Critical Thinker

Comma Rules

Commas are designed to help writers avoid confusing sentences and to clarify the logic of their sentences.

If you cook Jeff will clean the dishes. (Will you cook Jeff?)

While we were eating a rattlesnake approached us. (Were we eating a rattlesnake?)

Comma Rule 1: Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction (FANBOYS) joining two independent clauses.

Rattlesnakes are high in protein, but I’d rather eat a peanut butter sandwich.

Rattlesnakes are dangerous, and the desert species are even more so.

We are a proud people, for our ancestors passed down these famous delicacies over a period of five thousand years.

The exception to rule 1 is when the two independent clauses are short:

The plane took off and we were on our way.

Comma Rule 2: Use a comma after an introductory clause or phrase.

When Jeff Henderson was in prison, he developed an appetite for reading.

In the nearby room, the TV is blaring full blast.

Tanning in the hot Hermosa Beach sun for over two hours, I realized I had better call it a day.

The exception is when the short adverb clause or phrase is short and doesn’t create the possibility of a misreading:

In no time we were at 2,800 feet.

Comma Rule 3: Use a comma between all items in a series.

 

Jeff Henderson found redemption through hard work, self-reinvention, and social altruism.

Finding his passion, mastering his craft, and giving back to the community were all part of Jeff Henderson’s self-reinvention.

Comma Rule 4: Use a comma between coordinate adjectives not joined with “and.” Do not use a comma between cumulative adjectives.

 

The adjectives below are called coordinate because they modify the noun separately:

Jeff Henderson is a passionate, articulate, wise speaker.

The adjectives above are coordinate because they can be joined with “and.” Jeff Henderson is passionate and articulate and wise.

Adjectives that do not modify the noun separately are cumulative.

Three large gray shapes moved slowly toward us.

Chocolate fudge peanut butter swirl coconut cake is divine.

Comma Rule 5: Use commas to set off nonrestrictive (nonessential) elements. 

Restrictive or essential information doesn’t have a comma:

For school the students need notebooks that are college-ruled.

Jeff’s cat that just had kittens became very aggressive.

Nonrestrictive:

For school the students need college-ruled notebooks, which are on sale at the bookstore.

Jeff Henderson’s mansion, which is located in Las Vegas, has a state-of-the-art kitchen.

My youngest sister, who plays left wing on the soccer team, now lives at The Sands, a beach house near Los Angeles.

Are We Ready to Replace Personal Cars with Autonomous Vehicles?

Are we ready to replace personal cars with autonomous vehicles?

 

Option A:

 

Read Allison Arieff’s “Cars Are Death Machines. Self-Driving Tech Won’t Change That” and support or refute her contention that self-driving cars are not the solution to traffic dangers. 

 

Pros and Cons in a Nutshell

 

Pro: People are terrible drivers prone to error and distractions, so in terms of raw numbers people will always create fatal accidents more than Teslas. 

 

Con: But here’s the psychological hurdle: In a self-driving car, you lose control. You don’t surrender control only.

 

Con: You also surrender information. All of your driving is “looked at.” 

You are also susceptible to hacking. 

 

Con: Current costs of autonomous vehicles are too expensive to scale.

From the 2020 article “Are self-driving cars safe for our cities?” by Alissa Walker

Two Arguments Against Autonomous Vehicles

 

Some argue the safety record for self-driving cars isn’t proven, and that it’s unclear whether or not enough testing miles have been driven in real-life conditions. Other safety advocates go further, and say that driverless cars are introducing a new problem to cities, when cities should instead be focusing on improving transit and encouraging walking and biking instead.

Not sure widespread variety of self-driving cars is an argument:

 

Contentions aside, the autonomous revolution is already here, although some cities will see its impacts sooner than others. From Las Vegas, where a Navya self-driving minibus scoots slowly along a downtown street, to General Motors’ Cruise ride-hailing service in San Francisco with backup humans in the driver’s seat, to Waymo’s family-focused Chandler, Arizona–based pilot program that uses no human operators in its Chrysler Pacifica minivans at all, the country is accelerating towards a driverless future.

 

Why Autonomous Vehicles Cars Are Safer

 

Can autonomous cars drive better than humans?

The biggest safety advantage to an autonomous vehicle is that a robot is not a human—it is programmed to obey all the rules of the road, won’t speed, and can’t be distracted by a text message flickering onto a phone. And, hypothetically at least, AVs can also detect what humans can’t—especially at night or in low-light conditions—and react more quickly to avoid a collision.

AVs are laden with sensors and software that work together to build a complete picture of the road. One key technology for AVs is LIDAR, or a “light-detecting and ranging” sensor. Using millions of lasers, LIDAR draws a real-time, 3D image of the environment around the vehicle. In addition to LIDAR, radar sensors can measure the size and speed of moving objects. And high-definition cameras can actually read signs and signals. As the car is traveling, it cross-references all this data with GPS technology that situates the vehicle within a city and helps to plan its route.

In addition to the sensors and maps, AVs run software programs which make real-time decisions about how the car will navigate relative to other vehicles, humans, or objects in the road. Engineers can run the cars through simulations, but the software also needs to learn from actual driving situations. This is why real-world testing on public roads is so important.

But how AV companies gather that information has led to greater concerns about how autonomous vehicles can detect and avoid vulnerable road users, like cyclists, and people who move slowly and more erratically through streets, like seniors and children. Waymo, for example, claims its software has been explicitly programmed to recognize cyclists. A video that Waymo released in 2016 (back when it was still part of Google) shows how one of its vehicles detected and stopped for a wrong-way cyclist coming around a corner at night.

Benefits of Autonomous Vehicles:

Will eliminating human drivers reduce traffic deaths?

50 years ago, the U.S.’s rate of traffic deaths was higher than they are now—in 1980, generally considered to be the deadliest year on U.S. streets, over 50,000 people were killed. With safety features like airbags added to vehicles, stricter seat belt laws, and campaigns that stigmatized drunk driving, the rate of deaths went down significantly.

But over the last few years, the U.S. has seen a slight increase in traffic deaths again. Additionally, pedestrian fatalities increased by 27 percent over the last decade, while all other traffic fatalities decreased by 14 percent. There isn’t agreement for why these deaths are increasing, but some experts believe that this is because Americans are driving more—overall vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) reached an all-time high in 2017.

Using USDOT’s claim that 94 percent of crashes are caused by human error, it seems like a fairly obvious way to reduce crashes is to reduce the number of humans behind the wheel. But it’s not just the number of human drivers that should be reduced, the U.S. could also reduce the number of cars on roads to prevent fatalities—and autonomous vehicles might be able to help do that, too.

The real safety promise of autonomous vehicles is the fact that these vehicles can be be summoned on-demand, routed more efficiently, and easily shared—meaning not just the overall number of single-passenger cars on streets will decline, but the number of single-passenger trips will be reduced, meaning a reduction in overall miles traveled.

In addition, cities can use automated vehicles to tackle ambitious on-demand transit projects, like a proposed initiative to integrate shared self-driving vehicles into the public transit fleet. If cities can launch these kind of “microtransit” systems that serve as a first-mile/last-mile solution to help get more people to fixed-route public transportation, that will also mean fewer people in cars and more people on safer modes of transit. According to a 2016 American Public Transportation Association study, traveling by public transportation is ten times safer per mile than traveling by car.

Without having to make room for so many cars, city streets can be narrowed, making even more room for pedestrians and bikes to safely navigate cities. In this way, autonomous vehicles have a great role to play as part of a Vision Zero strategy, which most major U.S. cities have implemented in order to eliminate traffic deaths.

You can consult “7 Arguments Against the Autonomous-Vehicle Utopia” by Alexis C. Madrigal. 

Here are 5 of the 7 Arguments:

One, AVs lack human smarts for real-life on-the-spot irregularities, like a drunk person bolting across the street. 

Two, AVs can get hacked.

Three, AVs are too expensive for private ownership, and AVs are too expensive to make money for the companies that lend the cars to the public. 

Four, Even if the car companies have 99% safety success, the 1% failure rate, or even .001% failure rate could expose them to liability that would bankrupt them. 

Five, The AV will eventually have the safety and cost effectiveness necessary to scale, but this won’t happen for decades.

Suggested Outline:

Introduction, use an attention-getter such as the AV Tesla that involved the death of a pedestrian. 

Thesis, pose the question if the AV is superior mode of transportation to our current personal car ownership, and then provide the answer with 4 pieces of evidence you will use throughout the body paragraphs of your essays.

Body Paragraphs

Counterargument-Rebuttal: Be sure to anticipate your opponents’ most pressing objections.

Conclusion: powerful restatement of your thesis.

Sample Thesis:

While I concede that there will come a time when autonomous vehicles replace personal car ownership, the current legal, safety, and technological obstacles make this transition something we won’t see for at least a couple of decades. 

Should Community College be Free?

Option D: Should community college be free?

Develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the claim that community college should be free. Be sure to have a counterargument section.

 

For research, use Rahm Emanuel’s “A Simple Proposition to Revive the American Dream” and Jay Mathews’ “Maybe tuition-free community college comes at too high a price” and any other relevant sources such as “Here’s the downside of making community college free” by Bruce Sacerdote, “Community College ‘free-for-all’: Why making tuition free would be complicated,” by Dick Statz, “Economists find free community college can backfire” by Jill Barshay, “When Community College Is Free,” by Juan Salgado, “For community colleges, free college has its costs,” by Liz Farmer, and “The potential disaster of free community college” by Biana Quilantan. 

 

Sample Essay Outline for "Should College be Free?"

Paragraph 1, Introduce the crisis of college education and discuss the and how many people are priced out of an education. Clearly, there is a need for free community college. Establishing the need is a good attention-getter, but it’s not an argument. It’s a fact. You can use this fact later in your essay if you decide to support free college education.

You can also use personal experience to create emotional appeal for your essay, showing in detail some of your financial struggles and how zero-cost education would benefit you. 

Paragraph 2, Transition to a thesis that argues for or against free community college with 3 supporting reasons.

Paragraphs 3-5 are supporting paragraphs.

Paragraphs 6 and 7 are separate rebuttal-counterargument paragraphs

Paragraph 8: conclusion is powerful restatement of thesis

Should Community College be Free?

One. Rahm Emanuel in The Atlantic argues that community college, like K through 12, should be free. 

Rahm Emanuel's essay "A Simple Proposal to Revive the American Dream"

(parenthetical headings are mine)

(History compels taxpayers to make community college free because CC is the equivalent of yesterday's high school.)

During the industrial age, when high school was the gateway to the American dream, public-school systems covered the costs of earning a diploma. Today, however, as associate’s degrees have replaced high-school diplomas as the indispensable ticket into the middle class, families are forced to cover the costs of tuition and more.

(Information Economy requires post-high school education.)

If the information-age economy demands a workforce with additional training, we need to begin cutting students and families the same deal: Anyone willing to work hard and earn the degree should be able to attend community college—for free.

(Free college requires 3.0 GPA. so that by free we mean merit-based) Is this just a “scholarship” for the 1-3%?

Because Washington has yet to shed any real light on how best to do this, each state and city has taken a different tack. Under the terms of the Chicago Star Scholarship, a program that has already enrolled more than 6,000 students, we tied eligibility to academic achievement. If a student at a local public high school maintains a B average, the City will provide a free associate’s degree at a local community college, regardless of immigration status. Then, through a program we call Star Plus, students who have maintained that 3.0 GPA are eligible to receive subsidized tuition at 18 of the four-year colleges located in Chicago, enabling many to graduate debt-free.

At the outset, we chose to make our program merit-based for two reasons. First, we suspected that setting a rigorous academic standard would change attitudes inside Chicago’s high schools. If students in grades nine to 12 know that good grades will earn them a guaranteed free education, they’re further incentivized to run through the tape. (Chicago’s high-school graduation rate grew from 56.9 percent in 2011 to 78.2 percent in 2018.) Second, we theorized that making the scholarship merit-based would help the program avoid the plague of college dropouts—and that’s exactly what’s happened. Chicago Star’s retention rate is 86 percent, well above the national average of 62.7 percent.

(Free includes other costs to expand higher education access to those who are economically challenged.)

Next, we decided to institute a series of carrots and sticks. Unlike some of its sister programs, Chicago Star covers not only tuition, but books and public transportation as well. And we decided to require recipients to complete the program in three years, allowing students to earn their associate’s degree while working full-time, but precluding them from dragging the process out indefinitely. Our shot-clock approach works: 49.7 percent of Chicago Star recipients complete their degree, more than double the national average of 23.6 percent.

The demographic impact is remarkable. More than two-thirds of Chicago Star scholars are Hispanic (compared with 20 percent in Oregon)—and 80 percent are first-generation college students (compared with 43 percent in Tennessee). But proud as we are of these successes, there’s no substitute for rigorous data analysis, and Washington should get in the game of determining which approaches work best. Policy makers in Arkansas, Hawaii, Kentucky, Nevada, and other states working to shape similar programs should know how free community college affects high-school graduation rates, for example, and whether “use it or lose it” time limits drive completion rates. As cities and states serve as laboratories of democracy, our national leaders must look to these programs as models for modernizing and expanding access to higher education.

Counterargument

Two. We see that free community college is no panacea or cure-all in The Washington Post article. 

Jay Mathews' "Maybe tuition-free community college comes at too high a price":

(parenthetical headings are mine)

(A CC insider argues that free college isn't the solution: graduating on time is and so is transitioning to a job or a 4-year college.)

Few educational issues, at least the nerdy kind I write about, get people riled up. Angry demonstrators rarely carry banners demanding, “More Research Papers in High School!” or “Down With Credit Recovery!”

But one school issue — free college tuition — has been getting big political play this year. Community college counselor John Mullane wishes that would stop. He has been spending much of his time explaining why free tuition would be bad for his students.

How can that be? Many community college students don’t have much money. Why not make their struggles to get an education easier by making sure they don’t have to pay that bill?

“Providing tuition-free opportunities at public colleges and universities is far superior than the typical hodgepodge of aid packages and loans that are cobbled together by many students,” says the nonpartisan, nonprofit Campaign for Free College Tuition. Some polls show more than 80 percent support for that idea.

Mullane is not allowed to promote his views on state and federal education spending during his working hours at Gateway Community College in New Haven, Conn. His job is to help students negotiate the complicated pathways of learning so they can establish a career and a life. What does he know of legislative politics?

He knows community colleges. He has spent his personal and vacation time doing research and making convincing arguments that getting rid of tuition would make it harder for his students to earn the certificates and diplomas they need.

“States can make college as free as they want,” he told me, “but if they don’t have a system in place to help students get through these institutions and graduate on time, with a college degree that allows them to go directly into a good job or to fully transfer the credits to a bachelor’s degree, they are doing more harm than good.”

(Free college means less resources for other areas resulting in a compromised education.)

The free tuition idea, he said, “involves spending hundreds of billions of dollars and flooding public colleges and universities with new students.” Increased spending on tuition to make sure everyone gets a free ride would mean less money to hire more professors and less money to expand room in the most important classes so that students can get what they need to graduate, he said.

(Free college is no solution to abysmal completion rates.)

Mullane testified before the Connecticut legislature in favor of a bill that would have allowed students to transfer all community college credits to the University of Connecticut and the Connecticut State universities. The two big systems opposed that measure. They said their transfer systems were working fine, despite research showing that only 6 percent of Connecticut community college students are in a degree program that allows them to transfer all their credits to the state universities.

Sixty-one percent of community college students told the Center for Community College Student Engagement at the University of Texas in 2016 that they could get the certificates and degrees they sought. Yet only 39 percent of community college students get a certificate, an associate degree or a bachelor’s degree from a four-year college within six years.

Only 15 percent of students who begin in a community college ever earn a bachelor’s degree. Traditionally, colleges have fought for more students — something free tuition would give them — but have done little to ensure successful student outcomes because state funding has usually been based on enrollment.

Mullane endorses what many scholars of the community college system say: States need to tear down traditions that keep many students stuck in remedial courses and leave transfer paths to four-year schools that look like a Halloween season cornfield maze.

Mullane said he is pushing for “state laws that mandate statewide transfer pathways for students.” Then, they have to be enforced, he said — which could prove even more difficult. That is not happening with many such laws at the moment.

There is good news in some parts of the country. Florida has one of the best transfer systems in the country. But its reforms are complicated and hard to summarize in one slogan. How can it beat a movement with a banner as simple and compelling as “Free Tuition Now”?

Second Suggested Outline

Paragraph 1, your introduction, summarize Rahm Emanual's case for making free community college.

Paragraph 2, your claim or your thesis, support or refute Emanual's argument by addressing Jay Mathews' objections. 

Paragraphs 3-6 are your supporting paragraphs.

Paragraph 7 is your counterargument-rebuttal.

Paragraph 8 is your conclusion, a restatement of your thesis. 

Sample Thesis

 

While free college education would help a small percentage of low-income students who already have a baseline of writing and math skills, for the most part the argument for free community college is not persuasive when we consider that free things tend to lead to entropy (decline, chaos and worthlessness), free college doesn’t solve the problems of baseline acquisition that would allow students to complete their graduation in a timely manner, free tuition would take away from budgeting for instructors and infrastructure, and free college would only lower the already abysmally low graduation rate.