Term Essay AmLit

English 230

American Literature Before 1865

Term Essay

Walt Whitman and Friend

The Assignment

Write a 4-5 page essay analyzing some narrow and specific aspect of a story, play, or poem (or small group of poems, perhaps) assigned during the term. Please observe the following guidelines:

2. Based upon this reading and your own interest, select a general category of analysis from the following list:

Character

Point of View

Setting

Theme

Imagery

Symbolism or Allegory

Poetic Form and Style

Dramatic Form and Style

Note: Students will find an excellent explanation of these categories of literary analysis, along with useful example essays, in the supplementary textbook for the course, Writing Themes About Literature: Brief Eighth Edition, by Edgar V. Roberts (Prentice Hall, 1995).

3. Then review the work with your general category of analysis in mind, taking concentrated notes on potentially useful portions.

4. When you believe you have amassed enough material, review your notes with an eye to developing a specific central idea which will serve as the thesis of the essay.

5. Select a focus only if it meets this test: that it can be covered adequately in a four to five-page paper. Avoid large questions which would require far more coverage to satisfy the reader.

6. Continue to review your notes (and the work) to establish a list of points to be covered in your paper in support of the central idea. Remember that the literary paper is argumentative in the sense that it seeks to convince the reader of the validity of your view of a work by presenting evidence from the work itself.

7. Once you are sure of the points to be covered, create a thesis sentence which embodies the central idea which the list of points (evidence) will support.

8. Begin to establish the structure of the essay by deciding upon the order in which you will cover the list of points in the paper itself. Your outline might resemble the following:

Introduction
Capture reader interest, state central focus and thesis.
Body
A. First point of evidence to be presented.
B. Second point of evidence to be presented.
C. Etc.
Conclusion

9. Write a first draft of the paper. Then evaluate it as a skeptical reader would. Does it make a convincing case for its thesis? Identify areas in need of strengthening, and revise them carefully.

10. Write your final draft, and type it into a clear, readable, convincing form. NOTE: Make sure the essay you hand in is well-written and free of mechanical and grammatical errors.

DUE DATE: See Course Calendar

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