Marijuana should be illegal
? ESSAY
Your primary objective for this paper will be to make a well-informed, carefully considered contribution to an on-going conversation or debate about an important topic. Your audience for this essay is comprised of scholars who are interested in your topic and who may be aware of the important texts, thinkers, and arguments frequently cited within your chosenconversation. However, while your readers may be familiar with some of the more influential voices that you will cite, they will expect you to remind them of key words and statements. These academic readers like texts, and they respect well-read participants of the conversation, so you should use textual support as a way of establishing credibility as well.
Your academic readers, though, will not be reading your essay simply to "re-hear" authoritative voices; they want you to bring those voices into your argument ? and they want you to prove that you have understood them ? but they still expectyour voice to predominate. So you must have something definite to contribute, even if it is only a revision, qualification, or correction of an existing belief or idea.
?Using your planning document as a guide, take a few minutes to reread your previous exercises and review some of the "moves" your academic audience will expect you to make as you write your essay. For example, what are the larger implications of this conversation? Your readers will expect you to discuss established claims already in circulation within the conversation, and they will expect you to give these ideas a full and fair trial. But most of all your readers are interested in what your response is, and what your contribution to the conversation will be.
Remember that academic readers like a calm and methodical consideration of ideas; making an argument is not the same thing as being argumentative. Even though you may criticize another scholar's position, your readers will not respond favorably to a strident or sarcastic tone. Also, as before, keep in mind that while your evidence provides the foundation for your work, you need to keep your voice and your thinkingfront-and-center.