Conspiracy Theory.
ENGL 1322 – Essay Two Prompt Fall 2019. This essay will be the second major writing assignment of the semester. You will compose a piece of forensic (a.k.a. “judicial”) rhetoric, arguing from evidence that an existing popular conspiracy theory is persuasive or not. You must do research, identifying the strongest arguments for your chosen theory, then offering counterarguments that either persuade you of the theory’s falsehood or fail to do so (meaning that you find the theory believable). For this second essay, I would like you to adopt the academic style that you are probably already familiar with. You should not, then, present yourself as a partisan—that is, one who has chosen his/her side of an issue before the fact. Instead, you need to present yourself as a dispassionate observer, critical and careful in your thinking about this issue. In other words, the style is going to be more inclined toward logos and much less toward pathos. Ethos must, as always, also be established, but this is best done subtly and implicitly. Again, as in Essay One, you will need to conduct research for this project. You will certainly find more evidence for your chosen theory than you can include in this short essay; hence, you will need to “sift” through it, selecting the best proofs, the most convincing evidence, for your paper. Do not construct a “strawman” argument (one that is weak, fragile, and thus easily destroyed). Instead, find the strongest evidence out there, and take it seriously in your writing of the paper. If you use websites, try to identify those that are credible. This will be a challenge with a paper about conspiracy theories, a field that attracts the gullible. So try very hard to find those sources that present themselves as possessing a strong, trustworthy ethos.We will continue to learn citation methods as we work on this second paper. Must be cited . NEED FINAL DRAFT BY THE DUE DATE/TIME.