Poetry, two plots for analysis within 24 hours

GUIDELINES FOR SHORT ESSAYS AND PRESENTATIONS:

HOW TO SIGN UP FOR A PRESENTATION: On D2L, click on “Collaboration” and then on “Groups.” Find the correct signup sheet—Short Story or Poetry. The Drama sign up will be different. Use the syllabus to see what dates connect with what texts. Sign up for either D1-D6.

THE SHORT ESSAY:

- Your essay should be at least 500 words long so that you give yourself enough space to explain your idea fully and to quote, cite, and analyze the text specifically. These short essays are a kind of practice for the longer ones you will do on the short story and poetry.

- Although we will be discussing more than one short story or poem an any given day, choose just one of the texts assigned on that day to analyze in your essay. Your essay should focus on one main thesis about the text. You should use one (or more) of the short story or poetry concepts that we are covering in class in your analysis. See the “Terms and Definitions” handouts, the relevant sections in our textbook, and the glossary at the back of the textbook for a list of the concepts and for help understanding them.

- Your goal in the essay is to show that you are understanding the class concepts and using them to analyze the text and produce an interpretation. You should start by asking good analytical questions of the text. See the list at the end of this document for suggested questions to ask.

- AVOID PLOT SUMMARY: Remember that before you can offer your analysis, you need to explain briefly the basics of the specific part of the text you are discussing. Do not assume that everyone in class remembers the specific moment you are analyzing. However, do not give too much plot summary. The focus of your discussion should be on analyzing how the text is written.

HOW TO WRITE THE ESSAY:

MLA style:

Use the sample MLA style heading, header, title, citations, and Works Cited page in the Dropbox assignment to get started on producing correct MLA formatting. Your essay should have an MLA header and a heading. The title should name the texts and/or authors in some way and explains the main idea or argument that your essay presents. Use a colon for a two part title if you find it will help you include the necessary information.

For more information about using MLA style go to:

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/05/.

The introduction:

The first paragraph of your essay should present the reader with your topic and thesis statement. State the title and author’s name, give a brief overview of the essential elements you will be discussing, and get to the thesis as quickly as possible. When you mention a concept—reliability, sympathy, speaker, irony etc.—give a brief overview or definition of it. Present your thesis statement—the central argument or interpretation—as clearly and succinctly as possible.

The analysis:

After you set out the thesis, immediately begin analyzing the text in a way that supports your main argument or interpretation about it. Keep any contextual or background information brief and concise. Do, however, give brief definitions where necessary. Focus the essay on your interpretation of specific evidence from the text, explaining specific quotations thoroughly.

Ending Questions for Discussion:

At the end of the essay, include two or more questions that follow from the analysis and that you will use to get the class discussing your main thesis idea. This could be your original question(s). You can number these apart from the essay, or just have them be part of your conclusion. The questions should encourage the class to look at specific language in the story, either language that you have analyzed or a different place in the story that complicates your thesis. See below.

WHERE TO POST: It is best to post your essay directly to the Dropbox assignment on D2L in order to see the rubric I use to grade it. You can also go to Content and to the Week # that you have signed up for. There, you will find the link to the assignment. Upload your work as a Microsoft Word doc, PDF, RTF, or ODT. Note, Pages documents do not work with D2L.

THE PRESENTATION AND DISCUSSION:

- On the day that you signed up to present, you must turn in your short essay to the Dropbox assignment before the start of class. Come to class prepared to lead a short presentation on the text that ends in questions you will use to lead the class in discussion. You do not need to have a power point of other visual aid, although you are welcomed to use them. You can sit at your desk or stand in front of the room. This should be a clear, professional, and fairly formal presentation.

- In your presentation, start by announcing the main analytical question(s) that spurred your thesis and state your thesis or main argument/interpretation of the text.

- Then talk the class through your argument and thesis by having them look at two or three specific places in the text that support your reading. For this part, help the class find the specific quotations. Give the page number and have the class turn to the page, and then help them find the quotation on the page. For each, read the quotation aloud and interpret it for the class in a way that supports your main interpretation.

-Once you have answered your analytical question(s) and supported your thesis, ask the class a question or two that stem(s) specifically from your thesis and analysis. The goal here is to get the class discussing something about the text that may not be clear, or for which multiple readings or interpretations are possible. These questions should be directly connected to your thesis idea and should be about how the text is written. Avoid asking the class how they feel about things. Get the class talking about how the text is written in particular ways that guide readers toward a specific reading or understanding that may not be obvious.

*****If after the presentation you choose to revise your essay, you can do so by the end of the week that you present. I aim to grade essays and presentations by the end of each week. No late work is accepted. Please consider coming to talk with me about your essay or presentation as you are drafting them or as you revise your essay after a presentation.*****

TIPS FOR WRITING GOOD ARGUMENTS:

Below are some examples of the types of questions you could use to stage your discussion questions. This is by no means an exhaustive list, so please do not feel compelled to only use these questions. If you have an idea beyond these, run it by me. Mainly, aim to ask and answer questions that get the class talking about something in the text that is unclear or for which there can exist multiple readings. Always come up with your own answers to the questions, but first ask the class to discuss them. Once two or more people have responded, then explain how their answers relate to your own. Try to think critically and creatively for this aspect of the assignment. Push yourself to ask particular questions that point to real ambiguities in the texts.

Plot

The relationships and patterns of events. Even a poem has a plot, such as a change in mood from bitterness to resignation.

· What is the central conflict and is it resolved?

· How do the actions contribute to the conflict?

· How do the events connect to each other and to the whole to lead readers to a specific conclusion?

· Is there a conclusion or resolution? What are readers left puzzling over?

· Might a foreshadowing misguide or set up readers for a meaningful unexpected twist?

· Has might a closed, open, or surprise ending contribute to the text’s larger effect?

Characters

The people the author creates, including the narrator of a story or the speaker of a poem.

· Do the characters stay the same, or do they change? Why might this be important? (static or dynamic)

· Might a reader be able to understand and ultimately accept the motivations or actions of characters without fully supporting them? Why and how? (sympathetic or unsympathetic)

· Might ancillary characters play a larger role in the ideas of the story than may at first be apparent?

· Has the text meaningfully adopted stock characters, perhaps as a critique of a stereotype?

Point of view

The perspective or attitude of the speaker in a poem or the voice who tells a story. The point of view may be first person (a participant, using I), second person (told in commands, using you), or third person (an outsider, using he, she, it, they). A first-person narrator may be a major or a minor character in the narrative and may be reliable or unreliable (unable to report events wholly or accurately). A second person narration usually involves power dynamics. A third-person narrator may be omniscient (knows what goes on in all characters’ minds), limited (knows what goes on in the mind of only one or two characters), or objective (knows only what is external to the characters).

· Are the specific conclusions toward which the narrator or speaker is guiding readers logical or reasonable?

· Is the narrator or speaker trying to trick or unduly influence the reader toward a specific reading, perhaps an acceptance of a questionable idea or character?

· Does the narrator’s or speaker’s point of view hinder the readers’ understanding of the narrative or of events, perhaps by not providing enough or keeping information?

Tone

The narrator’s or speaker’s attitude, perceived through the words (for instance angry, joyful, bitter, or confident).

· Might there be a meaningful change in tone?

· Is there an ironic contrast between the narrator’s tone (for instance, confidence) and what you take to be the author’s or narrators attitude (for instance, pity for human overconfidence)?

Imagery

Word pictures or details involving the senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, taste.

· Do specific images have multiple, and perhaps contrasting, meanings?

· Might the text be using a meaningful pattern of images (for instance, religious or commercial images) that develop or contrast with themes in the text?

Setting

The place where the action happens.

· Does the locale or time period contribute to the work in ways that are not obvious or that produce an interesting tension or contrast with the text’s themes of ideas?

· Are scene shifts significant?

Audience or Listener

The person(s) who would most likely understand or gain from the text.

· How might the text exclude or purposefully delimit a specific audience?

· Does the text anticipate an audience that shares or opposes its ideas?

Style

The use of literary technique or figurative language for a specific effect.

· Does the text hinge on an important irony, dramatic irony, or verbal irony?

· Does the syntax—sentence structure—contribute meaningfully to the work?

· Does the author adopt dialects or a particular voice in ways that help to support or contradict the ideas and themes of the text?

· Might a particular symbol act as an extended metaphor throughout the text?

· Has the author used a technique—alliteration, allusion, assonance, elevated or low diction, enjambment, end-stopped lines, eye rhyme, hyperbole, metaphor, metonymy, onomatopoeia, oxymoron, paradox, personification, simile, slant rhyme, synecdoche, understatement, or a combination of these or others—to a particularly great effect?

· Why might the text adopt stream-of-consciousness or magical realism?

Genre, Form, or Kind

The use of literary technique such as genre or mode for a specific effect.

· Does the text meaningfully adopt a popular form—blog, folktale, memoir, journalism, parable, PSA, or television commercial?

· Why might the text adopt a specific genre—comic, crime, fantasy, gothic, historical, horror, political, noir, science or speculative fiction, romance, urban, western, etc.?

Thesis Checklist:

· Have I taken a position that others might challenge or oppose?

· If your thesis simply states facts that no one would, or even could, disagree with, it is possible that you are simply providing a summary, rather than making an argument.

· Is my thesis statement specific enough?

· Thesis statements that are too vague often do not have a strong argument. If your thesis contains words like "good" or "successful" or “wrong” or “bad,” see if you could be more specific: why is something "good"; what specifically makes something "wrong"?

· Does my thesis pass the "So what?" test?

· If a reader's first response is, "So what?" then you need to clarify, to forge a stronger relationship with your motive, or to connect the thesis to a larger issue.

· Does my essay support my thesis specifically and without wandering?

· If your thesis and the body of your essay do not seem to go together, one of them has to change. You will change your working thesis to reflect things you have figured out in the course of writing your paper. Remember, always reassess and revise your writing as necessary.

· Does my thesis pass the "how and why?" test?

· If a reader's first response is "how?" or "why?" your thesis may be too open-ended and lack guidance for the reader. See what you can add to give the reader a better take on your position right from the beginning. Your reader should think—“I had not noticed that this was happening in the way that the text was written, but I can see how if it is happening it relates to your larger claims about the text. Now prove it!”

The thesis cannot merely be a fact. But it should also not merely be a theme. There is a crucial difference between a theme and a thesis. A theme is merely a topic. In itself, it goes nowhere. It is a little like saying the same thing over and over again: “The author uses ___, ___, ____ to express a general theme of sadness and frustration.” This thesis will lead to a largely descriptive essay, not an analysis: "There is sadness and frustration in the text here, here, and here.” This is barely a thesis at all. All it tells the reader is that these things are present in the text. It does not explain why it is important that you are looking at them in the text.

A thesis, rather, goes somewhere; it makes a claim that needs to be unpacked, explained, supported, and argued in the essay body. Often, a thesis is the answer to an explicit or implicit question, a good question. In fact, the central challenge of a good thesis statement is to produce an answer to a question that is genuinely interesting. Your argument will be interesting to a reader if it provides compelling reasons for a position that is not immediately obvious to the reader.

Where it goes wrong: The most common shortcoming of a thesis is that it tries to tackle too much at once or tries to argue something that is just not reasonable. Your thesis should be focused enough that you can argue it in a short essay using less than 5 pieces of evidence. And it should make an argument that any reasonable person could understand and challenge concisely.

Motive (so what?):

(Adapted from Gordon Harvey’s “The Elements of the Academic Essay”)

Motive is probably a new concept to you, but it is a very important aspect of college writing. Motive explains why your analysis is important; it tells the reader that there is a problem, a tension, a dilemma, a twist, or some other element that needs to be addressed in the text.

In order to produce a strong motive, you must locate something which should honestly puzzle readers. Your goal is to make readers consider an enigmatic moment offered by the text. The motive is ultimately why the reader should care to read your essay, since a reasonable reader should be intrigued by the problem or complication you are identifying. It should be comprised of claims that the reader will immediately consider true but in conflict (Compare to thesis, which is a claim that the writer must ‘prove’ to the reader.)

Motive for Close Reading and Interpretation:

· the truth is not what one would expect, or what it might appear to be on first reading/viewing

· there is an interesting wrinkle or complexity in the matter at hand

· a simple or common or obvious-seeming approach to this topic has more implications, or explains more than it may at first seem

· there is a contradiction or tension here

· there is an ambiguity or something unclear that could mean two or more things

· there is a mystery or puzzle or question here that needs answering or explaining

· we can learn about a larger phenomenon by studying this smaller one

Overall, your motive thesis must get to the heart of what you are analyzing. When writing about literature, film, or any narrative, your thesis must take as its focus the overall idea of the text. Avoid making your argument about one aspect, especially a minor aspect, of the text.

Motive and Thesis Checklist and Workshop:

· Does the motive identify a problem in the ‘text’ or present a viable method of analysis?

· Would reasonable people agree with the claims of this motive?

· Based on the motive, why might someone be interested in reading this essay—what will it teach the reader? What is really puzzling here?

· Does the thesis present an argument about the ‘text’?

· Is the argument of the thesis reasonable, or is it far-fetched? Is it concisely stated?

· How might someone justifiably and reasonably disagree with the thesis?

Remember to keep evolving and revising your motive and thesis as you develop your argument.

See the Grading Rubric(s) on D2L for more information about the grading method I use.