Essay Project 1: Delayed Gratification
Essay Assignment. For this assignment, you will write a three- to four-page essay that grows out of your reading, your discussion, and your thinking about delayed gratification. Your audience for this paper is students who will be arriving at your institution next year. Think deeply about delayed gratification—what it is, when it is a good strategy, and how one might be successful at doing it. Support your argument with information from the articles you have read or others you locate yourself and/or with examples from your own life or from the lives of people you know. If you want to use your sources most effectively to support your argument, it’s not enough to simply include them as a series of unrelated sources; you need to tie them together, explain their relationships with each other, and express your conclusions about them. This process is called synthesizing, and it is discussed in more detail in Synthesis (22.14). Because your essay is an argument, you will want to follow the conventions for arguments. You may want to review these conventions in What Is an Argument? (18.1), The Features of Effective Arguments (18.3, p. 513), and How to Answer Counterarguments (18.5).Documentation. If you do quote, paraphrase, or summarize material from the articles you have read, be sure to provide appropriate documentation and to include a works cited list or list of references at the end of your essay. If you need to review how to provide this documentation, refer to MLA Documentation (Topic 23) or APA Documentation (Topic 24).
