Please write a 5-8 page paper (double-spaced, with 12 point font and no more than 1″ margins) on the question below. This essay is due March 3, 2017 by 11:59.
Be sure to cite ALL of your sources and to use the correct MLA format for the Works Cited list (the bibliography) on an additional page at the end of your essay.
Essay Topic
I called this essay, “The Research Paper of DEATH,” because it sounded silly. It is, in fact, about death! According to the Centers for Disease Control, these are the ten leading causes of death in the United States, as of 2015:

• Heart disease: 614,348
• Cancer: 591,699
• Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 147,101
• Accidents (unintentional injuries): 136,053
• Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 133,103
• Alzheimer’s disease: 93,541
• Diabetes: 76,488
• Influenza and pneumonia: 55,227
• Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 48,146
• Intentional self-harm (suicide): 42,773

These are the top ten causes of death for people of all ages in the US. Accidents, including intentional acts of violence, are the leading cause of death for people in the first half of life—up to age 44. This includes motor vehicle crashes, homicides and falls.

(If you find more recent or robust statistics because you do this research later or better than I did, use them!)

For this paper, I want you to pick one of these causes of death and talk about how gender, race and class affect who dies of them. If you would like to concentrate on motor vehicle crashes or violent deaths, or you want to break out gun violence as a topic, I will accept that. Contact me if you have questions about how to narrow your topic.

Specifically, I am interested in:

1. Do class, race or gender affect individuals’ access to health care that could prevent this cause of death from killing them?
2. Do gender, race and class affect individuals’ access to other resources (food, water, clean air, law enforcement) that could prevent this cause of death from killing them?
3. Do race, gender or class affect how individuals are treated by doctors, nurses and other care providers for these potential causes of death?
4. Do gender, race or class affect individuals’ social roles in ways that put them at greater risk of dying from the cause of death you picked?
5. Do intersectional approaches to the data or to analysis change the picture? That is, do people from the same race but different gender, or the same gender but different classes, experience this cause of death differently? (Secondary research should help you find this—new primary research analysis should not be necessary.)
You may use articles from academic journals, articles from professional journals, statistics provided by the government, non-profit agencies or academic institutes that are published online, journalistic articles, or books. Make sure that you know what kind of source you are using—check who wrote the piece and when. Go deep and ask a lot of questions!
Writing Objectives
Essays should be a minimum of five paragraphs, including the introduction and conclusion, but your essay can certainly include more body paragraphs.
This essay will be graded on its clarity, its arguments and its organization. I will look for:
• a thesis statement in the introduction,
• a topic sentence in every paragraph,
• evidence from research in every paragraph that supports your topic sentence, and
• a strong conclusion that draws on the points you present in the body of the essay
The conclusion should be a separate paragraph that restates the thesis and drives your main arguments home.