The first version of your rough draft should be prepared and submitted via our Blackboard page by noon on Your first draft should be typed and must be at least 4 double-spaced pages in length (with margins of no more than one inch). You can submit your rough draft as a Word, PDF, or Google Docs document. For your first draft of this essay, you will be receiving comments from one of your fellow students in this class (I will be giving you extensive comments on your final draft but wont be making individual comments on the first draft). You will also be responsible for writing up comments for one of your fellow students. As soon as you submit your first draft, I will send it to the student who will act as your peer reviewer, and you will in turn receive a paper from a fellow student to comment on. You will receive comments from your peer reviewer within two days and also must submit your own comments within two days. So the sooner you submit your first draft, the sooner you will receive your comments. The final draft of your essay will be due via our Blackboard page by noon on Please submit your final draft via Blackboard; you can submit it as a Word, PDF, or Google Docs document. The final version of your essay must be at least 5 double-spaced typed pages in length. I will be grading this draft and will offer substantive comments, which you can use to revise and resubmit the essay in order to raise your grade, if you choose to do so. In her book Angela Davis makes a strong and, some would say, controversial argument regarding the need to abolish prisons and replace them with a constellation of alternative strategies and institutions (107). To make this argument, Davis uses a number of different approaches, including statistics, scholarly research, quotes from different experts, historical sources, and her o
wn personal experience and the personal experiences of others, among other techniques. Your focus in this essay will be on Angela Davis says in her argument, but also, just as important, she expresses these things as a writer. After your introductory paragraph, you should begin your essay by what you see as Davis main argument in (this summary should be no longer than one paragraph long). Next, in the body of your essay, you should cite, explain, and analyze , looking in detail at the ways that she builds her argument in each of these passages. Here are some questions you can think about asking for your analysis: As you move towards your conclusion, you should start to answer an important question: Be specific and give examples that will help you support your argument. In other words, I will expect you to work closely with specific passages from Davis book throughout this essay, but I also want you to bring in your own point of view regarding how effectively she uses different techniques, and especially how persuasive you find her argument to be as a result. While your essay should focus primarily on you should also bring at least one of the other texts we will be reading during the first weeks of this class into the conversation. These texts are: There are a number of ways that you might use one or more of these other texts in your essay. For example, you might find points from one or more of these articles that agree with and support Angela Davis argument; on the other hand, you might find points from one or more articles that disagree with and contradict Davis book. You might also compare and contrast some of the approaches taken by these other writers with Davis approach; in making this comparison, you can give your point of view about which of these readings you found to be most effective, and why.