Hi Professor, I could use some help getting started. Here is what I have so far. I’m researching how the creation of a false persona on social media leads to negative and unhealthy offline relationships. One cause for this is due to childhood maltreatment, and how the internet is used as a coping mechanism to deal with their trauma. However, I am having trouble going beyond this. I know that adolescents use these social networking sites to connect to others and that there is peer pressure to conform to others. This can lead to one spreading misleading information about themselves to “fit in”, but ultimately leads to a fake identity that affects offline relationships. How can I make this argument better? Do I do the cause and effect of why one needs to create a false identity? Or how special media affects all different types of relationships?
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Counterintuitive 
I’ll do what I can here, BeachGirl6, but I’m at a disadvantage because I don’t know what you mean. 🙂
So I have two primary recommendations at the top. Make your claims clear so I can understand the situation. And toss in some cows and chips.
You’ve got me thinking that adolescents who are being beaten and sexually molested at home take refuge in social media where they create alternative selves whose fantasy lives better assimilate to the youth groups they would like to associate themselves with. In doing so, they somehow create vulnerable self-portraits that attract the attention of stalkers and perverts who manipulate these desperate kids into meeting with them in person after which horrible things occur.
Is that the thesis?
There’s certainly a wealth of causal content there! My question for you would be, are you finding academic sources to support these premises? A common difficulty for many writers is their dependence on theory over evidence. Even complex situations, like the one I detailed above, can be distilled to a paragraph and presented as fact. If there’s no evidence to support them, though, the essay can’t grow and remains merely an unsupported theory.
Your best bet is to track down the work of others that will provide you the evidence you need.
This is meant to be a conversation, BG6. Your responses are always appreciated.
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I apologize for not being clear in my claims. The type of childhood maltreatment is emotional abuse, and physical and emotional neglect from families, which causes adolescents to develop attachment anxiety and depression.
Their attachment anxiety causes them to mistrust others, making relationships harder to form. Without healthy relationships, they turn to social media to cope with heir feelings to feel a sense of belonging. Their attachment anxiety causes a fear of real life interactions that they turn to social media to connect to others, which causes problematic social media use as they do not seek help from a trusted person in their life.
Here is the main source where I am finding information from
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S01651781173186684b4fb2c94c25&acdnat=1540402407_11cb854000531fb29e9c6304e0a86140
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Yeah. Grab that paragraph and import it upwards into your Causal Argument. It’s a good start. Get some cows and chips in there so our hearts break for the unhappy youth you want us to sympathize with. Maybe start your second paragraph with a “case study” real or imagined. Make a composite of several real adolescents if you want. But make it personal one way or another. All that “generality” in your overview statement will fail to engage us. For this story to sell, you’ll need us engaged.
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