Length and format: 4–6 pages, MLA format
This paper will help prepare you for writing college research papers; you will get practice using the library and search engines, interpreting essays, and citing secondary sources. In this paper you will find and respond to one critical essay in a scholarly journal or in a book, which discusses either Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Welles’s Citizen Kane or Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. You should download or create a PDF of the secondary source and work from that; you must turn in a copy of the article with your paper. Upload all required components of the assignment to Canvas when you submit your paper..
Follow this organizational pattern when writing your response:
1) Provide an introduction which identifies the work (by Sacks, Welles, or Dickens) and the essay you will discuss, and the publication information for the secondary source (author, title of the article or chapter, title of the journal or book, and year published). Mention in a thesis statement whether you agree or disagree with the critic’s interpretation, and on what grounds.
2) Summarize, in one or (at most) two paragraphs, the critic’s main points. Try to be correct and concise. Refer to the They Say/I Say chapter on summary for help.
3) Discuss in the body of your paper whether you agree or disagree with the critic’s analysis of the primary text, and explain why. You should provide and analyze quotations from both the primary and secondary sources to support your points. If you agree with the critic, you will need to provide a few of your own interpretations that correspond to those in the article; if you disagree, you will need to provide interpretations that differ. In either case you might, for example, analyze a passage the critic fails to mention.
4) Conclude with an evaluation of how convincing you think the critic’s interpretation of the book, film, or novel is. You should reread chapter four in They Say / I Say for ways to agree, disagree, or both agree and disagree with the critic. (The third option is usually best.)
Concentrate on details: you must quote portions of the secondary and primary texts to support and illustrate your claims. Make sure you also explain, however, how that quotation illustrates your thesis, and why the quotation means what you claim it does. Then offer comments that show how the portion you’re interpreting contributes to the work as a whole. As a general rule, say more about less. You will need to provide parenthetical citations for all paraphrases, summaries and quotations, and a Works Cited page in which you list your sources. You will use the MLA format. I also want you to concentrate on the organization of this paper: make sure that your paragraphs have appropriate topic sentences, that you use transitional phrases to clarify the logical flow of your ideas, and that you omit points which do not explicitly support your thesis. Successful papers will clearly incorporate rhetorical moves from They Say / I Say. If you do not understand how to organize a paragraph or use MLA format, consult the appropriate sections in Little BearHandbook.
Your paper is due by class time on the due date. Late papers may be penalized. Please see me if it appears your paper will not be finished on time. I will be happy to examine your drafts and to discuss your paper with you.
Draft Workshop: For the draft workshop, find a partner in the class and exchange drafts. You must give your draft to your partner early enough that your partner can read it and prepare comments prior to your draft workshop the next day. During the workshop you will talk to each other about your remarks, and discuss ways to revise the paper to make it more effective. As before, you may have more than one partner. When you submit your finished paper, include with it your draft, your partner’s comments, and a one-page reflection on what you learned from your partner and what you decided to revise in your draft.
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