Writing

WR 121 Textual Analysis Essay This assignment invites you to read to expand your knowledge and to use what you have read to stimulate your own thinking and writing. For this essay you will be writing in response to one of three common texts:

− Niccolò Machiavelli’s “The Qualities of the Prince”

− Lao-Tzu’s “Thoughts from the Tao-te Ching”

− Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “The Origin of Civil Society” For this assignment you will develop an essay that shows your understanding and analysis of one common text as well as your ability to connect the text to your own thinking. The final product will be about 1,000 to 1,500 words long, and will include appropriate citations of quotes and a works cited page. Generally, you will need to include at least 2 (and possibly more) direct quotes from the essay as well as summarizing and paraphrasing central ideas from the text directly related to your own thinking. To get you started:

“At the core of any idea of government is the belief that individuals need an organized allocation of authority to protect their well-being. Lao-tzu reflects on the ruler who would, by careful management, maintain a happy citizenry. He makes clear that the success of the existing form of government depends on good relations between the leader and the people. His view is that the less the Master needs to do—or the less government needs to intervene—the happier the people will be. Machiavelli places the survival of the prince (rules) above all other considerations of government and, unlike Lao-tzu, ignores the concerns and rights of the individual. His commitment to a powerful prince is based on his view that in the long run strength will guarantee the peace and happiness of the citizen for whom independence is otherwise irrelevant. Rousseau’s emphasis on the social contract focuses on the theory that citizens voluntarily submit to governance in the hope of gaining greater personal freedom. A fundamental principle in his essay is that the individual’s agreement with the state is designed to increase the individual’s freedoms rather than to diminish them.”

–Lynne Nolan Your assignment is to write an essay analyzing the ideas of one of these authors and use those ideas in direct conversation with your own ideas about how a society should be governed. Your completed essay will show that you can engage with a sophisticated text, discuss and understand it, quote from it by using accepted conventions of academic discourse, and emerge with your own well-articulated thoughts and judgments or conclusions in a text of your own making. This assignment involves a lot of thinking and a lot of work – you need to “wrestle”

with the primary text and develop a thoughtful, well-reasoned, and specific response to the ideas presented in it. The overall goal of a textual analysis essay is to help bring your thoughts into dialogue with those of a published writer, and to help you move toward writing with increased authority, agency, and standing. There are some very practical teaching goals for this assignment. Writing the essay will give you experience in some important scholarly practices that are essential for writing about texts: how to summarize fairly and clearly; how to fold quotations of the words of others comfortably into the flow of your own words; and how to use academic citations according to the appropriate conventions. How to Proceed The sequence for preparing your essay is as follows...Carefully re-read the assigned piece, take notes, look for passages which incite your own thinking, reflect on what you’ve read, arrive at some original insight or observation, and then write a paper in which you use what you have read as the point of departure for your own ideas. This is not a personal essay—the basis for this paper is a text, not your own experience. This is not a book report—you are not simply pointing out what is in the text. This is an essay that asks you to work with a text to arrive at an original insight or idea. The goal of this assignment is to help you read better and write better about what you’ve read. To be more specific... Goals or Why Are We Doing This?

− To encourage you to write with authority and agency about what you have read.

− To help you practice engaging, conversing, wrestling, exploring, and having a conversation with authoritative texts.

− To work on being both deferential and thoughtful when writing from literature.

− To help you structure your own active train of thought in response to a text.

− To work on summarizing, quoting, and citing material correctly. Some Criteria for Evaluating the Essay Here are some of the criteria I will look at when deciding what grade to give your work:

1) Ideas and Content—Does the essay have a point of view? Is that meaning clear? Is it insightful?

2) Organization—Does the essay have a clear purpose and focus? Is it clear what the essay is about? Is there enough information to accomplish its purpose, and is the essay in an order that makes sense?

3) Language and Mechanics—Does the writer have a distinctive voice? Is he or she able to adapt that voice to different subjects and purposes? Is word choice distinctive and meaningful? Are the pieces edited to make every word count? Do mechanical errors distract?

4) Working with Sources—Does the essay work deftly with sources? Are quotations appropriately introduced, interpreted, and relevant to the ideas presented in the essay?

DUE DATES: A position statement is due Sunday, July 17th by 2pm. A completed rough draft is due for peer review on Friday, July 22nd by 5pm. Revised essays should be 1,000 to 1,500 words typed, with double spacing and one-inch margins and are due Sunday, July 31st by 5pm. Please create a document that includes:

− your original position statement

− a 1-page letter explaining your revision process including details on how your thinking and writing changed from draft to draft

− the revised essay

− a table of contents for each of these pieces