Posted: March 11th, 2013

Debate: Real v. Faux Fur

Assignment Components
The essay will be an assessment of a contemporary debate on an environmental topic. It is not an argumentative essay in favor of one side or the other. Treat the debate as a text that you are analyzing. You might address the following:
§ What is at stake in the debate? Is it a disagreement about means or ends?
§ What are the two (or more) sides of the debate?
§ What is the history of the debate? Who are the main backers of each side?
§ Analyze the language used by each side: how do they frame the problem? describe
themselves and their priorities? characterize their opponent(s)?
§ Do the different sides of the debate rely on different ideas of nature, or the same idea?
Assignment Guidelines
§ You will need to reference additional primary and secondary texts to determine what
supporters of each side say, and how they say it. The purpose of this essay is primarily an analysis of each side’s argument, rather than original research to support the argument of one side.
§ Similarly, while you as author will probably favor one side over the others, and your opinion should be openly acknowledged, your purpose is not to defend one side but rather to understand each side on its own terms.
§ That being said, do not confuse neutrality with balance: not all arguments are created equal, or deserve equal status in the public realm. (For a good, brief discussion of this, see this New York Times blog about If a Tree Falls: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/if-a-tree-falls-can-it-win-an-oscar/ ). You should feel free to make reasonable, supported judgments about the reasonableness of each side’s argument.
§ Quotations should make up only about 10% of your text, so use quotes judiciously and purposively. Only reference the words/phrases/sentences/passages that pertain directly to the point you are trying to prove in that paragraph.
§ You must use Chicago Manual of Style citations; author-date [in-text] or notes- bibliography [footnotes] is your choice, but papers with more than a couple of footnotes will be longer than 10 pages to account for the notes space.