essay

brief description of what the essay is about and how the author enables readers to understand what it is about; your analysis can and should use examples from the text and from your own observation or experience (if appropriate) to support any assertions you make about the essay as you analyze it. As evidence to support the thesis, your paper should use examples and explanations to develop each point you assert. You should introduce, present, and explain each example you use; likewise, each example should be useful and appropriate to the subject and audience of your paper. Examples should be proportional to the significance of the points they develop (i.e., lengthy, detailed, or extended examples should explain important points, while brief, cursory examples should illustrate minor points). Your paper should demonstrate how the examples are related to each other as well as to the point being made.

Your success will depend on how completely and accurately you summarize the work and how astutely you analyze it. While the summary and explanation of the essay will be rather straightforward, your analysis should be more evaluative; you can and should think of examining the narrative and dramatic structure of the essay and evaluating the choice of detail and language for effectiveness by comparing and contrasting these elements with observations from your own experience or other knowledge (i.e., other reading, evidence from the experience of others, items you have seen on television, etc.).

Your paper should follow the form of the traditional essay: introduction, body, conclusion. The introduction should be a relatively short paragraph giving a brief overview of the subject and containing a brief but very explicit statement of your thesis and blueprint. The body of your paper, which can be a variable number of paragraphs, will develop and support that thesis with appropriately-presented evidence. Your conclusion, another, more generalized paragraph, like your introduction, should summarize your argument and remind your readers of the most significant points you have made. Your essay should follow a clearly identifiable plan of organization, presenting ideas in logical, chronological, or emphatic order. For this assignment, the plan must include both a summary of Smith’s essay and your analysis of how effectively she has made her point and how valuable is some insight or point that the essay makes.

Your essay should not stray from its announced topic; material that is irrelevant to your thesis should be cut. All the paragraphs in the paper should relate back to the thesis. Individual paragraphs should have clear topic sentences that introduce their subtopic and make solid connections to the thesis; in particular, you should reiterate key concepts, words, and phrases occasionally throughout the essay, to remind readers of your focus, and you should use transitional words, phrases, and/or sentences to signal the end of one section and the beginning of another in your paper. You should employ an assortment of sentence patterns and rhetorical devices to achieve both variety and unity.

Your style and diction should be suited to the conventions of college-level writing. Your tone should be suited to the subject and audience of the paper. Your language should reflect your best understanding of the conventions of standard American grammar and usage. In particular, you should avoid slang, jargon, vulgarisms, and any type of casual language that would be considered inappropriate to a formal discussion. Your vocabulary, sentence grammar, and mechanics should represent a consistently accurate and correct use of college-level American English. Your essay should correctly document and cite all quoted sources. Your typed document should be legible, attractively arranged, and practically free of typographical errors.

Criteria

Your paper will be evaluated for good presentation of the following:

1. in your introduction: a clear, focused thesis that names the essay you will discuss, briefly mentions what your chosen essay is about, briefly describes what critique/analysis you are going to make of it, and that does so in an order that can be used as a blueprint for the organization of your essay;

2. in the body of your paper: a brief but complete and accurate report of the major points of your chosen essay and a description of how it develops and what points it makes; a longer, clear analysis of the work that clearly conveys what you think of how the essay works and explains why you think as you do; consistent and clear use of helpful examples to illustrate and support all the assertions you present;

3. clear presentation in essay form, with an introduction, body, and conclusion;

4. logical organization and coherence among the parts of your paper, using transitions and reiteration to make it a unified whole;

5. careful and accurate editing to eliminate slang and correct basic grammar, including sentence fragments, run-ons, comma splices, subject-verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent agreement, pronoun reference, other aspects of pronoun usage, comma usage, misplaced and dangling modifiers, and appropriate capitalization; and don’t forget to check spelling!

following the specific guidelines for length and format: your final draft should be at least 1000 but no more than 1500 words, typed and double spaced, in a standard 12-point font, with margins of at least .5 inch and no more than 1 inch all around and should include a properly formatted bibliographic citation at the end of your paper.