Endterm Paper, Final Draft: An essay on freedom in the United States before and immediately after the Civil War describing the efforts to expand and to abolish slavery, and the aftermath of the ultimately successful campaign to do so (100 points).
A draft of an original essay on the above topic. The essay must have all of the 6 distinct elements described below. N.B.: THREE ELEMENTS HAVE BEEN ADDED TO THE REQUIRED LIST. The instructors will review these drafts for the required elements, each of which earns 12.5 points. A completed draft, containing all six elements, earns 75 points. Incomplete drafts earn fewer points.
YOUR GRADE ALSO DEPENDS ON HOW MUCH AND HOW WELL YOU EDIT YOUR FIRST DRAFT. RE-WRITING IT COMPLETELY WITHOUT IMPROVING ITS GRAMMAR, SYNTAX, AND STYLE WILL NOT EARN FULL CREDIT.
THE REMAINING 25 POINTS DEPEND UPON EITHER YOUR PRO WRITING AID
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SCORE SUBSTANTIALLY IMPROVING; OR, ALTERNATIVELY, ON THE NUMBER OF TRACKED CHANGES MICROSOFT COMPARE COUNTS IN THE FINAL DRAFT.
Every student received a Pro Writing Aid (PWA) assessment of their first draft. Your final draft is also submitted to Pro Writing Aid
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and I use its reports as one of two measures of the effort you made to improve your paper between its first and its final draft.
If the PWA assessment scores of your final draft are substantial improvements over the scores of the first draft the effort is considered sufficient. “Substantial” is here defined as final Pro Writing Aid “key scores” in Spelling and Grammar of 100, and a final draft Style score that is either at least 80, or more than halfway between it and your first draft Style score, whatever it was.
In case your Pro Writing Aid scores do not change much between the first and final drafts, we will also use Microsoft Word Compare to count the number of tracked changes in your draft. Trying to make things better counts as much as actually managing to do so.
But please note: to receive credit for this effort, you need to enter your changes directly into the draft text OF YOUR ENTIRE ESSAY and either substantially improve your Pro Writing Aid score or make at least 125 non-formatting revisions to earn full credit. I deduct 1 point for every multiple of 5 changes less than 125 that are recorded. Thus, if no changes are recorded and your essay’s PWA score has not substantially improved, the completed final draft will only receive 75 points unless your PWA scores showed substantial improvement. More than 120 substantive revisions will get you full credit no matter what happens to your PWA scores. To ensure that you get credit for all your revisions, edit the additions to your final draft using Microsoft Word’s Track Changes function.
For more on how to get the most out of Pro Writing Aid, please consult Getting the Most Out of Pro Writing Aid.
For more information about how your paper will be graded, please consult this Grading the First and Final Drafts of Your Paper.
Each essay should be at least 1,200 words or 4 double-spaced pages in 12 pt font with 1-inch margins on all sides of letter stock (8 1⁄2 x 11), and submitted as a Word (doc or docx):
The final draft of your essay must address the following six elements. EACH element must cite specific passages from the text AND engage with one or more specific themes in our weekly class discussions and summaries. Essays that do not refer to both will lose points. For the fixed pdf version of the text, cite the chapter number and title and the page number on which the information or quotation can be found. To cite the web version, use the following format: Chapter number, [chapter title (optional),] section subhead, paragraph number. To determine the paragraph number, you need to count the paragraphs from the reported subhead to the paragraph in the section that contains the information references or statement being quoted. It is more cumbersome than the first method, but does narrow the search down sufficiently to be feasible.
1 Define freedom: Is freedom the absence of constraints or the absence of coercion? Is it a personal attribute or a social condition? Does the freedom of others enhance or hamper your freedom?
2 Describe freedom: Every living person is free to some degree. How or to what degree were different groups of people free in the US before the Civil War? What is the minimal requirement of acceptable freedom?
3 Slavery and the South: Did slavery enrich or impoverish the southern states? Why do you think so? Why were so many white southerners prepared to go to war to defend it? Which southerners refused to do so and why?
4 Slavery and the north and west: What effect did slavery have on the northern and western states? Why were so many people there willing to fight a war to abolish it? Who opposed doing so and why?
5 Prosperity and slavery: Was slavery indispensable to the nation’s prosperity? Why do you think so? If not, why was it not abolished sooner? If so, why was it abolished at all?
6 The Civil War and Reconstruction: THe Civil War abolished slavery. Did the Reconstruction effort that followed succeed or fail? What were its key provisions? What more, if anything, needed to be done?
reference:https://www.whobuiltamerica.org