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English 3563 |
Assignment Two
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| Due Dates: | Requirements: |
| Working Draft—November 23, 2005 Final Draft—December 5, 2005 |
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To identify the important issues in a work of literature and construct a persuasive argument addressing those issues in a paper.
In the first assignment, you considered very brief passages and examined them in minute detail. It is now time to apply those same skills to an overall literary work from this semester. Attention to detail will still be important, but now it will also be important focus on the most useful evidence from this longer text. Furthermore, it will be important to situate the work within a larger literary context.
In writing this paper, please avoid simply summarizing the work. You can presume that your audience has already read the text, so devote your energies to an analysis of the text. Break it down for your reader and only refer to those parts of it that contribute to your argument. Along these lines, do not let the structure of the chosen work determine the structure of your own argument. Structure the argument according to your thesis statement and the subtopics that will allow you to prove this thesis. Do not hesitate to take quotations from the work out of order in doing this.
In writing this paper, focus on one selection from the semester. Choose from among the following topics or choose one of your own (though, please, talk with me about the topic before you start writing the paper if you are choosing your own topic):
Educating the Reader—Many of the works we have read this semester have had, at least as one goal, a desire to educate the reader, to alter the reader's behavior in some way and thus make the world a better place. Choose one such work and explain the techniques that the author uses to convince the reader to act in a certain way or to avoid acting in a certain way or both. Explain also how this advice distinguishes the time period in which the author has written this work.
Some possible arguments (you can make these more specific to the subject matter of your own paper or choose your own argument about advice in literature):.
This book offers good advice that we should heed as much now as readers at the time would have. The advice that this book offers is misleading and potential harmful, especially if we try to apply it to our lives in the present day.
This book seems to be telling us to do one thing, but, upon closer reading, we realize that it is telling us to do something else.
Drawing Our Attention to Something—Many of the works that we have read this semester have attempted to make readers reconsider their traditional understandings of day-to-day objects or commonplace ideas. Indeed, it is often the mark of a good work of literature that it makes readers pay attention to objects or ideas that they had previously overlooked, disregarded, or taken for granted. Choose one such work and focus on particular examples of objects in the work that we must see in a new light after reading about them.
Some possible arguments (you can make these more specific to the subject matter of your own paper or choose your own argument about the author's description of objects):
The _________ in this work may at first seem unimportant, but it actually proves to be crucial to our understanding of the main idea of the work..
The meaning of the _________ in this work only makes sense when we study the historical context of the work. (Explain what we need to know about the past to have a useful understanding of the object.)
Pitting the Individual against the Community—We often associate rebellion with youth and sometimes glamorize it. However, youthful rebellion can sometimes a cross a line into extreme, sociopathic alienation. Choose a work that addresses concerns about the often-strained relationship between an individual and his or her community.
Choosing between Body and Soul (Or Refusing to Choose)—There has been a running argument for much of history about whether body and soul are at odds with each other or happily unified. In the grander scheme, this question relates to the connection between heaven and earth or the spiritual and the physical. Choose a work that somehow addresses this debate over our priorities and develop a thesis that explains how this work either takes sides or simply works through it.
Choose a topic from the above list and one or two works that genuinely interest you and that will allow you to elaborate the most effectively on the chosen topic.
Read through the works again and take notes on the salient points as well as similarities and differences between related works.
Adapt one of the thesis statements that I have provided to your chosen works or come up with a thesis on your own.
Break the argument down into between two and four subtopics that are likewise arguable (three, of course, is the standard number of subtopics). Think about the most logical arrangement of subtopics for the structure of your argument.
Write a draft of your argument. Go back and reconsider your thesis statement. Revise it.
Bring the draft to class on November 23, 2005 for peer-editing. If you cannot attend class on that day, let me know. You can regain some of the points lost to an absence on peer-editing day if you can exchange papers with another classmate and edit it before turning in the final draft.
Be sure to include a Works Cited List on the last page of the paper.
Be sure the paper is at least six pages long. Six pages is the absolute minimum length, and papers under six pages will lose some points. That is, please write six full pages of text (not six pieces of paper with some writing on them).
Revise and proofread the paper over the weekend and turn in the final draft on December 5, 2005.
Writing Tips
I have based many of these tips on my comments to you on your previous papers.
In most cases, your first thesis statement will not be arguable enough. Keep revising it until you have a statement that truly arguable and truly interesting. Do not hesitate to revise it after you have written a complete draft of the paper. The thesis statement should directly address your two chosen works.
Examples:
FIRST TRY: Nathaniel Hawthorne criticizes the Puritans in The Scarlet Letter.
SECOND TRY—NOT THERE YET: The Scarlet Letter is about a woman who suffers from an overly harsh punishment at the hands of her Puritan community.
A GOOD THESIS: Hester Prynne’s punishment in the Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter illustrates Hawthorne’s criticism of the Puritans’ insistence on their ability to read clear messages from God.
Notice the evolution from an overly general, though accurate, statement about the two works to a statement about the difference between the two works to a precise explanation of how these books compare.
Organize your paper around the thesis statement and be sure each part of your argument bears some clear relationship to the thesis statement. Do not leave it to your reader to figure out what each subtopic is doing in your paper. Consider the following outline for an argument supporting the above thesis:
THESIS: Hester Prynne’s punishment in the Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter illustrates Hawthorne’s criticism of the Puritans’ insistence on their ability to read clear messages from God.
Hester suffers from a punishment that Hawthorne regards as unduly harsh.
Hawthorne portrays numerous other shortcomings in the Puritan community that thus punishes Hester.
In order to make his criticism more direct, Hawthorne proposes an alternative to the Puritan world view in this novel.
Turn each of these subtopics into a unified paragraph (or two) with supporting evidence in the form of quotations. If a paragraph gets too long, break it down into two paragraphs, but make careful use of transitional phrases to keep the logic clear to the reader. Remember that a good paragraph should be roughly between one half and one page long.
Follow MLA format when using quotations or paraphrases to support the argument:
Use blended quotations for quotations under four lines and block quotations for quotations over four lines. Remember the tricky punctuation rules for each type of quotation. If you have questions about this, ask me or look it up in a style manual such as Keys for Writers.
Write a list of Works Cited at the end of the paper. The last name of the author comes first, then the title of the selection. Then, if applicable, the title of the book in which you found the work (i. e.: The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. A.). Notice that you should italicize the name of a book whenever you mention it.
Examples:
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1852. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
Wheatley, Phillis. 1773. "To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for North-America &c." The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. A. Fifth Edition. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1998. pp. 1243-1244.
[NOTE: If you are looking at this online or have printed it from the web site, please remember that indentations are NOT CORRECT in the above example. There is simply no way to follow this rule in HTML, which we use to produce web pages. Consult a style manual for correct indentations of bibliographic entries.]
Alphabetize works cited according to the author's last name. The year of original publication after the author's name in the above two examples is optional, but the year of publication after the publisher is required. There are many other rules for MLA format for peculiar instances that will come up, but the above two examples should serve as useful models for the vast majority of cases for this class. Do not hesitate to look these rules up.
Grammar points:
Remember grammatical points from the previous assignment’s guidelines:
Refer to events in a work of literature in the present tense. This may sound strange at first, but it is the convention for addressing literature. Notice that we tend to follow this rule in class discussion.
A grammatically complete sentence has at least one subject and one verb. If it is missing a subject or a verb, it is a sentence fragment. Sentence fragments are sometimes acceptable, but only if you mean to use them.
Comma rules are complicated, so look them up in a style manual if you had trouble with them on the previous paper. A comma splice is what happens when you try to separate two grammatically complete sentences with only a comma. Comma splices are bad. Avoid them.
Example:
WRONG: I hope it starts snowing soon, snow would make Duluth so much prettier.
CORRECT: I hope it starts snowing soon because snow would make Duluth so much prettier.
ALSO CORRECT: I hope it starts snowing soon. Snow would make Duluth so much prettier.
Transitions. These are words that serve as signposts pointing out the direction of your argument to your readers. Some of these transitions are like "One Way" signs leading your reader on to the next point. Others are like "U Turn" signs indicating a reversal of direction. There are other more subtle transitions that alter the tone or indicate approval or disapproval of what you are discussing.
Examples:
One Way Signs (leading from before to after or from cause to effect)
A Native American raiding party captures Mary Rowlandson in a violent raid on her homestead in Massachusetts. Subsequently, her child dies from a bullet wound.
Frederick Douglass reaches his breaking point and has as serious fight with Mr. Covey in which he defeats him. Consequently, Mr. Covey never lays a hand in anger on Douglass again.
Crévecœur's second reference to a prospect is much less conclusive than his first such reference. Therefore, we must presume that his disenchantment with America is causing him to doubt all of his earlier certainties about what makes the land so rich.
U-turn Signs (establishing a contrast between ideas)
Whereas Emerson sits behind his desk to develop the theory of Transcendentalism, Thoreau goes out into the woods in order to practice Transcendentalism.
William Bradford believes the American colonies are the most religiously pure in the world. However, he must still acknowledge the Devil's repeated incursions in to this territory.
Though Thomas Morton does not hesitate to erect a Maypole in Merry-mount, he also vigorously defends himself against charges of heresy coming from the Puritans.
Keep in mind also that these transitions are often the most important as you move from one subtopic in your paper to the next. Very frequently, the first sentence in a new paragraph needs to provide the reader a clear transition between ideas in the previous paragraph and ideas in the new one.