Number of Pages: 4 (Double Spaced)

Number of sources: 5

Writing Style: Turabian

As tensions escalated between England and her American colonies, a young lawyer rose to speak to his fellow Virginians about the issues at hand. Patrick Henry’s speech give me Liberty or give me Death in March 1775 was a bold public statement of his opinions regarding the colony’s course of action.
After reading the text of the speech, available in Blackboard, viewing the video on Patrick Henry, and reviewing Chapter 5 in your textbook, you are to construct a 900-1100 word response to one of the following prompts. Your paper should completely address the question selected and use specific examples from the text to support your answer.
These are the questions that needs to be answered. 1) Henry’s speech was a call to action. What did he want his fellow Virginians to do? How did he justify his desire? In what ways did Henry address the concerns of those who did not agree with him?

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Research: The body of the paper should be based primarily on your own reading and consideration of the document. You may do some outside reading and research to provide clarity to the document, but any sources you use in your paper must be listed in the assignment Bibliography and properly referenced in the text using footnotes in Turabian format.
Writing: Your paper should be well organized and developed, written in scholarly language with no grammar, spelling, or punctuation errors. Please be sure to reference the Writing Tips document provided in Blackboard, as you will be held responsible for the guidelines it contains. It should be at least 900 words in length, but no more than 1100 words. It should be typed in a Microsoft Word document in 12-pt Times New Roman, double spaced with 1” margins. Citations should conform to Turabian citation style with properly formatted footnotes and bibliography. (The Citation Style Guide is located in Blackboard).

There are several mistakes that students fall into when writing these papers. Across the board, I always see these problems and they always hurt students. Please attend to this list as best you can! I want you to succeed and get the material, and I do not want to pull my hair out over the same problem over and over.

1. Students fail to follow the format for the paper. I can understand messing up citation a little bit, but if you do not cite, do not have a title page, and do not correctly put the paper together, you cannot do well on the paper.

2. Students fail to answer the question. I have gotten multiple essays where students have written a biography of Patrick Henry without answering one of the assigned questions. Try to avoid that, you will not do well on your paper. I should have a clear idea what question you are addressing.

3. Students answer multiple questions. The other extreme is for a student to try to answer all of the questions instead of answering one. I do not know if they think this will impress me, or show their mastery of the material, but the assignment calls for you to answer one question completely. You cannot do that if you are trying to answer all of them.

4. Students do not make the paper long enough. This is rather self explanatory. Do a word count on your paper. If is not long enough their may be more material you need to address.

5. Students rely on “block quotations”. A block quotation is a quotation that takes up multiple lines and is used to pad your essays length. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that you grasp the material and can analyze it. Do not fill up your essay with material from the speech itself.

6. Students make appeals to nationalism or religion as the body of the paper. Patrick Henry was motivated by love of his him colony, and he did use religious imagery in his speech. However, this does not mean you should use this essay as a platform to write about what is right or wrong with contemporary American religious or political culture. If you write on the religious imagery in the speech, discuss the specific examples of the imagery, do not talk extensively about Henry’s relationship with God. Address it and move on if necessary.