Good Essays Exploring Personality-Related Topics

The essays I'm sharing in this post are professional, noted pieces of non-fiction journalism. They are not scholarly, per se, but definitely work with multiple sources and are good examples of how to organize and give purpose to readers in a piece of writing. They might spark ideas for your project, since they too treat the topic of personality in their own way, but what we'll talk about are the clarity of structure, the ways that sources are brought into the conversation, and what the writer is putting on the table for us to ponder:

• Megan McArdle's piece for Bloomberg View, "Seven Reasons We Hate Free Range Parenting"
• Will Storr's piece for Mosaic, "The Male Suicides: How Social Perfectionism Kills"

So You Made It Here . . . Now What?

Hi, everyone, and welcome to our lightning-fast, summer version of COM 102. We've got a lot to do and not much time, so here are some things to know about the course:

1. COM 102 is the course that counts as the "research-based writing" course under the Illinois Articulation Initiative that governs transferability. That body requires 10 pages minimum of polished, multi-source based writing. That doesn't seem like much, but just know that all our projects will require sourcework. 
2. Most projects will not be incredibly directive. We'll be reading and viewing materials that will get us thinking about broad topics—centered around different ways we "read" ourselves and others—and your writing will stake out its own territory within the wider framework of each unit. The pieces won't be "position" papers or generic "research papers"; we'll work in non-fiction and literary/academic prose. That said, in all the pieces you will be making a purposeful claim. 
3. The tabs at the top of the page house the Syllabus, Schedule, and Project Requirements. I also tag all the posts here, so on the right sidebar you can click tags to find what you need quickly.