ENG 111: Paper topics on Iraq

Here are some ideas for paper topics based on the brownbag lunch talk that Sr. Rihab Mousa, O.P., gave Wednesday of last week in the SCI Resource Center, along with some links. One is to an article Sr. Rihab wrote for the Dominican Life | USA website about her visit to her Dominican community in Mosul and her home town of Qaraqush in the summer of 2005. (It not only goes over some of the same things she told us last week. It also gives correct spellings of names, places, etc.) You can find other information on Sr. Rihab by googling her name, and the Dominican community in Springfield has a wealth of information on Iraq available on its website. All of this can be good background for your paper.

Your assignment will be to write a 500- to 750-word expository (or explanatory) paper in which you state a thesis related to what you learned from Sr. Rihab's talk and support (or explain) that thesis with factual evidence drawn from your notes on the talk, information you find on the web and your own knowledge. Here are some ideas to get you started choosing a topic and narrowing it down to a thesis statement:

• Christians in Iraq. Several people said in class discussion after Wednesday's talk we were surprised to hear how many Christians there were in Iraq. There is a lot of information on the web about the Christian communities in Iraq, and you could take what you learned from Sr. Rihab as a starting point. Go to profiles published by the BBC (British Broadcasting Corp. and the Arab TV station al Jazeera. You will find several good articles by googling on keywords "Iraq" and "Christian," too. If you are interested in what the Dominicans are doing in Iraq, you could narrow your topic to their activities. Lots of different ways to narrow it.
  
• Do the media get it right? One point several of us brought up in class was the picture we get of Iraq from the media is quite different from the way people from Iraq perceive the reality of living there. Part of that is because it is hard for Americans to report on Iraq (scroll down to the next most recent post to this blog, "COM 209: Reporting from Baghdad") for more information. And part of it is in the nature of news, which emphasizes the unusual just by definition. You might start by listing the things Sr. Rihab said that surprised you, and compare them to the stereotypes Americans have of Iraq or the Middle East in general. What kinds of stories do you find on the Google news page? Try actually counting them. (There might be some surprises there, too. What are the stories about? How many try to explain what conditions are like there?) Lots of possibilities there, and lots of ways to narrow the topic.
  
• Life in another culture. Sr. Rihab said a very basic problem is that Americans just don't understand Iraqi culture. Have you spent time in a different culture? If you have visited Europe or Mexico, how did you cope with the language? What did people do that you didn't expect? How did you get used to it? Or your experience might be as simple as spending a week visiting relatives on a farm if you grew up in town (or in the city if you grew up in the country or a small town). Going away to school, or even the transition from junior high to high school ... or high school to college ... might give you experiences that help you understand some of the challenges Sr. Rihab spoke of. How can we use our experiences to overcome cultural barriers? How can we as Americans overcome the difficulty of learning other languages and other cultures? Again, lots of different ways to find a topic and narrow it.
  

All of these ideas I'm throwing out just to get you started thinking about a topic you'd like to write on. The next step is to choose one, narrow it down and check it out with me before you start writing. The theme will be due at the end of next week, so you have a couple of days to think about what topic you'd like to write about. See me -- or email me -- if you have questions.