Newspaperlessness

Op-Ed on a Specific Timely Topic

Op-Eds are worth studying and emulating not because they appear in newspapers but because they’re persuasive and responsive to the writing of other authors. Every skill required to write a good Op-Ed will serve you well in academic writing.

MODELS
You’ll find an unlimited number of Op-Eds on our textbook, easily accessible from the Opinion heading, each identified as having been produced by an “Op-Ed Contributor.” Read a few before you try to write your own. The articles we read this week for our Unfair Summary Exercises are good examples.

SOURCES
You’ll choose your topics from articles anywhere in our textbook and locate additional sources to support a thesis you’ll identify and refine throughout the multi-week revision process. You have hardly any time to get started, but plenty of time to improve the end result.

TOPICS
Like any good Op-Ed, yours will respond to a recent event or current situation, or directly to an article by another author. In addition to being timely and responsive, your essay will reference at least one additional source in the first draft, to demonstrate that you’ve done some background research to earn the authoritative voice that will support your clear and direct claims.

REFERENCES
When I say reference, I don’t mean quote. You may quote of course, but you may also simply summarize the argument of another author or point us with a link in the direction of someone else’s research. One way or another, though, you will mention and make use of two sources, one primary, one secondary. Later, you’ll add others.

Tips for Good Op-Eds

Thesis Statement

Make one in your opening paragraph. Be sure it’s a clear and compelling claim on a very specific topic you believe you will be able to persuasively prove with adequate evidence in the course of your Op-Ed style essay. Keep in mind that, while the standard of proof for a research paper might be “irrefutable evidence,” the standard for an Op-Ed is “reasonable and persuasive evidence.” The purpose of the Op-Ed is to provide a logical and convincing case for a personal opinion; Op-Eds offer sympathetic readers a well-made argument they can use to support or focus their own opinions.

Bad Example that makes no significant claim:
The American Patriot Act is a very controversial piece of legislature that has some people worried about whether it violates basic human rights.

Good Example makes a significant claim:
“Enemy combatant,” a category of war prisoner unknown until the passing of The American Patriot Act, has made it possible for the US to wrongfully, indefinitely, and without access to due process, detain individuals “suspected of offering assistance” to terrorists who could never have been taken captive—let alone imprisoned for years without charges—under the Geneva Convention. The treatment of our “enemy combatants” shames America, which used to pride itself on adherence to the “rule of law.”

2. Background and Evidence

In later paragraphs, you’ll summarize sources, quote where needed, make reasonable arguments, and present the material you’ve gathered.

Bad Example (vague development):
Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a Yemeni citizen and one of the first detainees sent to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in January 2002, died there earlier this month. Despite his “low-level danger” assessment, he is still in US custody.

A law may soon pass that will change the definition of  “battlefield.” It’s unclear whether that will increase the number of people detained at Guantanamo. Detainees can ask their lawyers to permission the Department of Justice if they believe they do not belong in custody.

Good Example (specific development):
Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, a Yemeni citizen and one of the first detainees sent to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in January 2002, died there earlier this month. Despite his “low-level danger” assessment and the fact that he’d been recommended for release by several presidential administrations, Latif was routinely denied release. He was never charged with a crime.

The American government refuses to grant these detainees the most basic legal rights: to be told of their charges, to confront their accusers, to dispute the charges on which they’re being held. Some have been held for 10 years without a chance to appear before a judge. One was tortured and force-fed to thwart his hunger strike before his ultimate release.

Legislation currently pending would grossly expand the definition of “battlefield,” arguably to include the entire world, making it possible to find “enemy combatants” anywhere. The Justice Department provides no relief, declaring that detainees need permission to meet with their lawyers, if they can get one.

ASSIGNMENT

1. Write an essay in the Op-Ed style with a very specific thesis on a very specific topic of your choosing.

2. Adopt the tone and formality level of the opinion columns published every day in the New York Times. Because Op-Eds are understood to be the opinion of a single person, unlike Editorials, they may use first person singular. (You may refer to yourself as “I.”)

3. Your Op-Ed will draw support from at least two sources. You’re not required to quote them, but you must refer to their content in your essay and provide hyperlinks to the originals whether you quote them, paraphrase them, or summarize them.

4. Op-Ed writers are paid to be opinionated. They do not get published by stating the obvious or reflecting common knowledge. Their essays do much more than simply state facts. Their claims are either controversial or uncommon or surprising. For example, they don’t say, “Our health care system could be improved.” Instead, they say: “The Affordable Health Care Act is killing people.”

5. Title your essay: Op-Ed—Username.

6. Post your essay to the A05: Op-Ed category.

7. Early Feedback
As always, if you post early and I have the time, I will provide early feedback you can use to improve your draft before receiving your first grade.

GRADE DETAILS

• MW Section: DUE 11:59PM SUN OCT 19
• TR Section: DUE 11:59PM MON OCT 20
• There will also be an Op-Ed Rewrite assignment. This week’s Op-Ed assignment will receive its own grade, which cannot be improved after it’s recorded. Make it good.
• Grade will start and end in the 25% Shorter Argument, Non-Portfolio grade group.
• Customary late penalties. (0-24 hours 10%) (24-48 hours 20%) (48+ hours, 0 grade)

WordPress saves all drafts.

Tyler asked me today to demonstrate how to view side-by-side drafts of his posts in WordPress’s Edit mode. I promised I would, then forgot to follow through. So here:

Find the Revisions table.

First, open your post in Edit. Down below the text field are a set of tables that include a list of hyperlinks to all the time-stamped drafts you’ve saved, or that WordPress has Autosaved for you.

Launch the side-by-side window.

Click any time stamp, the one you want if you recognize it, though any link will do. You can fine-tune your selection once you launch the function.

Click “Compare any two revisions.”

The double arrows above the side-by-side window will let you scroll through all your early drafts, comparing any two.

Scroll to find revisions.

WordPress highlights the differences between your drafts.

• In-Class Exercise (ICE) Unfair Summary MW
• Introduction to the Op-Ed

ONE feature of the tragic case of Thomas Eric Duncan, the first traveler known to have carried the Ebola virus into the United States, rankles me as a physician: Even if every system in place to identify suspected carriers had been working perfectly, he may have still set off a mini-epidemic in Dallas.

Mr. Duncan, recall, was screened before his flight and found to have a normal temperature. Asked specifically about exposures, he denied any contact with the ill. On Sept. 25, when he first presented to the emergency room with a fever, he was discharged. He returned three days later with fulminant infection. But the fact remains that even if Mr. Duncan had been identified and isolated on the first visit, it may have been too late. He had probably been exuding the virus for days. The news that a nurse who helped treat Mr. Duncan has now tested positive for the disease, evidently because of a breach of safety protocols, adds to the picture of disorder.

In the wake of the Duncan case, three strategies to contain the entry and spread of Ebola in the United States have been proposed. The first suggests drastic restrictions on travel from Ebola-affected nations. The second involves screening travelers from Ebola-affected areas with a thermometer, which the federal government is beginning to do at selected airports. The third proposes the isolation of all suspected symptomatic patients and monitoring or quarantining everyone who came into contact with them.

Yet all these strategies have crucial flaws. In the absence of any established anti-viral treatment, we may need to rethink the concept of quarantine itself.

“Quarantine” sounds like a medieval concept because it is. Invented in the mid-1300s to stop the bubonic plague, the word derives from the Italian for “40 days,” the time used to isolate potential carriers. Although the practice of quarantine has been reformed over the centuries, pitfalls remain. They are especially evident during this epidemic.

An indiscriminate ban on travel would make it impossible for aid workers to reach the most widely affected areas, obviously deepening the medical and humanitarian crisis. It would also encourage subversion: Travelers might pass through other countries, confounding efforts to track their origin.

Screening travelers from affected areas using questionnaires and temperature may prove effective, but here, too, there are profound weaknesses. Low-grade fevers can easily be concealed with antipyretics like Tylenol. More important, by the time an Ebola carrier has a fever, he or she is already in an infectious phase and may have exposed many others to the virus.

Isolating symptomatic patients is certainly effective, but it will not work as a proactive strategy of containment. By that point, a carrier may have already infected dozens of people. Even when surveillance is well deployed, the collateral costs associated with it are forbidding. Between July 31 and mid-September, New York City’s health department received 57 calls reporting suspected infections based on fevers. Of these, only six merited further testing. Three cases were caused by malaria and one by anaplasmosis; two were of unknown causes. Ebola was not found in any of the cases.

There is a fourth strategy, although it will need to be evaluated and deployed carefully. Since the 1990s, novel methods have allowed doctors to detect viruses in the pre-symptomatic phase of an infection, often with remarkable sensitivity and precision. One of these involves the polymerase chain reaction, or P.C.R., a chemical reaction that amplifies pieces of a virus’s genes floating in blood by more than a millionfold, which is what makes early, pre-symptomatic infections identifiable. The technique is not particularly cumbersome: As an oncologist working with blood cancers, I have been using variants of it to detect subclinical infections in patients for nearly a decade.

A 2000 study in The Lancet illustrates the power of this approach. Twenty-four “asymptomatic” individuals exposed to Ebola were tested using P.C.R. Eleven of the exposed patients eventually developed the infection. Seven of the 11 tested positive for the P.C.R. assay; none of the other 13 did. In 2004, virologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention further refined this method to increase its sensitivity. The test now requires only a teaspoon of blood. The sample is transported, on ice, to a centralized lab. Results are back in a few hours.

Technologies like this allow us to imagine a new form of quarantine. Rather than relying on primitive instruments, indiscriminate profiling or questionnaires, we should consider running a pilot program to test asymptomatic travelers using sensitive P.C.R.-based techniques. Obviously, such technologies are expensive, but the cost is not prohibitive. A typical P.C.R. reaction, including labor, costs between $60 and $200 (we have already spent 100 times more disposing of the contaminated sheets from the home Mr. Duncan stayed in). Since the test takes about a third of the time of a trans-Atlantic flight, the flight would become the quarantine.

Huge logistical questions would need to be solved. Where would such a screening test be administered — before departure from West Africa, or upon landing? Could we imagine a walking quarantine in which travelers were granted provisional entry, but recalled if they tested positive? What infection precautions would need to be in place for such testing? What forms of consent would be required? Who would bear the costs? Who exactly would be tested?

Despite these questions, we should develop a pilot program, perhaps targeting the worst-hit regions of the epidemic. Currently, immigrants to the United States are screened with blood tests and chest X-rays to detect preclinical tuberculosis. Testing nonimmigrant travelers is obviously a much larger endeavor, but a targeted program is worth the effort.

One major issue with this kind of rapid-testing quarantine is the phenomenon of false positives. But P.C.R.-based testing for Ebola has a low false-positive rate (three per 1,000), and its accuracy could be further improved by focusing on patients who come from particular geographic regions or by using more refined questionnaires. The second problem is false negatives: missing actual carriers of the infection. And yet, at four false negatives per 1,000, the detection rate might be sufficient to keep Ebola from becoming epidemic in the United States. Even the presence of such a testing and tracking system would act as a deterrent to those who wish to evade detection.

A rapid-testing quarantine would be expensive, but a pilot program might teach us much more about how to move forward. It certainly does not solve the civil liberties questions of quarantining, but it makes them vastly more palatable.

Ebola is an ingenious virus. To fight it, we need to be just as ingenious.

Very Simple Agenda Today

• Fair and Unfair Summary
• Article for Study in Prep for THU Exercise.

Very Simple Agenda Today

• Fair and Unfair Summary
• Article for Study in Prep for WED Exercise.

In-class Editorial

For too long, we have acted as if patients have only two end-of-life choices: experiment with treatments, or quit and die.

Health care must reward doctors for learning their patients’ priorities.

We should be ashamed of ourselves if we fail to provide a few days of rich human interaction and sharing, on their terms, to our terminal patients.

When neither choice is right, we owe it to one another to find alternatives.

Our goal as doctors is to facilitate the trade-offs our end-of-life patients are willing to make to achieve the most satisfying last few days they can. (Patients should get what they want, not what their doctors think they need.)

Writing is not a spectator sport; it’s participatory. Editorialists come to us looking their best, engage us in eye contact, make us feel important, and ask us to dance. On the floor they lead, and if they’re good, we follow, swept along by their sure-footed expertise. It helps that they own the studio so that we recognize their authority. It also helps that they get to choose the music and that we come to them seeking instruction.

When we write in the style of the editorialists, with all of our advantages, we don’t waste time on the preliminaries. The sooner we get the partner we want moving in the direction of the dance floor, the less likely we are to be rejected.

We never, for example, require our readers to slog through paragraphs of “background information” to prepare them for argument. Editorials that begin as this one does are taking for granted that the reader has the patience for preliminaries.

People entering the United States from countries that are in the center of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa will now be subjected to screening in five airports. The screening includes temperature checks and a questionnaire upon deplaning and will add some security to ensure the virus does not enter the country. Passengers are also being screened as a pre-requisite to departing from airports in ebola-stricken countries. The US international airports doing the screening—Kennedy, Washington Dulles, O’Hare, Hartsfield-Jackson, and Newark—are the five which receive about 90% of all traffic from those countries.

Some experts doubt that the screenings will be worth the time and effort but they may keep the public calm and relieve some anxiety. The one case of Ebola in the United States thus far, a man named Thomas Eric Duncan, would most likely not have been discovered by the screening. Duncan arrived in the country September 20, and was not diagnosed with Ebola until the 30th, while showing symptoms as early as the 24th. Mr. Duncan has since passed away. The screening alone most likely would not have been enough to say that he had been infected with the virus. His temperature would have been fine and he might have lied on the questionnaire and questioning.

The above paragraphs are a solo performance that fails to engage the reader as a partner in the examination of the facts. As “background” it may have value later, but we don’t woo readers with chit-chat standing on the edge of the ballroom; we take them to the floor.

Suppose instead our editorial began like this:

The new airport screenings for travelers from ebola-stricken countries likely would not have prevented Thomas Eric Duncan from sneaking the dreaded disease into Dallas.

With this first sentence, we introduce the important “background” material that there will be new screening protocols at airports, but more importantly, we make a value judgement about their uselessness that challenges readers to evaluate what we say next about the protocols. They want to find something in those procedures either to verify or to refute the bold claim of our first sentence.

In addition, we’ve made a secondary, rather ominous but subtle claim in the one word “sneaking,” that Duncan might have been deliberately infiltrating the country with a dreaded virus in his person. Feel the difference in the dance when we’re in it, not watching it.

The new airport screenings for travelers from ebola-stricken countries likely would not have prevented Thomas Eric Duncan from sneaking the dreaded disease into Dallas. The protocols are easily thwarted. Passengers will have their temperatures taken on arrival in the US, and they’ll be asked questions upon deplaning. They’ll have been similarly screened before departing any ebola-stricken countries, which amounts to doing too little, twice. Duncan’s temperature was likely normal the day of his flight, and he would have lied about his exposure, as he did in the Dallas hospital where he later showed up with flu-like symptoms.

The US international airports doing the screening—Kennedy, Washington Dulles, O’Hare, Hartsfield-Jackson, and Newark—are the five which receive about 90% of all traffic from those countries, but experts doubt that the screenings will be worth the time and effort, except as a public relations move to keep the public calm and relieve anxiety. Any traveler wishing to bypass the protocols will know which airports to avoid.

While the measures may catch the occasional accidental importation of ebola into the US, they will more likely unfairly detain travelers with malaria, which has the same early symptom profile. But the most troubling shortcoming of the protocols is that they would never prevent the deliberate smuggling of a very deadly virus into the country in the bodies of fanatical terrorists.

Granted the final claim is far-fetched, but so would a warning have been, before 9/11, that terrorists who had trained for years as pilots to prepare themselves for a spectacular act of atrocity would commander several passenger airlines and crash them into national landmarks killing themselves and all their passengers.

The point is, once we move Mr. Duncan’s case to the top of the editorial and suggest that he would have slipped through the new protocols, our readers have much more at stake in what we say next. And that is the job of the first sentence.

• Uncategorized Mechanics
• Eliminate Tags
• A04: Editorial Rewrite Assignment
• Dance Partners
• Writing Workshop: Cookies, Bread, and Beer
• The Best Possible Day