Paper 1: Presenting Insights into the North Korean Regime
Assignment: Analyze information presented in Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy to
answer this question:
To whom do North Korea’s leaders pose the greatest threat, and what is that threat?
Your answer should take the form of an academic argument paper consisting of three pages or
750 words at minimum.
Audience: Librarians who will run public discussions and workshops about Nothing to Envy.
Scenario: You are an intern working for the U.S. Department of State, which is the federal
government’s executive department in charge of foreign affairs. The state department has
received a request from a national initiative funded by the National Endowment for Humanities
and led by librarians as well as English, anthropology, and political science instructors across the
country who want to improve Americans’ global affairs and current events literacy.
This initiative, which is named “Touching the Globe: World Events in Your Public Library” will
distribute free books to the community and organize a series of talks and classes around each
book. The first set of classes will discuss North Korea’s leaders through the information available
about them in Nothing to Envy, the first free book. This is where you come in! As a state
department intern, you have general knowledge about world events and have recently begun
increasing your knowledge about the North Korean regime. As someone who has read the
book as well as some outside sources about North Korea, write a paper for the librarians who
will run the initiative’s public discussions and workshops, recommending to them where they
should direct participants’ focus once a general discussion of the book is underway.
Formatting:
1. Please use the MLA template.docx file posted on Laulima. Please see “A Directory to MLA
Style,” p. 109, and “Sample Research Paper,” p. 149 in Little Seagull.
a. The Purdue OWL website provides similar resources.
i. Visit https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/13/ to view a
sample MLA paper.
ii. Visit https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/675/1/ for an overview
of MLA style.
2. What interesting, somewhat complicated conclusion do you want your reader to understand
and believe by the time s/he has finished reading your paper? Spend your first paragraph
explaining this conclusion. A first paragraph that explains your conclusion is called “thesis
paragraph,” and a conclusion at the beginning of your paper is a “thesis.”
3. Save “laying the groundwork” writing, otherwise known as general background, for later
paragraphs (second paragraph at the earliest). Assume that your reader knows at least as much
as someone taking this class who got sick and fell a few days behind.
4. When citing examples from Nothing to Envy and other readings, explain, analyze, or discuss the
details of those examples in your own words before quoting from the text. Please see
“Integrating Sources, Avoiding Plagiarism” in Little Seagull, pp. 97-108.