Explain Socrates' response to Meletus' accusation that he corrupts the youth. Is Socrates' response adequate? Why or why not?
Written Assignments:
In this course you are going to have to complete several written assignments. The purpose of this handout is to tell you a little bit about my expectations for written assignments.
Written assignments will be graded on the quality of your ideas, along with your ability to express these ideas clearly and effectively.
The minimum condition for expressing your ideas clearly is the use of correct English prose. If the quality of writing is so poor that the reader is unable understand what the writer is trying to say, it is impossible for the reader to evaluate the quality of the ideas expressed. This is because, to be precise, no ideas were actually expressed. For this reason, failure to meet this minimum condition will be treated as failure to fully complete the assignment. Essays that I cannot read will get F's, and essays that are difficult to read because of excessive grammar, spelling, and usage mistakes will not fare much better.
The quality of your ideas will be judged on a number of criteria, determined in part by the nature of the assignment. Typically, your written assignments will require you to give an answer to a question about some issue that we will have covered during the course. The quality of your ideas refers to how well you provide an answer to that question.
Based mainly on the reading required in the syllabus and the material covered in class, there are some things that I will expect you to know - the ideas expressed in the reading and covered in class. I expect you to use relevant bits of this knowledge effectively in your attempt to answer the question. This means understanding key concepts and using them effectively in your writing.
It is important that your answer to the question be a good one. It is very often perfectly legitimate for you to give a different answer to the question than that given by me or your classmates. Some questions may require personal reflection, and many will admit of different answers when approached from different theoretical perspectives. This doesn't mean that anything goes. Answers grounded in a misunderstanding of the question -- or in a misunderstanding of a key concept -- are likely to be wrong, and answers that are self-contradictory are certainly wrong.
You are also expected to defend your answer. That is, you are expected to make an argument in support of your thesis. The best written assignments are not the ones that tell me what I want to hear (in fact, you probably don't really know what I want to hear). They are the ones that give powerful reasons for believing a good thesis. Your written assignments will generally take the form of persuasive essays, where your thesis is the answer you are giving to the assigned question and where your goal is to give the reader reasons to believe that your answer is a good one.
So, provided that you have expressed your ideas clearly, you will be graded on: whether your answer to the question is a good one; whether you demonstrate a good understanding of the relevant concepts; and whether you provide a strong defense of your answer.
Finally, it is not enough to write a bunch of good ideas down on a piece of paper. You must also express your ideas effectively. This means that a readable essay with good ideas still might not earn you an A. Good essays enable the reader to follow your line of reasoning and understand why he or she should share your view. This could be called clarity too, but it goes beyond what I said above about correct English prose. An essay that impresses your philosophy professor with how much you've learned in class isn't really worth much, unless it is also capable of showing any relatively intelligent adult why the position that you've defended in your essay is a one worth defending. Good writing is a skill that takes a lifetime to perfect; most of us never do. Nonetheless, at this level, we should all be able to clearly and effectively communicate astute ideas about material we are studying.