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EC 2 ASSIGNMENT 2

ROUGH DRAFT DUE MAR 1 (2 copies)

FINAL DRAFT DUE MAR 22

Choose either Emily Dickinson or Langston Hughes. It would be a good idea to stay with the poet you chose before (but not required).

If you choose Dickinson, your selection will be the following poems: “I like a look of Agony” (836), “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—” (843), “Because I could not stop for Death—” (844), and “A Light exists in Spring” (847).

If you choose Hughes, the selection will include the following: “I, Too” (907), “Negro” (908), “Song for a Dark Girl” (911), and “Harlem” (915).

Your rough draft next week should aim to be about 4 and ½ pages double spaced in length. Your final draft due next month should be 5 pages in length. Try to give good explanations without padding. Remember to explain your quotes before and after.

A packet of critical responses comes with each poet to help you back up your discussion. Before you read the criticisms, you should read the poems and develop your response and attitude first. Think about the poems and try to understand them on your own first. Come to a conclusion about what you want to say about them. Try to find a thesis or a main idea based on the understanding and insight that you would like to explain to your readers. Remember, you want to go beyond insightful observation; you want to develop a real thesis with either cause or result stated. And then proved with evidence.

Then you should go to the critics and see if they say useful things that confirm what you believe about the poems—or if you disagree with their analysis, you can support your position with a good argument against the critic. Just because the critic says something, doesn’t mean it’s right or that you must accept it. Sometimes even critics see different things in the poem and may not agree with another critic’s reading. But in order to disagree, you must back yourself up with evidence—your own reading or another critic that supports what you say.

In your draft this week, you must quote (directly or indirectly) and use four or more critical sources in your argument. You may use the editorial discussion of the poems in question from the text book as an extra source. You may also bring up poems by these authors that you have written about previously if you think it will help your case.

Remember to quote from your texts and give examples of what you are explaining. The reader cannot read your mind.

Except for the fact that you are including critics as part of your presentation, the essay you are doing now has the same basic structure as before: Thesis that tells the reader what your main idea or argument is; Topic sentences that support the thesis in each paragraph after the introduction. Remember that your topic sentences should say something about your thesis—not just mention key words, but actually say something that explains the thesis or helps to prove it is true. And your paragraphs should explain your topic sentences, which ultimately explains the thesis.

The essay’s only purpose is to explain your thesis and prove that it is true. If you are not talking about your thesis with every single word in your essay, then you are wasting your reader’s time.

These drafts must be handed in on the due dates in class. Late rough drafts worth ½ credit. Late final draft deducted one letter grade per week.