Paper 6 Body Examples

--These are just one paragraph examples. The body should be about a page long. These examples show you how to make a single argument in the space of one paragraph.

Manners:
The traditional view is that good manners create a good person. Contemporary life seems to prove otherwise: it seems good manners are used to hide bad character. A businessman who smiles, shakes your hand firmly, and maintains eye contact does not necessarily have a good sense of business ethics. Businesses that offer "special deals"--which sound more special than they really are--rely on the persuasiveness of good manners to get people to sign up for six months of yoga or three bottles of a supplement. When I collected baseball cards, I remember one seller told me, "Look: I'm a good Christian gentleman. I would never rip anyone off." After I sold him my rare but damaged baseball card, I saw later that he was selling it for ten times more than he bought it for.

On the other hand, one can witness someone with bad manners who has a good heart. Do we dismiss someone who says, "'Sup?" instead of, "It is an honor to meet you?" without getting to know the person better first?

What are manners, then? What are they supposed to be? Do we care more about "good manners" or "good people"? And if we are looking for "good people," do we need to change the way we look for them?

Prejudice:

When I graded papers for a remedial (i.e. below the standards of college) level English exam, the teachers would write sentences that they found funny on the board. This was to provide relief from the stress of grading so many papers, and yes, often the sentences were very funny. However, it is very inappropriate to laugh at a students writing in a group situation, for it only encourages additional prejudice against students, and it fosters an "us against them" mentality. Worse, some of the things that were written on the board reflected some ignorance of what students need. One teacher wrote a sentence with the phrase, "he suicided." The school at which I worked was 40% Asian, and many of these students were immigrants. It is the teacher's responsibility to know that students who speak another first language have certain mistake tendencies. "Suicide" is a verb in Chinese, so many students will write, "He suicided" instead of "He committed suicide." Teachers should know to teach their students what mistakes they need to look out for; instead, this teacher showed ignorance of her own students' needs.

Another teacher did not write on the board, but she often read out loud students' political arguments. The teacher was liberal; she always read conservative arguments by students. This being written work from a remedial class, of course many of the arguments were bad. But some were good. It seemed that the teacher thought this was "bad writing" only because she disagreed with the political argument.

While I understand the need to relax, and I understand why teachers sometimes laugh at students' work, I think it behooves teachers to take time regularly to reflect on their attitudes toward students. Without this reflections, the teachers might be blind to a prejudice against students that affects a teacher's ability to teach and students' ability to learn.