Assignment One
Analysis of a Short Story

Objective

To construct a persuasive argument about the meaning of a short story by Flannery O'Connor or Richard Wright. The argument should involve a close consideration of details in the text in question.

Procedure

1. Choose a short story from the syllabus by Flannery O'Connor or Richard Wright.

2. Take notes including specific details in the story that explain its meaning and significance. Such details may include context, word choice, comparison/contrast, imagery, punctuation, and anything else the author has used in order to make his or her meaning clear to an audience. Focus on those details that are the most useful in explaining the meaning of the short story.

3. Formulate a thesis statement about the meaning and importance of the chosen short story. This thesis will undoubtedly change as you write your paper, but at least it will give you a place to start.

4. Write a draft of your argument about the short story in question. Refer to specific words and phrases in the selected story in order to support the points in your argument. You may also refer to quotations from other stories in the larger work, as long as you use them to explain the meaning of the short story in question.

5. Bring a word-processed, correctly formatted draft of this paper to class on February 3rd, 2016, for peer editing. Include the entire chosen quotation at the top of the first page.

   After considering feedback you received from peer editors and reconsidering your own argument, revise your paper. You may also sign up to meet with me to discuss a draft at this point.

6. Proofread your draft to remove spelling and grammatical errors.

7. Turn in the completed final draft along with a peer-edited working draft in class on February 10th, 2016.

Close Reading

Close reading means paying careful attention to details in a written work. Since you will be looking more closely at this story than most people who read it, your paper can offer perspectives on its meaning that will interest your audience and challenge readers' expectations. In analyzing specific passages from a short story, you may ask yourself the following questions:

What, literally, takes place in the story?

Are there connections between this story and the other ones in the collection? What are they?

How is this short story different from any other short story by this author or by other authors?

Does the author use any terms that could be unfamiliar to 21st-century readers? What do these terms mean? How have these terms changed since the author first wrote the short story? Are there any terms that are unfamiliar for other reasons?

Is there anything distinctive about the arrangement of ideas in the short story? Are there clear parallels or contrasts implicit in the order of ideas? Is there anything distinctive about the author's diction or use of punctuation (distinctive as in unconventional, different from other authors' diction and punctuation).

Does the author use any imagery in making her or his point? The most common forms of imagery include metaphor, simile, personification and symbol.

Does the author allude to any other works of literature? Common sources of allusions are the Bible, Greek mythology, the works of Shakespeare—any work of literature could be the source of an allusion in a subsequent work of literature, though.

What will make this paper interesting to an audience consisting of your classmates, your teacher and yourself? You will want to tell them something new—that would not otherwise have occurred to them after reading this short story.

Writing Tips

I have based the following writing tips on common difficulties that students encounter when writing papers for this class.

Develop an arguable and interesting thesis statement that applies directly to the story (i. e., that you could not write about any other short story).

1. Organize your argument around this thesis statement. Think of between two and four sub-points and structure your argument around them. Each subtopic should have its own, more focused thesis statement that should also be somewhat arguable. Break your argument down into subtopics in such a manner that you can safely avoid merely summarizing the text.

2. MLA format means you should include a list of works cited at the end of your paper, even if it only includes one work. For example:

   O'Connor, Flannery. "A Circle in the Fire." A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Short Stories. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955. 137-152. Print.

   Wright, Richard. "Down by the Riverside." Uncle Tom's Children. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. 62-124. Print.

3. Some grammatical tips:

   1. Avoid using the passive voice whenever it is possible to do so. When writing in the passive voice, you remove the subject from the sentence or at least de-emphasize it. This makes writing less engaging to most readers.

      Example:

      ACTIVE VOICE: The Reverend Bevel Summers baptizes Harry Ashfield.
      (Note structure: subject/verb/object)

      PASSIVE VOICE: Harry Ashfield is baptized by the Reverend Bevel Summers.
      (Structure: object/"to be" verb/past participle)

      ACTIVE VOICE: The Reverend Bevel Summers baptized Harry Ashfield.

      PASSIVE VOICE: Harry Ashfield was baptized by the Reverend Bevel Summers.
      (Passive voice can exist in any verb tense.

4. Avoid contractions when writing college papers. Replace they're with they are and replace don't with do not (these are just a few examples of the numerous possible contractions out there.

5. Italicization is the best way to signal that you are referring to a word itself and not to the thing that the word represents. Notice how I am using italicization of the terms in the following section "d". You should also italicize titles of books (even in parenthetical references and lists of works cited) and foreign-language words like Bildungsroman and coup d'Žtat. In addition, titles of books (and magazines) should always be in italics. Titles of poems and short stories go in quotes instead.

6. The word it's (with an apostrophe) is a contraction of it is. The word its (without an apostrophe) is the possessive of it. Its and whose both deviate from the above rule about possessives.

7. Refer to events in a story in the present tense. The words in the short story are currently sitting there on the printed page, so we refer to the events that they depict as things that are currently happening.