To write an effective paper of this kind, you need a
strong thesis, rigorous argumentation, and carefully chosen textual support.
Again, you may not use secondary sources for this assignment. That means no research. I am not interested in your ability to look up what someone else thinks of a work. I am only interested in your ability to read discerningly and argue persuasively. Using outside sources for this essay would be a violation of the Honor Code.
The thesis should unite theme and literary technique — something about what the work means and how it conveys what it means — in some way. You absolutely cannot make your focus a broadly qualitative judgment.
No one needs to be told that these are great or important works, or wants to read you arguing that they are not.
You should assume your readers are familiar with the work. Therefore, you should never bother with summarizing any part of it. At most, a short phrase or sentence to orient the reader when you are about to examine a particular passage. For example, you might say something like “The scene in which Hester meets Dimmesdale in the forest offers some of the clearest evidence of Pearl’s strangeness.” Then you would analyze one or more passages from that chapter.
You should also
assume your readers have a college-level vocabulary and own a dictionary. Thus you do not have to define words, unless the meaning
the poet intends is other than the usual one. The phrase “Webster’s Dictionary defines” does not belong in a college-level essay.
To support
your ideas, your primary source must be the text itself. You should
quote it frequently. However, because literary works are all too long to quote
in their entirety, you must be selective. Choose your
quotations with your supporting arguments in mind. Quote only enough of any passage
so that you can support your point effectively. A good general
rule is that if you quote it, you need to comment on it. If you
quote four sentences in a story or six lines in a poem but only comment on the last two, something is wrong.
Of course, the quotation needs to make sense out-of-context, but
in general students begin by quoting too much, or quoting in too
big chunks. That said, you should probably quote the work at least
once in every paragraph except for the introduction and conclusion.
Once you have
identified the best passages to use for support, you need both to set
them up and comment on them so that they support the thesis. Your
general approach should be to establish the point you are trying
to make — not the whole thesis, but a point that supports
it — then introduce a quotation (and introduce means
setting it up in a meaningful way, not just starting a paragraph
with “Then Hawthorne writes”), quote accurately, and then
explain how the quotation supports the statement. You must both
introduce the quotations and comment on them; as a result, you absolutely
cannot either begin or end a paragraph with a quotation. Remember:
the quotations cannot make your argument for you; you need to comment
on everything you quote. The listserv posts have been opportunities to practice this.
For poems, do not automatically
quote only whole lines of poetry. Sometimes starting or ending your
quotation in the middle of a line is necessary in order for the
quotation to make sense. However, again you must be careful that your quotations
make sense out of context, or that you set them up in a way that
makes the meaning clear. Quotations of a single word or merely a
two- or three-word phrase are almost never useful.
The paper may
be either open- or closed-form; literary essays lend themselves
to an open-form approach but either form can be effective. (See
the description and examples of open-form and closed-form linked
from the “Resources” page if you do not know what these are.) Either way,
you should have an introduction to the paper in which you establish
either the issue you are exploring (open-form), or the issue and
your thesis (closed-form). You should not quote the work in your
first paragraph. The
conclusion of your paper either states and develops the thesis while connecting it to the claims you have made so far (open-form), or it briefly re-connects the thesis to the points the essay has made without repeating them fully, and ideally makes one further point (especially if the essay is closed-form) to make the reader glad you didn’t end one paragraph earlier.
Just as you should not quote in your first paragraph, you should
also not be quoting and analyzing the poem in your conclusion. If you could swap the positions of your introductory and concluding paragraphs, and they would still make sense, your conclusion is poor.
You must quote and cite
the work properly according to MLA format.
See the Quotations
and Citations Guidelines and your writer’s handbook for help with formatting quotations
and citations.
Follow the Format Rules for the document.