What is an easy and smart sounding research topic for a high school student to write a 10 page paper about?

This is the kind of assignment that the college freshmen I teach in First-Year English Composition and Rhetoric are given three times per semester. The advice that I like to give my students is to choose a subject that you are passionate about or have an interest in learning more about. Select a topic that personally affects you, and you will have no trouble sounding "smart" because the act of researching will be an engaging process for you. Do NOT pick a topic that you have no interest in simply because it seems easy to write about; this will often lead to the classic teenage disease known as "procrastination," which can lead to the even more fatal condition known as "writing your paper the night before it is due."

Here is what I like to ask my students when they are searching for a topic: Look at the world around you and your life. Are you happy with it? Would you want to be living this exact life in this exact world's conditions in fifteen years? The answer is likely no. The average human being can find issue with something in their life. So what is it? What would you like to change?

Personally, a topic that I care a lot about right now is the private prison industrial complex and the incentivizing of locking people up. What this means is that non-violent offenders are being given longer and longer prison sentences for drug-related offenses, all for the financial benefits of huge corporate investors who profit when prisons are full. This has resulted in huge personal consequences for inmates who will likely not see the light of day for years (if ever) and has decreased efforts toward limiting recidivism (the likelihood that one re-commits a crime) and rehabilitating criminals. A vast majority of these sentences are also reflective of a sinister judicial system which is predicated on racial bias and prejudice, with 70% of imprisoned individuals being people of color. This topic impacts me because I spent a year teaching Creative Writing to maximum security students in a state prison; I saw firsthand how damaging imprisonment was to the psyche of my students, many who came from impoverished and underprivileged backgrounds.

So, to reiterate: think hard about what troubles you about the world around you and choose something to advocate on the behalf of. Pick up any newspaper and you'll find some cause worth fighting for.

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...

nouns - what do you call the person who passes the trophies to the prize giver/presenter?

The person who gives out the trophies to the winners are called award presenters. So what do u call the person who passes the trophies to the presenter? Thanks!

Is 'efficate' a word in English?

I routinely hear the word "efficate" being used. For example, "The most powerful way to efficate a change in the system is to participate." I do not find entries for this word in common English dictionaries, but I do not have an unabridged dictionary. I have checked the OED (I'm not sure if it is considered unabridged), and it has no entry for "efficate". It does have an entry for "efficiate", which is used in the same way. Wordnik has an entry for "efficate" with over 1800 hits, thus providing some evidence for the frequency of use. I personally like the word and find the meaning very clear and obvious when others use it. If it's not currently an "officially documented" word, perhaps its continued use will result in it being better documented.

Notes

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