ENGL 1101 - Assignments Assignment 4: The Persuasive Essay. Addiction as a product of Social Dislocation and Family Stress.
ENGL 1101 - Assignments
Assignment 4: The Persuasive Essay
Introduction
Now it’s time for you to create your own persuasive paper. Having completed the activities in Unit 4, you are ready to pull together everything you have learned about persuasive writing and craft your own written argument in response to the essays you have been reading and critiquing.
This assignment is marked out of 100 marks and is worth 20% of your course grade.
Instructions
Using the material generated in Activity 4 of this unit and the following list of possible topics, draft a response to the arguments presented in the assigned readings in an essay of 1,000 to 1,250 words. Your essay should be well organized, with good paragraph structure and transition; a strong, ethical, persuasive approach; an appropriate introduction and conclusion; and lively, precise, and grammatically correct sentences. Use a variety of rhetorical techniques, as appropriate, and use MLA-style documentation to cite any material that you quote, paraphrase, or summarize. Revise, edit, and proofread as necessary.
Note:
The critiques written in Activity 4, as well as the first draft of the assignment, MUST be submitted with the assignment.
Topics:
Argue one side or the other of one of the following statements, drawing on the material from the readings listed following and from the critiques you completed in Activity 4. Remember that your thesis must be your own. Because your essay will be shorter than the assigned readings, you will need to narrow your topic, zeroing in on what you believe are the most important points.
Addictions are a product of social dislocation and family stress. Readings: Addiction in Free Markets (see linked PDF); "An Insatiable Emptiness" (page 495).
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Addiction as a product of Social Dislocation and Family Stress.
Societal addiction to drug and substance use has, and still is, a menace to our human society, prompting extreme measures to be put in place to not only curb, but also try to eradicate the problem. Addiction can be defined as the way in which a person responds to the pressures of the society that are mounted on them and these pressures are the ones that predispose the socially dislocated persons to addictionCITATION Eve16 \p 45 \l 1033 (Everitt and Trevor 45). In recent times, drug addiction has proved to be a bigger problem in the society and most of the people have come up with measures that are intended to get rid of drug addiction from our society. There are various programs some carried out by the government, the non-profit making institutions, educational institutions and even family groups that are intended to fight drug addiction. In this modernized era, addiction is a neurotic lifestyle adopted by persons as a frantic means to face fragmentation and dislocations from individual and societal ties. In this paper, I do provide the argument that addictive tendencies are thus due to a person’s adaptation to social isolation and family stress, characteristic to our modern societies.
In the 21st century, there are many problems that are affecting the society. Some of them include the loss of jobs on short notices, increasingly unstable, weak societies, rapid occupational, family problems, spouse, language, ideological and even belief changes that compromise the stability of social life in our societies. Not only has social dislocation affected the poor adversely but it has also raised mayhem amongst the rich, therefore propagating flimsy binds between persons that form the social-psychological integration of the society. This has resulted to persons with reduced psychosocial integration to come up with lifestyles intended to fill up the emptiness that comes with dislocation socially, lifestyles that breed habits including, but not entirely to, drug and substance use, while others delve into insufficiently stable, orally and socially unacceptable relationship, with a good example being sex surfing on the internet – a habit that tends to cling more unto them than a normal, healthy social relationship can. These persons develop, for instance, physical illnesses, violent behaviors, depression, eccentric tendencies and even suicidal thoughts.
Distinctly, addiction can be seen to be due to dislocation as evidenced by the history of Scots and Canadians, which portrays how free market rapidly produced extensive social dislocation between the haves and have-nots, notably at the same rate at which globalization of free market ensuedCITATION Wis14 \p 254 \l 1033 (Wise 254). In my view, for markets to be actually free, labor, consumer goods/land and currency should not be overwhelmed by psychosocial elements of integration that include religious beliefs, family and social obligations, clan responsibilities and the rights of unions.
There lies a profoundly strong relationship between intense social dislocation and addiction. From ancient times, in Europe for example, alcohol intake and drunkenness was a common aspect during festivities, and although a few developed into drunkards, there was not much of a problem when it came to mass alcoholism. However, with the advent of the free markets after the 16th century we do realize that alcoholism begun to take root, hitting a high domin...