Assignment Three
Othello and Its Critics

Objective

To identify a specific element of William Shakespeare's Othello and analyze two different critical approaches to it.

Overview

The goal of this course is to examine the varieties of literary criticism and to apply them to the study of literature. In this assignment, it will be necessary to build on the skills you used in the previous assignment by working with the arguments of at least three literary critics of Othello.

Procedure

1. Choose an element of William Shakespeare's Othello that interests you and that will be amenable to your preferred critical approach to the study of literature.

2. Read through at least three critical works on Othello and take notes on the salient points as well as similarities and differences between related works. These articles can be from the Norton Critical Edition and/or from another source that you find on your own, as long as it has a named author and appears in an academic journal.

3. Formulate a thesis statement that interprets the passage from the literary work and that allows you to consider ideas from the three chosen critical works.

4. Break the argument down into between two and four subtopics that are likewise arguable. Think about the arrangement of subtopics that is the most appropriate for the structure of your argument. Avoid an arrangement that lends itself too much to plot summary.

5. Write a draft of your argument. Go back and reconsider your thesis statement. Revise it.

6. Bring the draft to class on November 20, 2014, 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.

7. Be sure to include a Works Cited List on the last page of the paper.

8. Be sure the paper is at least five pages long. Five pages is the absolute minimum length, and papers under five pages will lose some points.

9. Revise and proofread the paper over the weekend and turn in the final draft on December 4, 2014.

Writing Tips

I have based many of these tips on my comments to you on your previous papers.

1. 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 chosen works.

2. 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.

   Turn each subtopic into a unified paragraph 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.

3. Follow MLA format when using quotations or paraphrases to support the argument:

   1. 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. Consult a style manual or the Online Writing Lab for how to format the anomalous ones.

   2. 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.

   Examples:

   Boose, Lynda E. "Othello's Handkerchief: 'The Recognizance and Pledge of Love.'" Othello. Ed. Edward Pechter. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. 262-275. Print.

   Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Chicago: U. of Chicago P., 1980. Print.

   Shakespeare, William. Othello. Ed. Edward Pechter. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Print.

   Alphabetize works cited according to the author's last name. There are many other rules for MLA format for peculiar instances that will come up, but the above examples should serve as useful models for the vast majority of cases for this class. Do not hesitate to look these rules up. The Online Writing Lab at Purdue University offers an extremely helpful collection of guidelines for using the MLA Format, and you can find it at

   "http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/"

   Go to that website and click on "MLA Formatting and Style Guide" in the right-hand column.

4. Grammar points:

   1. 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.

   2. Avoid contractions in academic writing. Contractions produce a casual tone and academic work tends to be more formal. The same rule applies to business letters. So, replace they're with they are and replace don't with do not.

   3. 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 (unless it is a command, but papers do not normally use commands). Sentence fragments are sometimes acceptable, but only if you mean to use them.

   4. The word it's (with an apostrophe) is a contraction of it is. The word its (without an apostrophe) is the possessive of it.

   5. It is acceptable, on occasion, to use the first-person singular pronoun—I, me, my. However, in many cases, doing so makes your sentence redundant. Everything in your paper is something that you have thought. Thus, writing "I think" at the start of sentence adds nothing to that sentence.