Poverty, by definition, is when someone cannot afford to buy, or doesn’t possess, resources that are considered essential in a person’s life. Examples of such resources include food, potable water, shelter to live in, etc.

Poverty caught everyone’s attention and once again became an important social issue during the Covid-19 pandemic when unemployment had reached a record high. Because of unemployment, many people lost their sources of income, which then pushed many of them into poverty. Governments did try their best at using various economic policies to reduce unemployment, but till now, no government has even been successful at completely eradicating poverty.

A snip from Poverty in America Documentary 2017 on YouTube

The reason why I chose poverty as the topic for this assignment is because of how deadly it can be. Poverty can have detrimental, physical as well as mental, effects on the person that is experiencing it. Having little or no food for many days or being deprived of water during the summer can take a huge toll on any person’s body. Also, poverty can lead to other social issues such as homelessness, malnutrition, etc.

For this major assignment, I have chosen 3 scholarly articles and 1 easily verifiable article by a news agency. The 3 scholarly articles discuss poverty in the United States, with each of them analyzing a different aspect of poverty.

The scholarly article by David Brady and Zachary Parolin discusses extreme and deep poverty, two terms that describe the worst variations of poverty. The article also analyzes multiple data points and tries to estimate the number of people living in deep and extreme poverty in the United States. The second scholarly article by Navarro Carlos Gayán and other authors tries to find out the determinants of poverty in the United States. The authors try to present a view that determining the causes of poverty would be of no use if there is no action taken to affect those causes. They provide many determinants of poverty by analyzing data over a period of time and then concluding based on the analysis. The scholarly article by Jeremiah Bohr and Anna C. McCreery talks about energy bills and how they contribute to poverty. They discuss various factors that determine the energy bill and how that can lead families into economic poverty. The easily verifiable article’s role in this assignment is to act as a reliable source of information that strengthens the topic by talking about the impact of Covid-19 on the people who were already living in poverty. 

For the formatting, I would be referring to the Purdue OWL as well as to the Page Formatting Worksheet. In addition to that, I would also be referring to Dr. Fentem’s Style Preferences. For sentence structuring, I would be using the Expository Writing Okay and Good Examples as a guide.

There are two major problems that I have faced till now while working on the assignment: sentence structuring and reaching the 1000-word limit. For sentence structuring, the problem for me is to not give out my opinion. As this is an expository essay, I have to restrict myself to only giving out facts and explanations, and not opinions. This is a bit difficult as I have to check every sentence I write and make sure that it contains no opinion. The second problem is related to the first problem. Because I am very critical about the sentences I write, I end up having to edit or delete some of them, which reduces the word count of the article.