Answer

English Composition I: Persuasive Essay Worksheet

Topic: Is the Internet Making Us Smatter or Dumber?

Argument: The internet continues to hinder our abilities to review topics, deliberate and think critically thereby making us dumber.

Thesis Statement

The internet makes us dumber by lowering their desire to become inquisitive, comprehend, think, and retain information.

Reason #1

The introduction and mass spread of internet across societies has made it easy and fast for people to get answers to any question online and trust such information instead of reviewing the topics and thinking critically on their own.

Topic sentence #1

The internet jeopardizes people’s originality and higher order thinking. .

Reason #2

When people work online, their brains are repetitively pressured to absorb large amount of information and this together with numerous links that are connected to others, sidebar advertisement flash and divert attention, attractive webpages, and various components of a web page distract people as they search for information online causes decreased attention spans that initiates other critical cognitive challenges.

Topic Sentence #2

The internet promotes the development of short term attention spans and scattered thinking.

Reason #3

People depend on the internet to get solutions to their problems but this makes it difficult to establish how much knowledge people already have or how effective they have become in getting solutions to the challenges they grapple with in their daily lives.

Topic Sentence #3

The internet reduces people’s desire to become inquisitive.

Source #1: Carr, N. (2010). Does the Internet make you dumber? Wall Street Journal, 5(10).

This source supports the reason that the internet jeopardizes people’s originality and higher order thinking, as well as, the second reason that states that internet promotes the development of short term attention spans and scattered thinking. According to this source, the introduction and mass spread of the internet has made people to trust every information they get online without giving such information a second thought.

Source#2: Shirky, C. (2010). Does the internet make you smarter? Wall Street Journal, 4(6).

            This source supports the second reason that states that the internet promotes the development of short term attention spans and scattered thinking. Clearly, this source states that humans are interrupted and distracted because as they tend to remain online, their brains cannot withstand the expansive and strong neural connections that provide distinctiveness and depth to our thinking.

Source #3: Hooper, V., & Herath, C. (2014). Is Google Making Us Stupid? The Impact of the Internet on Reading Behaviour. In Bled eConference (p. 1).

This source supports the argument that the internet reduces people’s desire to become inquisitive because it explains how the internet makes it challenging to determine how much knowledge people already have or how effective they have become in getting solutions to the challenges they experience.

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