Your assignment is to read the following paragraph from Chris Hedges' book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, and paraphrase its main ideas:
"We pay a variety of lifestyle advisers-Neal Gabler calls them "essentially drama coaches"-to help us look and feel like celebrities, to build around us the set for the movie of our own life. Martha Stewart built her financial empire, when she wasn't insider trading, telling women how to create and decorate a set design for the perfect home. The realities within the home, the actual family relationships, are never addressed. Appearances make everything whole. Plastic surgeons, fitness gurus, diet doctors, therapists, life coaches, interior designers, and fashion consultants all, in essence, promise to make us happy, to make us celebrities. And happiness comes, we are assured, with how we look and how we present ourselves to others. There are glossy magazines like Town & Country which cater to the absurd pretensions of the very rich to be celebrities. They are photographed in expensive designer clothing inside the lavishly decorated set-pieces that are their homes. The route to happiness is bound up in how skillfully we show ourselves to the world. We not only have to conform to the dictates of this manufactured vision, but we also have to project an unrelenting optimism and happiness." (23)
Your paraphrase should follow the guidelines contained in "Plagiarism: What It Is and How to Recognize and Avoid It."
Your essay must contain a Works Cited (or References) section and in-text citations, all as described in the Your essay must be word-processed in 11 point Times-Roman font, double spaced, and with one-inch margins on all four sides.