Persuasive Essay potential topic:
1. Topic: A potential topic that I will right about is if student’s who cyber bully should be suspended from school (focusing on middle and high school). I was reading an article in a magazine about cyber bullying the other day and figured that it is a topic different from what I’ve been writing about all year. A majority of students use internet sites like Facebook or Twitter and most likely see someone being bullied or made fun of. Don’t you think that schools don’t really do anything about it? I am interested to see what I will find in my research if I decide to stick to this topic because I’m not sure if I will find enough information for a 6-8 page paper.
2. Specific Audience: Middle School and High School staff would be the audience because it is their decision and action on whether or not a student is suspended from school.
3. Purpose: I want my readers to think that more people should step up and attempt to end cyber bullying rather than skim through their Twitter feed and completely ignore the tweet of a kid being made fun of. I want people to realize that many students have lost their lives because of being bullied on the internet.
4. Research: I will need to find articles of different situations when students have been cyber bullied and/or have committed suicide (or hurt themselves) because of it. I will see if there has ever been a school that suspended students for cyber bullying because I have never heard of a school actually do it. I will also have to look up statistics on how many students are bullied every day and if anything has been done for it.
Page 44 of ARCS:
5. 1. This topic hasn’t been brought up in the news recently but everyone knows that bullying is an ongoing thing. I think that if I were to write about this topic, I would need to make people understand that just because it’s not in the news everyday that a student is bullied, it doesn’t mean that it’s not happening. Bringing up history of this issue will definitely help because there have been many serious and famous cases of cyber bullying throughout the years that people now seemed to have forgotten about.
2. I feel that students may not want the suspension to occur because some of them joke around on the internet all the time and may think that their jokes will be taken as bullying. A lot of the time it is bullying so the students will argue against this. I think that the families, friends, and acquaintances of victims to cyber bullying would be for the suspension of the bully because they have experienced either the loss of a victim they knew or understood the pain felt by the victim being cyber bullied.
For the advocacy project, three ideas are:
1. Make flyers to hand out at middle schools and high schools in your hometown school district (at least you’re starting somewhere…).
2. Write a short but informative blog post where the link could be shared all over the internet.
3. Create a short video that makes the viewer get the chills and want to cry (not to sound harsh but they should feel upset that bullying still happens and hopefully the video will make them want to do something about it).
I think you’ll definitely find information on this, I’ve heard the idea of cyber bullying and schools’ role in addressing that issue quite a bit. For your research, you could start by looking at different schools’ rulebooks/handbooks and see their policies on bullying. I googled “high school rule cyber bullying” and found a lot of articles, so you’ll definitely have a place a start. Also, your argument also needs to say why it’s the school’s job to combat cyber bullying. Do they really have jurisdiction over what a kid does on the internet? It’s a really important argument to make, because even if cyber bullying is awful, the school doesn’t necessarily have the obligation to do something about it, and that kind of action can be seen as a violation of personal privacy/rights or something along those lines.
Also, you might want to think about the school board/parents in your audience, because they probably have more influence on school polices than the staff.