write an argumentative essay about why/how do Confucianism and Daoism syncretize with Buddhism? Only use sources given in class. Use the following guidelines to write your paper.THESIS is the key to a strong essay!!!!! A reflective, critically engaged and arguable thesis guides the direction of the essay by indicating the lines of thought that require explanation, explication, establishing relations and justification.
Development, Organization & Cohesion: Depth of engagement with the key ideas. Even for a short paper, a superficial discussion will not convey much understanding or credibility. Good critical engagement with reading, and the reflection should lead to a thoughtful discussion in the essay. Fully explain the important ideas in your essay. Avoid inessentials: Focus! The thesis guides a well-developed essay into an organized and cohesive whole, with each paragraph progressively building on the last and developing into the next. This requires consideration of the meaning of each developing point to the whole (the whole is summarized in the thesis), as well as what each individual point means, and often is exhibited in good transitional thoughts in the form of topic sentences, etc.
Clarity: More needs to be clarified or explained. Absence of mistakes does not sufficiently ensure a strong, clear discussion of the material.
Focus: Explicitly laying out the claim and developing ideas so as to guide reader to the implications of your or the thinker’s claims.
Precision: Work to precisely characterize the thought and argument closely and carefully.
Text Use/Credibility: Need more engagement with the text. This includes heavy reliance on the text in the form of quotes for justification of your claims (credibility), explication of the text (interpret, showing how you understand its meaning), and relating to your essay. Without quotes, your essay reads like a mere opinion without any evidence to support it. Without the latter two, quotes read more like an interruption than an integrated part of an academic essay. Remember that as an amateur and aspiring professional, you must establish the grounds/reasons for the validity of your views.
Academic/Formal Tone (style): Work on developing the professional style and tone of academia. This does not mean polysyllabic words. It means avoiding the conversational tone. 1st person pronoun (“I”) is not a problem, but must be followed by intellectual style predicates. Step into the pre-professional shoes of a university student, and practice taking your views seriously enough to compose them thoughtfully and reflectively.
Concision: Work on being more concise. Rhetoric needs to be tighter with less elaboration. Focus on developing only the key ideas thoroughly and yet still concisely. Avoid inessential discussions, points or words. Pare down tightly. As you work on being more precise, concision will improve.
Accuracy: Need to work on accurately representing the text and/or views of the course. Credibility is undermined without correctly discussing the text and ideas. Lack of accuracy indicates uncareful reading.
Mechanics need attention. Work on proofreading prior to submission by reading aloud or having a trusted and skillful advisor review for mechanical accuracy, including grammar, syntax (look for incomplete sentences or run-ons), punctuation, spelling, and readability (avoiding awkward phrasing).
Development (Focus & Clarity Precision), Text use/Credibility, Style, Accuracy
