Examples that show the thinking.
534 examples and lessons to explore. Find an approach, follow the thinking, and try it in your own writing.
Can Technology Support Meaningful Social Connection?
Technology can help people maintain contact and find support, but meaningful connection depends on relationship quality, not simply the number of messages or online contacts. Evidence about U.S. teenagers shows both real benefits and meaningful limits.
Should Teenagers Have More Control Over Their Online Data?
An argument for giving teenagers meaningful, age-appropriate control over their online data while preserving parental involvement and recognizing the limits of current U.S. protections.
Art as a Career and Art as a Hobby
A compare-and-contrast essay examining how purpose, obligations, and measures of progress differ when art is pursued as paid work or as a hobby.
Young Adults and the Cost of Establishing an Independent Household
An explanatory essay on how U.S. rents, earnings, and financial buffers interact as young adults establish independent households, with attention to disparities and limits in interpreting national survey evidence.
Changing Definitions of U.S. Citizenship, 1865–1920
An argument tracing citizenship’s constitutional expansion after the Civil War and the limits imposed by gender exclusion, court decisions, racial violence, and unequal access to rights.
Food Waste Is an Environmental and Household Problem
An explanatory essay on how wasted food squanders household resources and contributes to environmental harm, and why prevention should come before recovery and disposal.
Later School Start Times: Learning, Sleep, and Practical Constraints
An evidence-based argument for later middle and high school start times that explains adolescent sleep needs, interprets U.S. school-start data in its historical context, and considers practical scheduling objections.
Amanda Gorman on Optimism and Pessimism: When Is Hope Most Powerful?
An argumentative essay contending that optimism is strongest when it listens to pessimism’s evidence and limits, while explaining why hope can also become an excuse for inaction.
Has Social Media Done More Harm Than Good? Evaluate Its Effects on Society
A qualified argument that social media’s benefits are meaningful, but that its harms to well-being can outweigh them when they interfere with sleep, productivity, and supportive relationships.
Romeo and Juliet: Memory, Grief, and the Feud
An analysis of how inherited hostility and grief over Mercutio and Tybalt shape the lovers’ decisions and make reconciliation increasingly difficult in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
Why Job Growth Does Not Automatically Mean Every Worker Benefits
An evidence-based explanation of why expanding occupations do not guarantee that every worker can access a job, meet its requirements, or benefit from its conditions.
Migration and the Western United States, 1820–1898
An evidence-based argument about how migration shaped western settlement, economic activity, and Indigenous communities, while considering the influence of transportation and federal power.