ASSESSMENT DESCRIPTION: You are required to draft an essay for an academic audience using the
thesis statement that you have workshopped and developed in the first few weeks of the semester.
All the assessments in the course are building towards this output so completing all the assessments
and responding to feedback is critical to producing a polished finished product.
The essays must follow one of two formats based on your workshopped thesis statement:
1. Persuasive essay. This type of essay is for thesis statements that are explicitly arguing a point
that you want to convince your reader is true or false. You should aim to build an argument
around some data and use research from the academic literature to support your claims.
2. Research proposal. You can write a proposal for a specific research project. You can think
about this in several ways – as the narrative section of a research grant, as a proposal that
one would write to receive permission to conduct research in a public sector or professional
context, or as the proposal for a masters or PhD thesis.
No matter which type of essay you choose to write, you must include
1. A graph that motivates or supports the thesis of your essay. This will likely be a version of
the graph that we workshop in class in the Graph Assessment.
2. Each essay should include motivation and evidence from credible academic sources.
What are “credible” academic sources in economics While there is some debate on this, a good
starting point would be to draw most citations from journals ranked in the top 500 in the world on
this listing of journals for IDEAS/RePEc:
https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.journals.simple.html
and at least a couple recent citations from the top 200 journals. It is not enough just to cite papers
from these journals (e.g., as secondary citations), as it is critical that you identify multiple papers
from this set of journals that are directly relevant to your main argument (i.e., you should be
speaking to an issue that has been debated in such journals). Given academic publishing lags, it may
be hard to find published research on important and current economic issues. For example, there’s
now a lot of literature on the early impacts of COVID-19, but less on the recovery from COVID-19. If
debate on the issue has not yet emerged in the academic literature, such that you can find papers on
either side of the debate, then it is not an acceptable topic.
In general, the essays will have the following format: short introduction (1 or 2 short paragraphs
max) that includes your thesis statement, evidence/exposition with graph, short conclusion. The
introduction will motivate the central argument (the “hook”), outline the main aspects of the essay,
argue for the importance of the topic of the essay, and include the thesis statement. The
evidence/exposition is the meat of the essay – it will bring the student’s research to bear, in
outlining the evidence for the main argument or point of the essay and typically include the graph
(some essay may use the graph as motivation so it more naturally sits in the introduction), while the
conclusion will succinctly tie up the essay.
The final submission will be capped at 1500 words, not counting literature references. Format:
double spaced, 12-point font, 2.5 cm margins, and must be typeset using LaTex.
WHAT YOU NEED TO DO: The assignment will be completed in phases. The phases are meant to
build on each other. In addition, there are other assessment that led into this one including the
thesis statement and graph assessment.
First draft and literature review (6/26 marks): due Thursday, April 6 11:59 PM
The first draft of the essay is due Thursday of week 6. In tutorials that week you will receive peer
review on the literature review. In tutorials the following week you will receive peer review on the
draft. You will also receive written comments on the draft from the tutor and the lecturer.
Final draft (1500 words; 20/26 marks): due May 7, 5:00 pm
This is the final submission of the essay, to be submitted in soft copy online through Canvas, to be
graded by the course instructor, and course tutors.
GRADE WEIGHT: The academic essay carries 26% of the grading weight for the course.
