English 101A/Langdon
Essay 2
Throughout The Geography of Bliss , Eric Weiner considers the degree to which money contributes to human happiness, especially in Chapter 5, “Qatar: Happiness is a Winning Lottery Ticket.” He also discusses many other factors that may contribute to human happiness: strong human relationships, trust, something to believe in (perhaps religion), a connection to nature, creativity, among others.
Your Task: Write an essay in which you compare the relative importance of money to some other factor involved in human happiness, making an argument about which is more important. (You don’t have to say that one factor is important and the other irrelevant. Both may be important but in different ways and to different degrees. Your thesis need not take an extreme position, but it should clearly sum up your thinking on this topic.)
Requirements:
1. Unity: Your essay should have a clear thesis—a central idea—which the entire essay develops. No part of your essay should be irrelevant to this thesis.
2. Organization: Your essay should be clearly organized so that a reader will have no trouble following your ideas. You should begin with an introduction that introduces both the book and the topic and then leads into your thesis. The body of your essay should contain coherent, unified paragraphs with topic sentences. You should end with a conclusion that sums up your thoughts and leaves the reader with a sense of completion.
2. Development: Your ideas should be developed with evidence from The Geography of Bliss.
You should be using examples and quotations from the book to support your argument. When using quotations from the text, be sure to adhere to the “principles for using quotations effectively” that we discussed in class. You should also be analyzing, interpreting, and explaining the evidence that you present from the book so that it’s clear to a reader how this information supports your argument.
Do not use evidence from any outside sources. Just stick to analyzing and interpreting the book we are reading in this class.
3. Critical Thinking
. When I read your essay, it should be clear to me that you’ve actually read all of the chapters that we have covered in class so far and that you understand the content of these chapters. Show me that you have thought seriously about the chapters in order to develop your own ideas about happiness. You should be considering all of the relevant evidence in the text, thinking about what the evidence means, and then presenting your own ideas about this evidence. (Don’t ignore clearly relevant evidence from the text that doesn’t “fit” your argument. Discuss this evidence and talk about how it affects your views on this topic.)
4. The overall writing quality (this includes the clarity of your writing, proofreading, formatting, etc). I want to see you correcting the errors that I assigned you to work on after your first essay. Show me that you have made an effort to learn how to proofread for those errors. You should also show me that you have proofread your essay for obvious errors, e.g., missing words, misspelled words, proper nouns and titles from the book, etc.
Due Dates: A thesis statement and writing plan are due in class on October 12; three copies of the first draft are due in class on October 14; the final draft should be submitted through SafeAssign by midnight on October 21.