Alexandra Zarazua

Senior Defense

May 1, 2019
Argumentative Essay

This argumentative assignment was titled Working Mother Argumentative Essay. This

assignment was completed during my eleventh-grade year in my contemporary composition

class here at Huntington Park Institute of Applied Medicine at Linda Marquez High School. In

this assignment, as a class, we read an article that argued that mothers don’t have to be present

for a child. We were asked to write an argumentative essay agreeing or disagreeing with Brayke

about that statement and support our argument with textual evidence. This assignment was

argumentative because I disagreed with Brayke. I supported my argument with evidence I found

online as well as textual evidence. For example, I used statistics from a credible online source

that said there were over a million juvenile gang members in the U.S more than three times the

estimated by law enforcement according to a recent study. I used this statistic in order to support

my claim that if mothers are not there for their children, they will end up finding that love from

someone or somewhere else. My assignment was an argumentative piece because I argued that a

mother should be there for her child one hundred percent of the time. One of my arguments was

that if children do not have that love from their mother, they will begin to find that love in all the

wrong places. By this, I meant that the kids can possibly get into gangs and hang around wrong

influences​.
 In this assignment, I practiced my critical thinking skills for my student learning

outcome. I was a critical thinker by completing my argument assignment about disagreeing with

Brayke about defending that it is much better for mother’s to stay home to take care of their

children . I was a critical thinker by creating my three arguments that supported my thesis and

separating them into paragraphs in order to explain them in depth. I was a critical thinker by

analyzing my sources and my textual evidence to make sure they were credible, reliable, and that

they supported my claim which was that mothers should be taking care of their children. I was

also a critical thinker by analyzing the evidence I used in my argumentative essay to provide

examples and statistics to support my opinion . For example, when I researched online evidence I

made sure I used credible sources such as gov., edu, org., etc. Finally, I was a critical thinker by

researching information regarding the topic of a working mother and the effects on her children.

This made me a critical thinker because reading the articles served as a guidance throughout the

essay because I was well informed on the topic I was discussing.

This assignment helped me with my arguments by strengthening what I say or write in

my assignment. Before, I would often contradict myself when writing an argumentative

assignment, but now I’m able to discuss one argument and support that with evidence. This

assignment also helped my skill of selecting the pieces of evidence supporting my claim. I need

to improve my sentence structure when presenting my evidence, for example, my transitions

need to connect in sequence. I also need improvement in explaining my evidence so the reader

can understand the reason and be convinced with my argument.