Step 1: Tell me about the area you are researching. Do not declare a claim or thesis until after you have done some research. Let me know what your impressions are/were of this topic before your research process begins. Include a frank discussion of your own bias. Do you WANT a certain argument or point of view to be correct?
Step 2: Summarize what you’ve learned about this topic from 3 different research sources of academic quality. This is not supposed to be an essay unto itself; I do not expect more than 2 or 3 sentences per source. Please include an MLA format citation for each source, and be extra careful if you choose to use EasyBib to do your citations or use YouTube as a source.
EasyBib and all similar automatic citation programs, as far as I’m aware, will miss information or make dumb mistakes that no human would make (assuming “Javascript Required” was an author’s name is my fave). EasyBib will ask you to check over its information and fill in the gaps. Do it! If you make sure all the information is in place, EasyBib should organize it correctly for you.
As for YouTube, if you reference a TV show or documentary, MLA format will ask for the director, production company, and date of release. The person who posted a documentary to YouTube is NOT going to be its director, the date it was posted on YouTube is not its date of release, and YouTube will not be its production studio. It’s likely you’ll need to watch the opening and closing credits to find that information.
Step 3: State your claim. Your claim should be one sentence long — what point are you going to argue for in your essay?
Your claim should be Academic . It’s OK to use a pop culture event to introduce or build interest for your paper, but the argument must be mostly on a subject you might study in some college classroom. For example, you can’t write an essay about the career of your favorite football player. But you can tell the story of a football great who suffered from long term brain injuries to introduce (called “the hook” of an essay ) an essay that deals with the medical effects of repeated concussion and what legal responsibility colleges and/or the NFL should have for people injured while playing for them.
Factual (so try not to argue abstract concepts such as artistic merit, moral correctness, or what is “fair”). So you can argue that we should stop eating beef for health reasons, or for environmental reasons, but you can’t argue it on the basis that cows are cute and have nice personalities, or that it is evil to kill animals.
and Specific (“Screen time is bad for kids” is not a good topic, but “To protect them from bullying and online predators, parents should monitor the social media use of every child under 16” is specific enough.)
Your claim cannot be a question. Your claim cannot say that both or all sides are equally right, nor can it argue that no side is right.