Thinking through various topics for the persuasive essay, I have come up with some interesting ideas. For all of them, I have made sure that I could easily use them to do the advocacy project as well. Here are my three ideas thus far, with the advocacy idea in mind!
- Helping others (culture of volunteerism)
- Advocacy: Going abroad for volunteering, working for those less fortunate
- Equality (particularly LGBTQ)
- Advocacy: Understanding of LGBTQ individuals and support for same-sex marriages
- Changing our education system
- Advocacy: Longer school year or switching to German system
I think that any of these ideas would work as essay topics. Although I am most keen on the first idea, I feel that it has the potential to be rather difficult to narrow down, but we will see!
Josh, for this essay it will be especially important to approach the writing with a very specific rhetorical situation in mind that includes a sense of timeliness, i.e. why write a persuasive essay now on X? In light of this, option 2 seems to have the strongest sense of kairos, since DOMA and same -sex marriage are two fresh topics in the national civic conversation. You might be able to make a case for the other topics as well, but they seem more generally timely, i.e. helping the poor is ALWAYS a good thing.