The following passage comes from "The Common Life," a 1994 essay by the American writer Scott Russell Sanders. Read the passage carefully and then write an essay that defends, challenges, or qualifies Sanders' ideas about the relationship between the individual and society in the United States. Use specific evidence to support your position.
In the following excerpt from Antigone, by the classical Greek playwright Sophocles, the wise Teiresias observes Think: all men make mistakes, Take some time to think about the implications of the quotation. Then write a carefully reasoned essay that explores the validity of the assertion, using examples from your reading, observation, or experience to develop your position.
Should society have the right to prohibit drug use? Why or why not?
Write a five paragraph essay in which you develop two stated reasons in support of your claim. Each of your stated reasons should be summarizable in the "because" clause attached to your claim. Develop your most important reason last. Give your essay a self-announcing structure in which you highlight your claim at the end of your introduction. Summarize and refute opposing views in your second paragraph. Begin your next two body paragraphs with topic sentences that relate back to your stated reasons. You should follow the "Standard Form" for argument from the handout, which is briefly outlined below:
A woman who recently moved from Los Angeles to Bloomington, Indiana, told me that she would not be able to stay here long, because she was already beginning to recognize people in the grocery stores, on the sidewalks, in the library. Being surrounded by familiar faces made her nervous, after years in a city where she could range about anonymously. Every traveler knows the sense of liberation that comes from journeying to a place where nobody expects anything of you. Everyone who has gone to college knows the exhilaration of slipping away from the watchful eyes of Mom and Dad. We all need seasons of withdrawal from responsibility. But if we make a career of being unaccountable, we have lost something essential to our humanity, and we may well become a burden or a threat to those around us. A community can support a number of people who are just passing through, or who care about no one's needs but their own; the greater the proportion of such people, however, the more vulnerable the community, until eventually it breaks down.... Taking part in the common life means dwelling in a web of relationships, the many threads tugging at you while also holding you upright.
But a good man yields when he
Knows his course is wrong,
And repairs the evil: The Only
Crime is pride.
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying, "This is mine," and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."