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Working Title -- The title is part of the hook, so it needs help make the reader interested in your paper

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Working Title -- The title is part of the hook,

so it needs help make the reader interested in your paper. This is a working title, so it can be revised (like everything in the outline) later.


Thesis -- This is your assertion, arguing one side (and only one) of the question. Remember: Make it debatable, specific, and concise. -- in one sentence, not a fragment, not a paragraph.


Main points -- You must generate at 3-4 original points to support your thesis, and these points will become the main points for your paragraphs. 


Quotes/paraphrases -- Write the 3-4 quotes (one per paragraph) that you're thinking of using in the paper. Then, paraphrase at least one of them. You must use material from both articles, but they do not have to be equal (two from one text and two from the other, for example). The quotes and paraphrase must be cited; the directions for doing so are as follows:

-If both of your sources are articles, write an attribution (signal) phrase with the author's name before the quote/paraphrase, and the page number in parentheses after the quote/paraphrase.
-If one of your sources is the Thich Nhat Hanh YouTube video, use Hanh as the name in the attribution(signal) phrase and the time stamp of when the quote you're using begins (not ends), like this: Hanh explains that "Put the quote here" (11:37). 
-If one of your sources is the movie, use Finding Forrester as the name in the attribution (signal) phrase (remember to italicize the title) and the time stamp of when the quote you're using begins (not ends), like this: In Finding Forrester, Jamal says, "Put the quote here" (1:28:14). 
- Conclusion -- Summarize your thesis. Then state which of the conclusion strategies you think would work best in your conclusion.
Note: Remember that while your topic cannot change, other parts of the essay can and often do change as you move from the outline to the draft to the final version. That's fine. Good academic papers evolve as much as they are written. 




Article 1




Destructive Power of Despair By Charles M. Blow Despair has an incredible power to initiate destruction. It is exceedingly dangerous to assume that oppression and pain can be inflicted without consequence, to believe that the victim will silently absorb the injury and the wound will fade. No, the injuries compound, particularly when there is no effort to alter the system doing the wounding, no avenue by which the aggrieved can seek justice. This all breeds despair, simmering below the surface, a building up in need of release, to be let out, to lash out, to explode. As protests and rioting have swept across the country in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis, it's evident that America has failed to learn that lesson yet again. The protests are not necessarily about Floyd's killing in particular, but about the savagery and carnage that his death represents: The nearly unchecked ability of the state to act with impunity in the oppression of black bodies and the taking of black life. It is an anger over feeling powerless, stalked and hunted, degraded and dehumanized. It is an anger that the scenes keep repeating themselves until one feels exhausted and wrung out. It is an anger over feeling that people in power on every level — individual officers as well as local, state and federal government — are utterly 2 unresponsive to people's calls for fundamental change and equal justice under the law and equal treatment by it. When people feel helpless, like there is nothing left to lose, like their lives already hang in the balance, a wild, swirling, undirected rage is a logical result. You destroy people's prospects, they'll destroy your property. Our intransigence on the issue of social justice and use of force by the police is making last-straw extremists of members of a generation that feels unheard and disrespected. We can bemoan the violence that has attended some of these protests, but we must also recognize that to have to live in a world, in a society, in which you feel that your very life is constantly under threat because of the color of your skin is also a form of violence. It is a daily, ambient, gnawing violence. It is the kind that makes a grown man's shoulder draw up and his jaws clench whenever officers approach, even when there has been no offense or infraction. It is the kind that forces mothers down to pray whenever a child is out late, pleading to the gods for his or her safe return. It is the kind that makes a child think to write a parent's phone number on their skin when they sense trouble brewing, just in case. This is also violence. Indeed, America is not only the progenitor of this type of violence, but it sadly responds most to violence. That's when people pay attention, that's when the ears perk up, that's when the news crews come. During the Civil Rights Movement, the protesters practiced nonviolence, but they were regularly met with violence, and it was that violence that spurred action. 3 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed after the violence against protesters was broadcast on TV, four little girls were killed in the bombing of Birmingham, Ala.'s 16th Street Baptist Church and the killing of Medgar Evers in 1963. The Civil Rights Act of 1968, popularly known as the Fair Housing Act, was passed after Martin Luther King was assassinated and rioting swept the country. If America wants peace it must be responsive in peacetime. You can't demonize an athlete who peacefully takes a knee to protest against police brutality, labeling him a "son of a bitch," and then pine for peaceful protests now. It seems that no form of protest has been effective in this fight for justice. It seems that what the public and the power structure want is a continuation of the status quo. They want stillness and passivity. They want obedience. They want your suffering to be silent, your trauma to be tranquil. That won't happen. Some of the people now breaking things and burning things and looting things are ironically participating in a storied American tradition. There has long been a penchant for destruction in this country, an insatiable bloodlust, that the country conveniently likes to forget. American violence is learned violence. It is the American way. White people in America have rioted, slaughtered, massacred and destroyed for centuries, often directing their anger and violence at black people and Native Americans, to take what they had or destroy it, to unleash their rage and assert their superiority, to instill terror, to maintain power. 4 May 31st mark[ed] the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre in which a whole prosperous black neighborhood known as "Black Wall Street" was destroyed and as many as 300 people killed because of a violent white mob. White riots have often, historically, targeted black people, while black people have rioted to protest injustice. On either side, racism is the root. And we have refused to sufficiently address it. Now, that chicken is coming home to roost.


Article2




When Do Peaceful Protests Turn Ugly? Researchers find that moral attitudes, as measured in tweets, predict violence. By Naveed Saleh Peaceful protest is a cornerstone of democracy. Demonstrations offer a way for constituents to communicate concerns, focus attention on issues, and promote change. Unfortunately, protests can quickly turn violent. Although many people find protesting for causes that they care about liberating, it's safe to say that most people—including police officers and government officials—would prefer to avoid violent protests. Using AI and Twitter, researchers at the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC discovered that people are more likely to promote violence when they are moralizing the issue about which they are demonstrating, according to a new paper in Nature Human Behavior. Furthermore, this effect is moderated by moral convergence, or the extent to which a person thinks others share similar moral attitudes. "Extreme movements can emerge through social networks," co-author Morteza Dehghani told USC News. "We have seen several examples in recent years, such as the protests in Baltimore and Charlottesville, where people's perceptions are influenced by the activity in their social networks. People identify others who share their beliefs and interpret this as consensus. In these studies, we show that this can have potentially dangerous consequences." In this study, researchers analyzed 18 million tweets posted during the Baltimore protests of 2015, which focused on the death of Freddie Grey, a victim of police brutality. Over several weeks, these protests were punctuated by periods of peace and periods of violence, enabling the researchers to assess the association between social media rhetoric and violent incidents. To label these tweets as either "moral" or "not moral," the team developed a deep neural network using 4,800 tweets coded for moral content. "We focus on morality because once a protest is sufficiently moralized, it becomes an issue of right and wrong instead of mere personal preference," the 2 researchers wrote. Dehghani and colleagues compared the moral content of the labeled tweets with arrest rates, which served as an imperfect proxy for violence. The researchers also ran three behavioral experiments to elucidate the relationship between moralization and perceived moral convergence. The participants in these analyses were primed with accounts from the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. "Although the behavioral experiments measure the acceptability of using violence at protests instead of protest behavior," wrote the researchers, "the fine-grained text analysis of the Baltimore protests and the three behavioral experiments taken together aim to provide converging evidence for our hypotheses using both real-life protests and self-reported attitude measures." The team first found that moral rhetoric nearly doubled on violent protest days. On further analysis, as hypothesized, they found that hour-level tweets predicted violence. In other words, as the number of moral tweets went up, so did subsequent arrest counts. "A rise in violence at protests may thus reflect the increasing moralization and polarization of political issues in online echo chambers," the researchers wrote. In their series of behavioral analyses, the researchers found that participants were more likely to endorse violent protest when they moralize an issue. The extent to which they promote violence, however, is based on whether others share their outlook. Although violence at protests is well publicized, very little research has been done on this topic. The current study has important implications. First, this research may help decision makers better predict how to allocate resources to prevent a protest from turning violent. Second, the researchers suggest that "decreasing the moralization of attitudes and diluting the perception that others agree with one's moral position may attenuate the rise of the acceptability of violence." In other words, if we can decrease the extent to which people morally converge and select themselves into networks of like-minded individuals, then we may reduce the acceptance of violence during protests. Finally, although moral outrage and moral convergence are required for violent protest, the researchers point out that other factors—such as violent proclivities among protestors and the nature of the issue being protested—also play a role.