Carefully read chapter seven in your textbook (237-263).

Here is the writing assignment from your textbook:

Chief Smohalla and Marx both talk about the effect of work on a person's character and identity. They see work as doing violence to a person's sense of self, reducing them to cogs in a materialistic wheel. Many psychologists, such as Freud and Maslow, have explored the connection between work and people's mental and spiritual health. Both Freud and Maslow believe that meaningful work is essential to mental health and that oppressive work can deaden the spirit. Other psychologists believe that any work, even boring or menial work, can be beneficial because it allows people to feel useful and gives structure to their lives. Do you think that meaningful work is necessary to mental health? Can someone be happy and well adjusted and not work? Support your position by giving examples from your own life, from history, or from current events. Pay particular attention to the style of your sentences when you write this paper (Troiano and Scott 258).

Here are my added directions for this assignment:

Make sure your essay has the three basic parts: introduction, body, conclusion. The introduction should make it clear to the reader what you have done in preparation for the essay and what your purpose is. The introduction should have an interest catcher, something to attract the reader's attention (see pages 172-174).

In this essay, you might have an extended introduction of several paragraphs in which you summarize the different views on the importance of work in people's lives, perhaps quoting from the essays in this chapter. Your main idea should be stated at the end of your introduction.

The body paragraphs of your essay should present the results of your thinking and provide examples to illustrate your main idea. It should present this information in an organized way. Each paragraph should have a topic sentence that states a view on some aspect of the topic of the importance of work. This is a complex subject, and so you may have different ideas, some of them conflicting.

But after you state an idea on work in your topic sentence, then give an example from your own work experience, or from what you have read or observed. Follow this up with some words of explanation to make sure the reader sees the relevance of the example to the idea you have stated in your topic sentence. Good examples are specific and concrete. They impress the reader with a visual image of a person engaged in work and give a sense of what the job is like.

Your essay should have a conclusion that presents what you learned. It should restate your main idea and make any additional observations or point out the importance of what you have discovered.

The focus of chapter seven in your textbook is on appropriate words and style. Many students assume that after they have written a draft of an assignment, that the job is completed. Being inexperienced, they fail to realize that a first draft is the end of the beginning of the the job, not the end itself. A good paper that clearly and concisely and correctly expresses the writer's ideas is the product of many careful revisions and good editing.

To revise means to look at the work again, to read it through completely many times and to make the changes in organization, content, and expression that make it better. Individual sentences may be rewritten several times with different wording and different sentence structure.

The process is something like the process a sculptor follows in carving a statue out of stone. In making his "rough draft," he knocks off big chunks of stone. Each revision involves more refinements. He makes smaller, more precise cuts and pays attention to the details so that the final piece has the expression and finish that make it appealing.

It takes time and there is no substitute for sustained effort. Show what you can do on this last assignment.

For this assignment, you will need documentation. Give a parenthetical citation in the body of your paper for each source you summarize, paraphrase, or quote. Then make a works cited where you give complete identifying information for each of your sources. See pages 450-455 in your textbook for information on MLA documentation style. You will need to use the model for an essay appearing in an anthology.

The completed essay must be at least 500 words. There is no limit on length, but all essays should be concise, informative, and correct. Longer essays that multiply errors simply provide more justification for a poor grade. Microsoft Word will tell you how many words there are in a document.