Essay 1: Short Literary Explication

Please choose only 1 story from our text to focus on
To understand the essay assignment, do the following:
1. Read the biographical sketch of each author very thoroughly.
2. Read the story actively by making marginal notes, underlining important ideas, and writing your first impressions.
3. Find the meanings of words that you do not understand.
4. Determine what is happening, where it is occurring, and who is involved.

Strategies for Writing About Literature
You should begin your writing about the story you select by first using strategies to discover ideas about the topic. Develop a central idea for your essay and express it in a focused thesis statement, develop a logical plan of organization, and support your thesis with details and evidence from the literary works. After planning your essay, write a rough draft, and revise and edit carefully.

Writing the Essay
Your 750 word (two pages) essay should have an introduction, body, and conclusion.

The introduction should do the following:
1. Interest the reader with an effective opener
2. Identify the subject, work, and author (give author's full name)
3. Introduce essay's topic (which type of essay from the sample thesis statements below)
4. Define key words, if necessary
5. Present a thesis statement

Sample Thesis Statements

Writing a Character Analysis Essay: Katherine Mansfield's "A Cup of Tea" is a portrait of Rosemary Fell, a self-centered, materialistic, woman, grasping for admiration whose failure to communicate with other people makes her doubt even her relationship with her husband.

Writing a Character Change Essay: Her (Minnie's) change in character is indicated by her clothing, her dead canary, and her unfinished patchwork quilt.

An Essay focuses on Setting in a story: The forest (in "Young Goodman Brown") represents Brown's psychological state during each stage of his journey.

An Essay that focuses on Symbols in a story: The sunset, the winter setting, and the storm symbolize the end of the old man's good fortune.

An Essay that focuses on Irony in a story: The story's setting, its ending, and the main character's thoughts are ironic.

An Essay that focuses on Theme in a story: This idea (loving is an essential part of human nature) is embodied negatively in characters who are without love and positively in characters who find love.

The Body should do the following:
1. Have logical organization
2. Have unity - present one central idea and be coherent.
3. Provide sufficient information to explain thesis statement
4. Have paragraphs that are unified, coherent, and adequately developed with details and evidence.

The conclusion should do the following:
1. Restate the thesis
2. Summarize the main points

Sentences should be the following:
1. Grammatically correct - have no run-ons, comma splices, fragments, errors in subject/verb agreement or pronoun reference
2. Varied in structure and length
3. Clear in structure and meaning
Punctuation marks should be used correctly.

When writing about literature, remember to do the following:
1. Place quotation marks around the titles of poems, short stories, essays or chapters of a book and italicize the titles of novels or plays.

2. Use the present tense. For example, when explaining what a narrator says, you would write this: The narrator describes the people gathering for the lottery: "Soon the men began to gather, surveying their own children, speaking of planting and rain, tractors and taxes" . Notice that the verb describes is in the present tense.

3. Incorporate quotes into your writing by introducing the quote as I did above or by blending the quote into your sentence like this: The men discuss "planting and rain, tractors and taxes". Document quotes from the literary works by placing the page number from the prose work in parenthesis and the line number from a poem in parenthesis. Then write the source cited on a works cited page like this example:

Jackson, Shirley. "The Lottery." Literature - An Introduction to Reading  and Writing. Ed. Edgar V. Roberts and Henry Jacobs. 5th ed.
Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1998. 233-238.

4. Give your essay a title which reflects the content (the type of essay) you are writing.

In addition, when you write about literature, it is best to write in the present tense:

"Goodman Brown goes to the forest and thinks he sees his wife there,"

not "Goodman Brown went to the forest and thought he saw. . ."