, using the assigned scholarly articles and material from lecture, in addition to reliable outside sources, to make an argument about what obstacles stand in the way of enhancing diversity in your career community, and what can be done to counteract these trends, including the role a liberal arts education may play in this process.

 

Grading rubric

  • 1 point - Concise and interesting topic and thesis, not just descriptive but also normative
  • 1 point - Clear outline that systematically supports thesis, using scholarly references and concepts
  • 1 point - List of tentative sources, formatted consistently and correctly in APA style

  

Tools to become a better writer

1618030799 04/09/2021 11:59pm