Bachmann Essay Prompt

Overview and Purpose

In the first essay, we are using the concepts from one text to analyze the ideas in another text. We will work on carefully reading and understanding the texts, and we’ll be choosing strong specific examples to illustrate the connections we make from text to text and explaining these analytical connections to our readers.

Skills Used

    • Focus your essay with a strong thesis statement  that makes a claim about the degree to which Angie Bachmann should be held accountable for her debt and states the reasons for that claim (your “because” statement).
    • Provide effective and developed support for your claim  with ideas from both texts.
    • Effectively summarize  Angie Bachmann’s story and ideas from Duhigg’s book and Slater’s chapter that support your claim.
    • Critically analyze the degree to which you believe Bachmann is responsible for her debt using Duhigg’s theories about habits and the theories of addiction discussed in Slater’s chapter, and explain this analysis to readers.
    • Create organized paragraphs  that focus on one main point and divide your argument into manageable chunks for your readers

The Assignment

For this assignment, you will argue whether Angie Bachmann should be held accountable for her gambling debts based on what you learned about addictions from “Rat Park: The Radical Addiction Experiment” by Lauren Slater and habits from Charles Duhigg’s “The Neurology of Freewill.”

You should write your essay for people who are NOT in this class and are not familiar with Duhigg’s book or Slater’s chapter.  This means you’ll need to spend some time summarizing key ideas, defining any unfamiliar terms, and choosing short supporting quotations.  This includes:

    • Angie Bachmann’s story as described in Duhigg’s “The Neurology of Freewill”
    • Support for your argument from Slater’s “Rat Park”

Basic Requirements:

    • I’d like you to include details, examples, and quotations from the texts to develop and support your argument.
    • Talk about complexities, and look at the gray areas—for example, you might think the casinos are partly responsible because they encouraged Bachmann’s habits, but in the end, you might believe she is ultimately responsible.
    • Use your critical voice to explain WHY you think Bachmann is or is not responsible for her debts.
    • The essay should be 3-5 pages.
    • The essay should be formatted according to MLA style.