Sweatshops in developing countries

This assignment is designed to replace your grade for Essay 1 or 2. Students who submit this assignment will have their lowest essay grade dropped and replaced with the grade for this assignment.

Read the articles “Secrets, Lies, and Sweatshops” by Roberts and Engardio and “In Defense of ‘Sweatshops'” by Powell linked below.

The topic question for the Replacement Essay is: Do sweatshops in developing countries have a positive or negative effect on workers and/or consumers? I want you to write a 1,000 or more word argumentative essay in MLA format. The paper should contain 3-4 direct quotes of one sentence or less from 3-4 sources. These quotes will come from the article(s) I assigned you to read from the book and 1-2 articles from GALILEO. You cannot quote from any source that does not come from the articles I gave you or GALILEO. You need to have a Works Cited page. Use the Works Cited portion of the MLA style guide on the OWL at Purdue to help you.

When you write out of class, formal assignments, I want you to follow the conventions of academic writing. This means that you should be a little more formal in your language: do not use 1st or 2nd person pronouns (ex. I, me, my, we, our, you, your, etc.). This will give your ideas more force: the words “I believe” or “I think” lessens the impact of the statement that they are connected to; they make you sound as if you are unsure of yourself. This will also encourage you to think about how the topic affects society or America in general, not just how it affects you. Spell out your contractions (ex. you’re = you are). Contractions are too informal for academic writing and can lead to usage errors. Also, the title of your paper is not the topic question or your thesis sentence; come up with your own title that is a short and catchy phrase of a few words.