This assignment has two parts: a paper and a cover letter.
Part 1, Paper: Please answer the following prompt below in 1600-1750 words (~5-7 pages, double-spaced).
Prompt : On page 5 of “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr. writes: “In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law… I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law” (5). Here, King is presumably referring to himself and to other participants in the Birmingham campaign. When King says such individuals express “respect for the law,” do you think he is talking about the laws of the United States government in 1963? If yes, why? If no, what law do you think he is referring to? You should refer to “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in your answer but are also encouraged to draw on “Loving Your Enemies,” if you wish. Any view you attribute to King must be supported by evidence from those texts.
Each prompt asks about one or two readings from the course. In answering the prompt, you should refer to the reading(s) it mentions.
This paper is expository and evaluative. In some cases, it is also comparative – they ask you to apply one author’s ideas to the text or ideas of another author. Exactly what structure will serve you best may vary from prompt to prompt, but, as a general rule, it always makes sense to do any exposition that will be necessary to your argument, prior to making that argument. So, for example, if you are evaluating an argument or claim, you should reconstruct that argument, or explain that claim, first, and only then move on to offering your own take. And if you are applying someone’s ideas, you should explain and clarify those ideas before you apply them.
It is completely fine, indeed, encouraged, to speak in the first person when you are stating and defending your own view!
For citations, you don’t need to use any particular format, and it is completely fine if you just use paratheses, author, and page-number (e.g., “(Gourevitch, 910).”)
Part 2, Cover Letter: Along with your paper, please also submit a cover letter, of 150-250 words. The point of the cover letter is for you to do some reflecting on the writing process. In the cover letter, please tell me how, in working on this paper, you tried to incorporate feedback from your previous paper (like how you reformatted the paper to explain it better to the reader) Please also note if there was any part of the paper-writing process you found to be particularly challenging.