For your final essay, you should choose one of the following options.
Compare and contrast some of the poems from this week's readings or the poet you selected for part 1 of the forum. You may compare poems from a single poet, or compare poems across poets. Have a debatable, persuasive claim and focus on specific points of comparison, using the Lesson in week 7 to guide your structure.
View the list of American Essayists. Select an essayist who wrote after the Civil War (note, the list includes some pre-Civil War essayists. Do not select a pre-Civil War essayist). Search the internet for an essay by your selected author and read it. Compose a thesis that has a persuasive, debatable claim about the significance of the message or theme in the essay or the success/effectiveness of the essay as a whole. Summarize the essay in your intro paragraph, end the paragraph with your thesis, and be sure to include your three points of evidence in your thesis statement. Cite the essay as you would any article on the internet as you examine your points of evidence.
Discuss one work or one author from this course that you believe had the most significant influence on American literary history. Please be sure to maintain third person perspective.
Submission Instructions:
Your essays should be in MLA Style and approximately 1625-1950 words, not including the Work(s) Cited page. Meeting the minimum word requirement makes you eligible for a C grade. Meeting the maximum word requirements makes you eligible for an A grade. As with most academic writing, this essay should be written in third person. Please avoid both first person (I, we, our, etc.) and second person (you, your).
In the upper left-hand corner of the paper, place your name, the professor's name, the course name, and the due date for the assignment on consecutive lines. Double space your information from your name onward, and don't forget a title. All papers should be in Times New Roman font with 12-point type with one-inch margins all the way around your paper. All paragraph indentations should be indented five spaces (use the tab key) from the left margin. All work is to be left justified. When quoting lines in literature, please research the proper way to cite short stories, plays, or poems.
Should you choose to use outside references for prompt one or two, these must be scholarly, peer-reviewed sources obtained via the APUS library (select Advanced Search and check the Peer Reviewed box). Reliable open web sources may be used for prompt three. Be careful that you don't create a "cut and paste" paper of information from your various sources. Your ideas are to be new and freshly constructed. Also, take great care not to plagiarize.
John Grisham: "Somewhere for Everyone"
Sharon Olds "First Thanksgiving"
"Still Life in Landscape"
"After Making Love in Winter"
"The Planned Child"
Linda Pastan "A Rainy Country"
"I am Leaning to Abandon the World"
"The Obligation to Be Happy"
"Why Are Your Poems so Dark?"
Larry Levis: "Signs"
"To a Wren on Calvary"
"Winter Stars"