5-7 page work (To The grade)
Nicky
WritingTips.pdf
ENG 298
1
Scholarly Essay #1: Tips for Drafting an Essay Pre-Writing & Thinking Before you begin drafting your essay, you should do the following things, ideally spread out over a week or several days: 1. Carefully review all Scholarly Essay #1 assignment specifications, including where and when to
upload your Draft and how many copies to print and bring to class. All of this information is on the syllabus.
2. If you’re having difficulty deciding which poem to write about, look for potential ideas in the notes
you’ve taken during our class discussions, in your Reading Posts, and in Reading Posts by your classmates. You may find something that you can expand upon for this first essay.
3. Consider emailing me or stopping by my office hours to talk about your plans for the essay, such as
what thesis you’re considering or what question you think your essay might answer. 4. Use at least one of the strategies we’ve practiced or discussed in class to free write about the poem
you plan to write on. Nearly everything we do in class and in our Reading Posts is designed to help you make sense of poetry and / or find new or deeper meanings within poetry. Thus far, these strategies have included:
a. listening to the poem read aloud, preferably by more than one reader, while taking notes on
your observations; b. reading the poem aloud ourselves, and then recording our thoughts on the experience; c. scanning the poem for its meter and structure (remember that you have lots of resources on
scansion, all of which you can find in Module 1 on Canvas: there’s a Versification essay, an accompanying Versification handout, and two essays by the writer Frances Mayes);
d. drawing the most striking images in the poem; e. breaking down and alphabetizing the poem’s vocabulary, then looking over the list to find
themes and topics you might not have noticed before (as we did with “The Moose”); f. comparing the poem to other poems written in the same form (we’ve read multiple ballads,
sonnets, odes, and dramatic monologues, for example).
5. Follow the steps suggested on the handout “Reading Notes into Essay” (available in Canvas, Week 3 Module), which involve translating the poem, line by line, into your own words, among other useful things you can do to prepare to write about a poem.
6. Always look up any unfamiliar words in the OED, which is a resource available through Miami
Libraries. To access the OED from off campus Go to http://www.lib.miamioh.edu/ Click on “Databases a-z” and find the Oxford English Dictionary. Click on “Link to Oxford English Dictionary Online,” and login with your Miami info (the same you use for email).
7. Remember that you may use passages from other poems to support your thesis about the poem upon which your essay focuses.
With enough time, patience, practice, and creativity, a thesis of some kind will begin to emerge from these steps. Now you’re ready to draft your essay!
ENG 298
2
Drafting & Checking Your Draft Review the tips on textual evidence and analysis (below) before drafting your essay. Once you’ve drafted your essay, review the tips again to be sure you’re doing the following things in your draft (which we’ll also cover in our peer review):
Textual Evidence & Analysis. When using textual evidence in a formal, argumentative essay, there are several important steps.
(1) First, introduce the quote. No quote is an island: your reader will be confused about who is
speaking or how the quote follows from the previous sentence unless you include a short phrase such as
Huntly states, “…” (80). / Sarsefield cries, “…” (80). / “…” Huntly concludes (140).
(2) Second, cite the quote with an MLA in-text citation: in parentheses, provide only the page number
– or, in the case of poetry, the LINE NUMBER – of the source. The best place for a citation is usually just before the final punctuation of the sentence. See the Online Writing Lab (OWL) at Purdue (referenced in our syllabus, under Web Resources) for examples.
“Henceforth I resolved never to traverse the wilderness unfurnished with my tom-hawk,” Huntly concludes (140). Dickinson’s speaker reflects, “I dwell in Possibility” (l. 1).
(3) Paraphrase. Immediately after your quote, it’s a good idea to restate the source material in your
own words so as to insure that your reader has the same understanding of the passage as you do. Remember that paraphrase does not interpret the text (as analysis does), but merely restates it.
“Henceforth I resolved never to traverse the wilderness unfurnished with my tom-hawk,” Huntly concludes (140). In other words, from this point forward Huntly will not enter Norwalk without first arming himself.
(4) Analyze. As opposed to summary, analysis draws on textual evidence to argue in support of your
position. It attempts to convince the reader to adopt your point of view on the text by showing how the text does what you claim it does. It may also involve acknowledging and countering conflicting points of view.
Words such as “reveals,” “suggests,” and “signifies,” and phrases such as, “We can infer that…” are appropriate: you are showing the reader the implications of the passage you have chosen to analyze. Most of your paper should consist of analysis.
“Henceforth I resolved never to traverse the wilderness unfurnished with my tom-hawk,” Huntly concludes (140). In other words, from this point forward Huntly will not enter Norwalk without first arming himself. Huntly’s resolve reveals the methodical mindset that he brings to all tasks, whether cleaning his gun, retracing his steps through the woods, or (in this case) preparing for any future incident when he might have to fight American Indians to the death . . . (analysis continues here, including a discussion of specific words in the quotation and a reminder of how this evidence supports the essay’s thesis)
