take a clear position on your chosen question. No “fence-sitting.” Provide as much support for your position and claims as possible. This also means explaining how the evidence you present supports your claim. Evidence/support rarely, if ever, “speaks for itself.”  Citations should be placed at the end of the relevant sentence(s), prior to the final punctuation. If you include mentions of current events, news stories, or historical events, please provide proper citations for those as well. Please use in-text/parenthetical citations, not footnotes or endnotes, for all citations. Remember, you need to include citations for all references to words AND ideas that are not your own, regardless of whether you are quoting directly or not. discussion posts should be between 200 and 500 words, but this is only a loose guideline. No credit will be gained or lost by meeting (or failing to meet) this word count guideline. Posts will be evaluated on substance alone (i.e., answering the question given or fully explaining your own take, clear argumentation, support, effort, and creativity).