Midterm Paper, First Draft: How democratic were the British North American colonies before the American Revolution and how democratic was the system of government formed by the ratification of the US Constitution in 1787? (50 points)
A draft of an original essay on the above topic. The essay must have all of the 3 distinct elements described below. The instructors will review these drafts for the required elements, each of which earns 10 points. A completed draft, containing all three elements, earns 30 points. Incomplete drafts earn fewer points.
You will also be assigned the drafts of two other students to peer review. Read the assigned drafts and write a short, separate report about each one describing: (a) the best thing about the paper; and, (b) one thing that could be done to improve it. Each review is worth 10 points. Completing both reviews earns 20 points.
The instructors will submit your draft to ProWritingAid, a web-based editing program, which will identify errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and also suggest places where you might improve the essay’s style. You will receive a copy of the report and will be required to improve your overall score for the final draft.
A free copy of ProWritingAid is available on the web. The free copy will only evaluate up to 500 words, but it is possible to evaluate your entire draft without cost by submitting it in sections of 500 words or less.
For more on how to get the most out of ProWritingAid, please consult Getting the Most Out of Pro Writing Aid. For more information about how your paper will be graded, please consult this Grading the First and Final Drafts of Your Paper.
The final draft of your essay should be about 1,200 words long, or 4 double-spaced pages in 12 pt font with 1-inch margins on all sides of letter stock (8½ x 11), and submitted as a Word (doc or docx). In the first draft, you are only required to address three of the final six essential elements required in the final, so it may therefore be shorter. However, as a first draft in which you are working out your ideas, it may in fact be longer.
The first draft of your essay must address the following three elements:
A definition of democracy: How do you define it? What are its principal features? To decide if a practice, organization, or society is democratic, we need to know what a democracy is. What do you think it is? How do you define “democracy”?
A description of what it means to be a democratic society: Even undemocratic institutions, organizations, and societies can have some democratic features. How do you decide if, and to what degree, a particular organization or society is (or is not) democratic? What features or characteristics do you look for when trying to decide if an organization or society is truly democratic, or just pretends to be?
How democratic were the several colonies of North America before the revolution and why do say so? Having defined democracy in theory and described how you think it works in practice, you now need to use your understanding to assess the degree to which the British North American colonies were or were not democratic. You need to understand the tensions and forces in play to understand why the United States and its Constitution took the shape they did. The colonies had both democratic and undemocratic impulses and institutions before the Revolution. What were they?
