Essay Assignment Sheets and Advice

As you know, you have to write two short essays in this section of Major American Writers--one that focuses on Silko and one that focuses on Melville--each worth 15% of your final course grade. This page includes the assignment sheets, as well as requirements and advice, for each essay.

Silko Essay: Assignment Sheet

Due: Monday, October 23, 2000, no later than 5 pm, in my mailbox in the English department main office (277 Fenton) or in the envelope outside my office door (240 Fenton).

Format: 5-8 pages, double spaced, with reasonable fonts, font sizes, and margins. (Be warned that barely getting onto the fifth sheet of paper does not a five-page paper make!)

Options: Here are your options for the Silko essay. In each of these options, your job is to come up with an argument that you are trying to prove by using textual evidence to persuade your readers of your interpretation's validity.

• The first and most recommended option is for you to choose your own topic or question on which to focus your essay. If you choose this option, please email me your ideas for the paper at least five days before it is due.
• You might consider doing a close reading of some aspect of Ceremony. For instance, you might make an argument about how one or more of the traditional tales within the novel relate to the post-WWII plot of the novel and issues associated with it--and what conclusions can be drawn about that relation. Or you might make an argument about Silko's goals and purposes for writing the novel. The possibilities are endless--so long as you are making an argument and using textual evidence effectively, and get feedback from me on the goals and focus of your paper, you'll be fine.
• You might consider doing a close reading of some aspect of Storyteller. You might analyze the form of the book--possibilities include focusing on why she interweaves photographs, poetry, short stories, and autobiographical memoir in the book, what effect she is trying to have on the reader, how two different parts of the book relate, and so on.
• You might consider relating one of Silko's stories or poems from Storyteller to Ceremony.
• You might consider relating one or more of Silko's essays from Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit to some aspect of either Storyteller or Ceremony.
• You might explore issues of canon formation and revision by focusing on Silko and the American (Indian) canon. What does it mean for her to have become a "major American writer"?

A lot of this work of sorting through possible answers to come up with the one you find most plausible should take place before you ever sit down at a keyboard or desk to compose your paper. You should reread the story(-ies) you're writing on, mark significant passages, write questions or observations in the margins, take notes, brainstorm, make up lists or charts or concept maps, doodle, try to produce an outline, free write--whatever "pre-writing" process works best for you at getting your interpretive juices flowing. Often the things I tell you not to do in the final draft of your paper are excellent pre-writing strategies. You can think of them as building blocks that you can shape and then put together in different combinations, until you begin to move from putting together your observations and relating them to each other to actually coming up with an argument or a thesis that you want to try to prove. I can't recommend strongly enough that you go to the links page's section on researching and writing well, and check out the Princeton or Purdue writing center handouts on brainstorming, pre-writing exercises, and developing a thesis--you wouldn't believe how many people skip this essential first step of collecting and manipulating their ideas and observations, and instead stare blankly at a blank page or computer screen, hoping inspiration will strike. Don't fall into this trap of expecting your ideas to emerge fully formed and in complete sentences. The sooner you accept that writing is a process of discovery--that you will figure out what your real argument is as you struggle to find the words that will best develop it--the better you will be able to deal with the inevitable frustrations and dead-ends that come up as you are trying to figure out just what it is you want to argue. There's a lot of preparatory work to be done before you can expect to begin drafting the roughest of rough drafts, and the quicker you develop your own brainstorming strategies for "priming the engine," the more efficient your writing process will eventually become.

When you do move on to the drafting and rewriting stages, though, remember that a key part of persuading your audience that your answer is plausible and your evidence is relevant is anticipating how they might react to your answer and evidence. By imagining possible objections or counter-examples and then either explicitly or implicitly forestalling them in the written essay, you show your audience that you are taking them seriously and that you have thought carefully about the question. It's much more persuasive to deal with a major objection or counter-example to your argument than to pretend it doesn't exist. In fact, one of the best ways to make your own thesis stronger is to try advancing a thesis that contradicts yours. Some people find this process of imagining counter-evidence and counter-arguments more helpful to do early in the pre-writing stage, others when revising their first draft. Find out what works best for you by trying out different approaches this semester.

You will most likely find that you need to write a first draft that is much longer than the page limit in order to a) figure out precisely what your main argument is and b) figure out how best to convince your readers of the plausibility of your argument. Therefore, it is in your best interest to give yourself time to not only write that longer first draft but also to go through a serious re-vision process--to select, prioritize, reorder, condense, and cut in light of putting your ideas as clearly, concisely, precisely, and persuasively as you possibly can. The upshot of this is that you should never, ever, decide not to pursue a line of thought in writing because doing so will take you over the page length. Follow the idea where it takes you. Most experienced writers don't write their first drafts with a set blueprint in mind--they generally discover what they mean or change their minds while writing. Worry about page lengths only after you've thought through the issue in writing to your satisfaction. Once you've figured out a) and b) above, you can then move on to making the difficult choices about which sentences are too wordy and which paragraphs are really digressions from your key idea that you don't have space to develop and how to make your argument economically.

2. One consequence of the need for conciseness is that you are going to have to think carefully about the structure of your essay. Although you should definitely hang onto the key elements of the good old five-paragraph essay--an introduction, body, and conclusion; a main argument; some kind of topic sentences and transitions; a sense of structure; and a consideration of evidence--you should definitely avoid the "funnel" and "reverse-funnel" styles of introduction and conclusion and absolutely avoid needless repetition. Cut to the chase. Develop your own personal voice and style of analysis and persuasion. The only thing your introduction must do is "hook" your readers and make them want to read the rest of the essay (this is usually done by giving them some sense of where the rest of the essay is going or what the point of the essay is; often, having brainstormed on the inevitable "so what?" question most readers approach any piece of writing with, will help you write an effective introduction). The only thing the body of your paper must attempt is to persuade your readers of the plausibility of your answer to your central question. The only thing your conclusion shouldn't do is restate the thesis or move from the specific back to the general. Instead, your conclusion should "shift gears" in some way, approach your answer from another angle or discuss what follows from it. Above all, be aware of the form and structure of your own writing: think about what points you want to make in what order--about the most effective way of ordering your essay so that it helps you persuade your audience of your point's validity.

In general, then, think of the Silko essay as a much more formal reading response, in which you don't just make an observation or two and come up with some questions, but instead choose a specific question to focus on in some depth and think carefully about how you're going to go about answering it and persuading your audience of your answer's plausibility. No matter which option you choose for the essay, I will be grading your paper in terms of how well you make your case for your argument or interpretation of a story or stories, how well you use textual evidence to support or qualify your points, and how well-organized and -written your paper is.

Melville Essay: Assignment Sheet

Due: Monday, November 27, 2000, no later than 10 am, in my mailbox in the English department main office (277 Fenton) or in the envelope outside my office door (240 Fenton); those who wish to may still meet the original November 17, 2000, due date.

Format: 5-8 pages, double spaced, with reasonable fonts, font sizes, and margins; title that indicates main argument of paper; heading that includes your name, the course name or number, and the date; bibliography and citations in MLA style (see links page for explanations of this style of citation); proper quotation format ("..." (12). for quotations within a paragraph; blockquote format for quotes five lines or longer).

Options: Here are some options for your Melville essay. In each of these options, your job is to come up with an argument that you are trying to prove by using textual evidence to persuade your readers of your interpretation's validity.

• The first, and most recommended, option is for you to choose your own topic.
• You might try focusing on some aspect (thematic, structural, intertextual, political) of a single Melville work, and crafting an argument about its function--how it contributes to the meaning of the larger work.
• You might try relating an early Melville text ("Hawthorne and His Mosses," Moby-Dick) with a later one ("Benito Cereno," The Confidence-Man) on a particular theme or other axis of comparison.
• more to come!

Melville Essay: Requirements and Advice

General Requirements

1. At the most general level, in your Melville essay you must present an argument about or offer an interpretation of at least one of the texts by Melville we've read in class thus far. You should have a central question that you are trying to answer in your essay, and you should be working to persuade your audience that your answer is plausible by offering whatever evidence seems most relevant to your argument and audience.

2. For the Melville essay, you will be expected to choose your own topic and generate your own question.

Advice

Note: I've numbered the paragraphs in this section to correspond to the numbering in the previous section.

1. The best way to make sure you are making an argument or offering an interpretation is to generate questions that you have about the texts we've read, choose one, and set out to answer it for yourself. You should choose a question that's interesting to you and that you believe you can show to be interesting to your classmates (the audience you should imagine for your essay). Moreover, you should choose a question that's truly debate-able, a question to which you can imagine several possible answers. Your job is to sort through the possibilities and convince your audience that your answer is the most plausible.

2. You should choose a topic on which you have a number of observations that you can develop or distill into a coherent argument or interpretation. Above all, choose something that interests you and on which you feel you have a perspective that's distinctive. Try to bring to our attention something that you've noticed about the story to which you feel that the class as a whole hasn't paid sufficient attention.

Whatever question you choose, you should be able to say why it is important. The more you think about this, the more effective your introduction and conclusion will be--you will be able to answer the "so what?" or "why should we care?" question with which most readers approach every piece of writing.

EN 426-01: Major American Writers, Fall 2000
Created: 10/10/00, 6:11 pm
Last modified: 11/16/00, 3:50 pm