Personal Responsibilty Argumentative Essay

Thesis Statement and Informal Outline Worksheet

In this course, you will write a 700- to 1,400-word Personal Responsibility Essay, due in Week Five, which includes the following:

Definition of personal responsibility and what it means to you. Explain the relationship between personal responsibility and college success. Include a preliminary plan to practice personal responsibility in your education.

This week, using the Center for Writing Excellence resources, provide the thesis statement and informal outline for your Personal Responsibility Essay assignment, due in Week Five.

Thesis Statement: Personal responsibility is defined as taking responsibility for your actions and accepting the consequences of those actions because taking responsibility for your actions means you do not try to blame others for you not being able to finish school or your goals. Also, accepting the consequences of our actions teaches us to be more mindful of our choices and we can react to our mistakes. Even though blaming others for our failures is easy because we are more likely to feel better about the situation if someone else has to face the consequences.

Informal Outline: Personal Responsibility: Your Fault or Mine? Introduction: What is personal responsibility? How do you define it? Everybody has a different opinion when it comes to personal responsibility and how its defined. I define it as owning up to my actions and taking the consequences for those actions. II. Taking responsibility for your actions in every situation. A. When we take responsibility for our actions we admit that we made a mistake and we try to correct that mistake.

B. Take responsibility by making sure that when we make a mistake, we learn from that mistake, and try not to do the same thing again. 1. Example: You write a paper at the last minute and get a bad grade because you rushed through the paper. By making that bad grade, you learn to not procrastinate and take more time to do you assignment III. Accepting the consequences means we have to face the music (so to speak) and deal with whatever the outcome from our mistake. A. When accepting the consequences, we must be mindful that the result of our mistake can either be negative or positive, depending on the situation. 1. If we do not take time to work on our class assignment, then we receive a bad grade and the result is negative.

B. Consequences are the defining factor in our daily lives because we make every decision based on whether or not the decision is good or bad for us. IV. Blaming others for our failures is very easy because if we blame someone else, then we will not have to face the consequences. A. If someone makes a mistake, it is so easy to blame others and let them take the blame. 1. In school, it is so easy to blame the instructor for the bad grade, rather than taking responsibility for not doing the work. B. Do not let others take the blame, instead own up and face the consequences.