USF Writing Community Server

For the first time ever a partial face transplant was conducted in France.  This is huge news in the medical world. The woman who received the transplant was 38 and had been severely disfigured by a dog attack only 6 months ago. The surgical teams grated on to the woman’s face a nose, lips, and chin from a donor who had been declared brain ...

Mexico’s laws about rape are finally coming up to speed with most of the rest of the world. The Supreme Court of Mexico just recently ruled unanimously that rape within marriage is a crime. This is a very huge step for them. Before when I thought of relationships in Mexico, I stereotypically thought of machoism and the male being the aggressive ...

The injustice that I researched about is the parking situation at Eagle’s Point Apartment complex. I first heard about this from a friend who lives there, when I was visiting one time and had a hard time finding a parking space. When I was told that our third project would be on a local injustice, this is what came to my mind. Although I was ...

In Liuzhou, China coffin-making has been made illegal. Yes I wrote coffin making. This city has been known for its top-quality cedar coffins for centuries, ever since Liu Zhongyuan, a famous poet in the 9th century, was buried in one of the cedar coffins and after a long journey, the body was still fresh. This made the coffins popular. The reason ...

Chapter 15 in Writing Arguments goes over proposal arguments. These are the kind of arguments that “call for action”. These arguments should make the audience compelled to act on something, whether it be a local injustice or a national problem. The two kinds of proposals are exactness of something. It’s about correcting something here and now. ...

   An article in the New York Times today was on the bird flu. I know I have already written a blog about this topic, but it seems to be a growing threat to Southeast Asia. Of course it is a threat everywhere until a vaccine is created, but there have been cases of bird flu documented in four countries in Southeast Asia ...

   Since there was not an assigned reading for this week I will write about the second writing project.  Our second project is on ethical perspectives. This paper is an actual argument against a certain topic chosen. This is different from our first project, where we were only rhetorically analyzing an argument. Now we actually ...

A new study by the National Cancer Institute has been conducted on mammograms. They wanted to find out whether or not mammograms really helped the death rate of breast cancer victims go down. Since 1999, there has been a decline of breast cancer deaths and the claim is that is because of mammograms. About 80% of women over 40 get mammograms done ...

To help us in the new writing project, it was suggested to read pages 177-186 in the Penguin Handbook. This chapter starts by introducing an argument, and going through the basics of understanding a persuasive writing. You must start by taking a position on a certain issue; usually it is a controversial one.  This will create opposing views. ...