Close reading essay
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YouandyourTextandContextCloseReadingEssay2020.htmlYou and your Close Reading Essay
The Close Reading essay for Text and Context asks you to write about one creative text (or in the case of Niedecker’s poetry, several texts) through the lens of one of the questions set out in the Close Reading Essay Questions.
You can access the questions here:
You can access the guidelines here:
The task assesses your ability to:
- Identify the relationship between a text’s historical/cultural circumstances and its formal properties
- Analyse a creative text, providing detailed evidence to support your analysis
- Express yourself using in appropriate scholarly style, such as coherent sentences and paragraphs and academic language
This document outlines some of the ways you can demonstrate these skills.
Identify the relationship between a text’s historical/cultural circumstances and its formal properties
The best place to start is to go back to the lectures for the subject: in each lecture, we have looked at a particular historical/cultural circumstance and analysed how this plays out in the case studies.
You can certainly use the information on the historical/cultural circumstances in your essay. However, you should AVOID using the same quotes from creative texts that were analysed in detail in the lectures. Of course, there are some quotes from the text that it is hard not to talk about – the ending of “Miss Brill”, for instance – but try and find your own examples. Your job as a scholar is to build upon what has already been said by providing your own evidence from the case studies.
Fortunately, there is plenty of material in each of the excerpts I’ve provided (and I’ve tried to give you sections that I didn’t look at in detail in the lecture). The best place to find evidence from a creative text is to re-read it with the essay question in mind. So, re-read the excerpt, making a list of all the quotes you can find in the text. Once you have read the text, look at the quotes and arrange them into categories that relate to the question. For instance, if you are looking at the role of “deep layers of history” in Niedecker’s poems, you might want to make categories around different moments of history, but also the different kinds of history: environmental, personal, human, nonhuman, etc. You should also look at the way in which “layers of history” plays out on the formal level (the point of the essay!): so you could make categories around the way the structure of the poem encourages us to see layers: through line breaks, rhythm, different voices, etc.
You can then use the categories/quotes to start to build your essay paragraphs. You need only two or three paragraphs in the body of your essay: one paragraph for each category. If you have more then three categories, see if you can consolidate any (could one category be linked with another?) or just pick the categories that are most interesting to you. Remember, you don’t need to say everything about a text, especially in a 750-word essay! Focus on making two or three points in detail rather than trying to cover too much ground.
Analyse a creative text, providing detailed evidence to support your analysis
The most important element in your essay is your engagement with the creative work. This requires you to do two things:
Provide evidence!
Every time you make a point in your essay, you must provide direct evidence to support the point. Always quote the text directly – it is in a writer’s specific use of words that an idea is conveyed. Try to find (at least) three quotes to confirm your point: I find it useful to have two ‘small’ pieces of evidence (individual words or short phrases) and one ‘big’ piece (a sustained excerpt). I can use the small evidence to introduce my idea, and then use the sustained excerpt to provide in-depth analysis.
Analyse the evidence!
Once you have provided the quotation, always remember to analyse the quote: describe precisely what’s going on in the quote that makes it important; explain precisely where an effect happens in a text and how the devices are used to achieve it. Go into detail: without this, I can’t see where, specifically, the operation you’re identifying is happening in the text. You can see it – now show me!
Have a look at the lectures and see when I provide enough evidence and explanation to convince you: learn from when I do it well, as well as the moments when I am not convincing enough…
Express yourself using in appropriate scholarly style, such as coherent sentences and paragraphs and academic language
An academic essay is part of a formal genre: it has been designed to allow for the strongest presentation of an argument.
Format
Always read the task description carefully and pay attention to instructions for formatting.
In this essay you need to ensure that your font is 12 pt; line spacing not less than 1.5 (not single-spaced) and your margins are no less than 3cm.
- s also important to format the titles of works you cite in your essay. As a general rule, works which can be part of a larger collection are presented “in quotation marks” and larger complete works are presented in italics.
- Text and Context, this is how you should present the works we are studying:
|
Titles in quotation marks |
Titles in italics |
|---|---|
|
“The Burial of the Dead”, “A Game of Chess”, etc. (Books in The Waste Land) “Lake Superior”, “My Life by Water”, etc. “Miss Brill”, “Life of Ma Parker”, etc. Any academic essay or chapter in a scholarly book |
King Oedipus Uncle Vanya The Waste Land Oliver Twist Any scholarly book |
Grammar
Your essay should be written in complete sentences and paragraphs and your grammar should be correct and contain appropriate and proper punctuation.
The Australian Style Manual is the best reference for correct Australian grammar.
Style Manual: For Authors, Editors and Printers, 2002. Sixth edition, John Wiley and Sons, Milton.
Although you do not need to undertake research for this essay, sometimes it’s useful to look at other scholarly essays as a guide to useful grammar. As you read someone else’s essay, consider how they use language to present their argument: where they are successful and unsuccessful in communicating their ideas.
Structure
You should use the traditional three-part structure for this essay. This structure consists of:
1. Introduction
3-5 sentences which introduces the text you will be examining, the question you are answering and your response to the question (your argument).
A simple model for this is:
Premise: set-up the text you are studying and the question you are looking at. For example: “the shift from community to individual lives is central to Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill”.
Argument: This is central to your essay – you need to make a claim about the topic and use this to guide the rest of the material. You must declare the argument in your introduction. For example: “In this essay, I argue that Eliot’s use of fragmented quotation in The Waste Land mirrors the experience of moving through the modern city”.
Outline of Essay structure: In your essay, you want to make 3-4 points about the text that demonstrate your argument. You must declare these in your introduction, so we (and you) know where you’re going. Be as clear as you can. For example: “In this essay, I will examine three aspects of Oliver Twist that show that the “interlocking communities” of nineteenth-century Britain influences the structure of the novel. First, I will look at… Second, I will examine… Finally, I will investigate…”
- Body
- you identify three points to make in your introduction, then you should have three paragraphs to your essay. In an academic context, a paragraph is made every time you press ‘Enter’ – you should not have an essay with lots of short paragraphs of 1-2 lines (this document, for instance, is not an essay).
Each of your paragraphs should contain:
A topic sentence: A clear introduction to what you are going to be focusing on in the paragraph. For example: “One of the central images at work in The Waste Land is the
city as a site of degeneration”. You can use your scholarly research to support this claim.
Evidence from the creative text: As stated above, quote the text directly.
Analysis/Interpretation of the quote: Explain precisely what is going on in the quote. Again, you can use your scholarly research to support your claims. Quote the critic and then build on it to develop your own argument.
A link to your argument: Explain how this evidence and analysis relates to the larger point you’re making in your essay. For example: “In this way, Niedecker’s use of line breaks encourages the reader to recognise the different layers of experience presented in the poems”.
- Conclusion
- 5 sentences that reiterate your argument and remind us of the points you have made in each paragraph. While it is not possible to present an entirely new point in your conclusion, sometimes it is useful to include a moment from the text or a quote from a scholar that draws all your paragraphs together. For example: “At the end of Uncle Vanya, Sonya delivers a long monologue about her dreams of a perfect life after death. She exclaims: “We shall rest! We’ll hear the angels, we’ll see the heavens sparkling like diamonds…and our life will become as peaceful, gentle and sweet as a caress. I believe it, I believe it…” (Chekhov 1999, p.76). But no one is really listening. This moment shows the three elements of conflict Chekhov uses to explore the isolation felt by those living in the early twentieth century. The repetition of phrases in the dialogue shows…the use of imagery shows…the setting shows…”
Saving and uploading your document
When you have completed your essay and proof-read it. don’t forget to save your essay as a PDF file. Save the file as “[Your Name] - [Student No.]” (e.g. Joshua Lobb - 7654321), not as a generic title like “Text and Context Essay” or “Joshua’s essay”. This makes it much easier to distinguish your essay from other students when I am marking your work!
Instructions to upload your essay can be found on the Close Reading Essay guidelines. Make sure you follow each step to ensure that the work has been submitted.
You should receive a confirmation email from Moodle to your uowmail account that your essay has been submitted.
If you have NOT received this confirmation email within 8 hours of your submission, email [email protected], attaching your essay.
