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Featured English Song
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Black is student's original writing
Blue is teacher's correction
Red is teacher's explanation
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Example
Essay About Computers and How it Changes Our Lives. Sample
Composition.
{1} The computer is a product of advanced civilization and its
invention, according to some people, signals the advent of a Second
Industrial Revolution. Formerly a bulky machine that demanded much
space, the computer is now becoming smaller and smaller and
scientists have made it more sophisticated and accordingly more
useful. As is generally known, the computer can do a wide range of
work, including complex computation and analyses. People now also
use it as a teaching aid in designing. An infinite variety of
software can be put into the computer, which explains why it is so
powerful. There is, however, one thing which we should bear in mind:
that the computer cannot think but man can. So there need not be any
fear that someday the computer will control us and all we should
expect is try our best to bring it to perfection. A computer age is
not a pipe dream and there will come a day when most of our needs
can be met by this wonderful machine.
{2} Until now inventors have developed an impressive array of
machines called computers. At first I was mystified by these
machines, but now I know what they are and what they can do. As a
sophisticated electronic device the computer has a wide range of
functions including the storage and memorization of information,
calculation, analysis and the making of right decisions. All these
functions can help man in handling difficult or complicated
situations. But technological advance often cuts both ways.
Computerization, or for that matter automation, can lead, for
example, to unemployment and unemployment in turn will create social
problems. The use of computers, however, is modern trend here to
stay. We cannot resist this trend and should. In anticipation of a
computerized world all those interested in the computer should find
time to get the hang of it.
{3} To some modern societies the computer is one of the necessaries
of life. The miracles it can do are gimpy unbelievable. I have
always cherished to crack all the hard nuts in the world. Whenever I
hear that a lot of people have died of hunger in this strife-ridden
world, I cannot but hope that I have this computer in hand to find
the way to provide an endless supply of food. In that case we
wouldn‘t worry about starvation when a war breaks out or when some
disaster occurs. Personally I even wish it could help me improve my
English. But the long and short of it is that ever powerful it may
be, the computer, as we can safely predict, cannot cure all the ills
of mankind and cannot surmount all the difficulties we constantly
run into. However, we enjoy being dreamers, for in dreams we can
find happiness often denied us.
{4} The computer is one of the most important human inventions. A
highly sophisticated electronic mechanical device, it has done a lot
of good to mankind. Without it many human endeavors would be more or
less hampered. Today, computers are extensively used, as, for
example, in many construction projects. I have a computer, but I
don't often use it in solving mathematical problems. Rather than
depend on a computer for a quick printout, I would have more
occasions to exercise my own brain. Anyway, the value of the
computer is undeniable. We should encourage its development so that
it may render more service to human beings.
{5} Computers play an important role in the modern world. Today they
are used in many areas of human activities, such as business,
industry, science, and education. The development of computers has
also created many attractive job opportunities. I'm a college
student majoring in mathematics and as such I know quite well the
powers of the computer. They have evolved as a natural consequence
of man’s growing need for fast and accurate calculation. To make
myself better equipped in my field of study I have learned several
computer languages to communicate with the computer. My experience
tells me that if we want to become competent users of the computer
we must keep up with its development. Because modern industrialized
society need computers to perform a wide range of tasks, I think a
general knowledge of such wonderful machines is quite necessary for
most of us.
{6} I majored in electrical engineering four years ago and have
since been interested in the computer science. After college I got a
job as an electronic engineer. My job has brought me into close
contact with the computer and as a result my interest in it has kept
growing all the time. A computer is after all a man-made machine;
therefore, its effectiveness depends upon man’s ingenuity. So long
as we can program it using mathematical models, it can do almost
anything we want. Of course, the capabilities of a computer depend
upon its size---whether it is a microcomputer, a minicomputer, or a
large computer. We can’t use a microcomputer in complicated digital
processing or sonar signal processing. If we do that, the time it
spends in such processing would be longer than we expect. On the
other hand, if we use a large computer to do only a small job
ordinarily assigned to a personal computer, the cost would be very
high.
{7} The invention of the computer has often been viewed as the
prelude to a third industrial revolution. With the advances made in
science and technology and the general improvement of the world
economic situation, many of the business firms and even national
governments in the world have spent lavishly on the development of
computers. If the operation of a business establishment is well
computerized, this establishment can more often than not make a
profit. At first I saw the computer only as a wonderful yet
mystifying machine, but now I am fully aware how useful it is and
what possibilities it can open up in the future. My ever-growing
interest in the computer has prompted me to buy many books on the co
mute and I must say I like what I have read. So far as I see it, the
computer does have the power to help with a country’s economic
progress. Hence, if we want to keep up with the times, we must know
something about it. Not to be outdone by others, I have made up my
mind to learn more about the computer. I hope I shall be a
well-known computer specialist in the future because ever since
computers made their first appearance they seem to have been
installed everywhere for hundreds of purposes for which no one could
have imagined they would be used.
Addition essay
writing reference material on topics of interest
Subject: Cloning
General comments: Most people who choose this topic want
to write on human cloning, not plant or animal cloning.
They want to write on one or both of two types of human
cloning: therapeutic or research human cloning, or
reproductive human cloning. Therapeutic or research
human cloning involves the creation of embryos and
harvesting of their tissues to create organs or tissues
for transplant into patients who need, say, liver or
heart or bone marrow transplants. Reproductive human
cloning involves the creation of a baby who is an
identical twin of a living human being, perhaps as an
infertility treatment for infertile couples, gay
couples, or others who aren’t able to produce a
genetically related child the usual way, or perhaps as a
form of grief therapy for those who lose a child due to
accident or illness.
Some students are opposed to both; some are in favor of
both. But most are for one and against the other. Those
who favor therapeutic human cloning but not reproductive
human cloning believe that the legitimate medical
benefits of therapeutic human cloning justify its use.
But they think reproductive human cloning is wrong
because it’s selfish and dangerous for human beings to
create an exact replica of themselves to raise as a
child. They’re concerned that the unique individual
identity of the child will be compromised by
manipulative, overbearing parents who want to control
the child’s identity and life. Those who favor
reproductive human cloning but not therapeutic human
cloning believe that it’s okay to create human embryos
provided that you’re going to let them live to grow up
into human beings, but wrong to create embryos which may
be destroyed after they have been used to create donor
organs and tissues.
Although the textbook doesn’t say so, I encourage
students to think about linking this discussion to a
discussion of genetic engineering, which is more
controversial and fascinating, and is also the
technology that’s likely to be much more widely used and
have much more of an impact on society. We’re more
likely to want to change and “fix” ourselves than to
copy ourselves exactly. What might we do to our own DNA?
We’ll begin by correcting the defects that cause genetic
diseases and conditions. But soon afterwards, we’ll
dramatically lengthen our life spans and increase our
IQs.
This sounds great. And in some ways it is great. But it
will also create lots of potential problems. For
example, what if you have to have health insurance to
have your child genetically enhanced, and what if this
insurance is not available to everyone? Or what if
health insurance doesn’t cover genetic enhancements, and
these enhancements are therefore available only to the
children of the very wealthy? What if the technology
evolves so rapidly that younger children in the same
family have been engineered to be a lot smarter than
their own older brothers and sisters? And if we
dramatically lengthen the human life span, how will we
make room on the planet for billions of people who live
to the age of one thousand? Will it mean we have to
sharply restrict the number of new people who can be
born? Or if only a few people are allowed to live for a
thousand years, how will we decide who gets to live that
long and who doesn’t?
Who should not choose this topic? Anyone who has strong
religious convictions against it or anyone who is unable
to master the science. A poor understanding of the
science involved is responsible for the few really
terrible papers I get on this subject. For example, you
have to know that your clone is not actually you, but a
separate person who will be a baby and who will lead a
completely independent life. You have to know that not
all human characteristics are inherited. You have to
know that a clone of Hitler would not be able to do
exactly what Hitler did, due to his different
environment and place in history. You have to know that
human clones, like test tube babies, would not be
created for the purpose of manufacturing a race of
slaves, but to be children, like any other children.
Most of this is common sense, but still not everyone
intuitively figures it out. Be sure that you can!
An additional note on Hollywood and science: You know
that I’ve invited you to use movies in your discussion.
But it’s also important to remember that Hollywood often
does a bad job of dealing with scientific topics,
presenting an unrealistic view of how future
technologies would work. An example of an excellent film
on human genetic engineering is Gattaca. An example of a
terrible film on human cloning is The Island.
Gattaca is a sensitive portrayal of the dangers genetic
engineering would pose to family relationships, social
equality, and human free will. The Island is an
overblown pot boiler of a movie that presupposes the
existence of an unscrupulous insurance company that
would create adult human clones and kill the clones to
harvest organs for elite clients. No, no, no! For one
thing, clones will be babies. We’ll never be able to
create them fresh out of a magical clam shell as new but
fully grown adults, as this movie shows. So even if an
amoral insurance company wanted to create a double of
you to harvest its organs if you got sick, it wouldn’t
do you much good. You’d have to wait decades before the
needed organ would become available.
Chapter 11: Human/Machine Interaction
General comments: Almost all students who choose this
topic want to discuss some controversial aspect of the
way computers have changed our lives. (Other
recent technologies that bear discussion because of
their tremendous social impact include video games and
cell phones.)
The most important thing is to be able to narrow your
topic; that is, to discuss only one aspect or problem
with our growing dependence on technologies like
computers, cell phones, blackberries, and other
technological assistants. A paper that becomes a garbage
dump into which you throw everything you know about
technology will lack focus and will probably be
informative rather than argumentative in character. Here
are some questions you might want to write about:
Are electronic games bad for kids? Why or why not?
Is it good or bad for our bosses to be able to reach us
at all times of the day, at home or at work, and expect
an immediate response?
Are people choosing electronic communication like
emails, text-messaging, or brief phone calls as a
substitute for face-to-face interaction? If so, what are
the benefits and what are the dangers?
How dangerous are chat rooms and personal web sites like
MySpace and Facebook?
How is the constant use of the Internet affecting
education? For example, are students having a harder
time producing papers with original thought?
If we rely on TV and Internet web sites for news and
stop paying attention to print or online newspapers or
other more complex materials, how will that affect our
political process? Will we know less and less about the
people we vote for? Will elections come to be more and
more about personality, good looks, rumors, gossip, and
guilt by association rather than about substantive
issues and facts?
Who should not choose this topic? Anyone who’s obsessed
with technology or can’t see anything bad about our
dependence on it. Also anyone who hates technology (like
your teacher, maybe).
Why should we all care about this topic? Modern
technology, especially the Internet, makes our lives
easier in countless ways. We can travel the world
virtually from our arm chairs, meet and become friends
with new people who live on the other side of the U.S.
or the world, find true love from a seemingly endless
list of potential mates, search the world’s great
libraries or read the world’s great periodicals without
leaving our office chairs. We can work from home, or
even answer our email while we’re on the beach. What
could be wrong with this picture?
As it turns out, a lot of things could be wrong with
this picture. For example, just as we can find anyone,
anyone can find us. And some of the people who want to
find us don’t have such good intentions. Just as we can
find out anything we want to about anyone else, others
can find out anything they want to about us. They can
steal our identities, solicit sex from kids, or (if
they’re the FBI) arrest us for going to the same mosque
as a suspected terrorist, or spy on us for sending too
many emails to Pakistan last month. They can read our
once-private medical records (if they’re potential
employers or insurers) and use these records to deny us
jobs or health insurance. They can post pictures of our
homes or workplaces on the web (if they don’t like us)
and invite others to follow us and attack or harass us.
If we foolishly talked about our drug use or sexual
exploits on some personal web site when we were
thirteen, a potential employer or spouse can track down
this information, even if we have removed it from public
view, and it can follow us for the rest of our lives.
Use your imagination. There are as many scary
possibilities as wonderful and exciting ones.
And there’s an increasing body of evidence suggesting
that just as people become “different” behind the wheel
of a car—and often “different” means more hostile, less
caring, more aggressive—people also become “different’
in front of a computer screen. And “different” often
means more willing to attack or exploit other human
beings, whose injuries and hurt feelings they never have
to see.
An additional note on Hollywood and science: I’ve never
actually been able to sit through the most popular
Hollywood films on this topic, the Matrix films. (I had
too much trouble following the plot of the first one.)
But I can vouch for several interesting films that deal
with the issues raised by the increasing linkage of
humans and our own machines. Typically these films
explore the extent to which humans and machines will
remain separate, asking such questions as these: Will
intelligent machines, like computers, ever have
free will? Will they ever try to take over our world and
tell us what to do? What would our world be like if it
were run by machines that ran on pure intellect, without
the emotional component of human feelings? Here are a
few interesting films that explore these topics.
2001, a Space Odyssey (a seventies cult classic).
The Terminator films. (I can only vouch for T-2.)
Bicentennial Man (a mid-nineties film starring Robin
Williams).
I Robot (a Will Smith film from about five or six years
ago).
A.I. (a Stephen Spielberg film from about seven or eight
years ago; the letters in the title stand for the words
“Artificial Intelligence.” This is a long and
complicated film, but it’s hands-down the best robot
film ever made; if you can watch this movie without
breaking down at the end, you have a heart of stone.)
Subject: Crime-Fighting
Technology: Balancing Public Safety and Privacy
General comments: In my opinion this is the most timely
of our topics, except for the chapter on social class.
By “most timely,” I mean that it’s the topic most
extensively treated in current news. Why? Because of the
“war on terror,” of course. Generally those who write on
this topic are writing about one of two types of new
technologies: wiretapping and Internet surveillance,
especially as permitted by the Patriot Act; or CCTV
(closed circuit television camera) surveillance in
public places.
However, the essays in your text do suggest other topic
options. For example, the first two essays, by Clines
and O’Meara, discuss the implications of compiling
psychology profiles on high school students to see which
ones have violent tendencies. Stockpiling information
about the “psychological tendencies” of young people who
have done no wrong may seem like a privacy violation
worthy of a police state. But this is exactly the kind
of information that was not made available to Virginia
Tech prior to the rampage of the Virginia Tech shooter.
Had his profile been public information made available
to the university, it’s possible he might have been
stopped. I can think of at least one important modern
film that explores the moral implications of using
profiling of potential criminals to prevent crimes. That
would be the 2002 Dreamworks film Minority Report,
starring Tom Cruise.
In your reader, most of the sources (other than Clines
and O’Meara) are about CCTV surveillance in public
places. Christian Parenti’s essay “DC’s Virtual
Panopticon” is of particular interest because of its
local context. One of the links to the 112 syllabus on
my web page examines this topic and these essays
(“Paraphrase, Critique, and Synthesis on Surveillance
Cameras”). An excellent recent film that examines both
the vital uses and dangers of surveillance cameras is a
post 9/11 film called Enemy of the State, starring Will
Smith. This film has been criticized for being
unrealistic. But in my view, it’s a chilling portrayal
of the possible future dangers of government spying gone
out of control. A much earlier film that focuses
directly on the issues of CCTV surveillance is a 1974
Francis Ford Coppola film called The Conversation. While
most of you would probably balk at watching a movie
that’s this old, this film does a better job than any
other movie I’ve seen of exploring two relevant issues:
(1) the dangers of misunderstandings that misleading
surveillance tapes could create, and (2) the insidious
way in which watching people transforms the watcher.
(Although I haven’t yet seen it, I understand the recent
academy-award winning German film The Lives of Others is
also about this.)
However, the most frequently chosen sub-topic of those
who write on crime-fighting technology is not CCTV
surveillance or psychological profiling. It’s government
wiretapping of phones and surveillance of email and Web
traffic as permitted by the Patriot Act. Only one essay
in your textbook (Posner’s) focuses on this issue.
However, more than any other crime-fighting issue, this
is the focus of numerous recent news reports. Most of
the stuff on Chapter 12 in my news scrapbook in the
library is on the surveillance provisions of the Patriot
Act. That is, the scrapbook contains news articles
discussing what the government can and cannot do to
listen in on your phone calls, read your emails, track
the web sites you visit, and otherwise keep track of
your personal communications.
Subject: The Changing
American Family
General comments: Of all the topics you have to choose
from, this one is the hardest to make controversial. An
overwhelming body of evidence will tell you the
following three things:
Divorce is bad for kids. Single parenthood is also bad
for kids. Kids who come from intact families, with both
biological parents, do better in school, are less prone
to get in trouble with the law, less prone to have
emotional problems, less prone to suicide or drug or
alcohol abuse.
The intact traditional nuclear family is almost a thing
of the past. Half of all American kids grow up without
both biological parents; and the number in some
socio-economic groups is closer to 70%.
Divorce is also stressful for couples who don’t have
kids. And people who live together before getting
married do not have more secure marriages as a result;
they have less secure marriages as a result. (Why isn’t
necessarily clear, but it seems to have something to do
with traditional versus non-traditional expectations and
values.)
If you know these three things at the outset, you can
have a hard time coming up with a controversial thesis.
Think about it.
You can’t build a persuasive paper around stating the
obvious, even if you imagine your audience is ignorant
of the real situation. Those who oppose you only out of
ignorance don’t constitute a legitimate opposition. Most
people leap for a thesis that simply informs us of the
facts, something like one of these:
There’s no such thing as a “good divorce.” Divorce is
bad for kids, period.
Too many people get divorced these days.
Children in non-traditional families face problems that
children in traditional families don’t face.
Couples with kids should make a real effort to stay
together.
Cohabiting (living together outside marriage) is not a
good substitute for marriage.
You’ll get nowhere if you try to write a “persuasive
paper” that simply tells me these problems exist.
Instead, you’ll have to do some hard thinking and come
up with a proposal for a solution—for example, something
like this:
No-fault divorce has been a catastrophe for American
families. To promote family stability, we should
overturn our no-fault divorce laws and require couples
with young children to prove wrongdoing on the part of
the partner they want to leave.
Or this:
It would be nice if we could decrease the divorce rate
in American society, but to think we can do this is
simply unrealistic. Therefore, in order to minimize the
damage family collapse does to American children, the
federal government must invest more heavily in support
networks like after-school programs to take over some of
the responsibilities of missing parents.
Another option that’s popular with some students is to
discuss the current “hot controversy” surrounding gay
marriage and gay adoption. (See especially Barret and
Robinson, the first essay in this chapter.) I won’t veto
this option if you want to try it. However, I should
warn you that I have my doubts about whether gay
marriage is still controversial. In the past three
years, out of about ten students who have chosen this
topic, only one has taken a stand against gay marriage
or gay adoption. The overwhelming majority of
researchers find that most credible evidence supports
gay family rights. Opposing gay rights without resorting
to a religious argument is hard. (And remember that you
can’t appeal to God or use any other form of religious
argument.)
Subject: Social Class and
Inequality
General comments: Our country’s economic woes make this
a timely topic. It was popular after Hurricane Katrina
as well. President Obama seems poised to make it the
number one issue of his presidency. Let’s look at some
facts and talk about why in class.
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An Essay About Computers
and How it Changes Our Lives
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