Drama Essay GuidelinesLength: 2-3 pages of text (750-1000), double spaced with an additional works cited page of 1-2 sources.Format: Use MLA manuscript format. For more about MLA Format, see the Cours
Poetry Essay Guidelines
For this essay, you'll develop a thesis about your chosen poem that you can use evidence from it and some sources to support. In other words, you do NOT merely summarize, or even just explain the poem, but think deeply about a text through all of its parts (which you've already done in your essay prewriting). Then you generate an arguable claim that becomes a thesis for a polished essay.
Length: 2-3 pages of text (750-1000), double spaced with an additional works cited page of 1-2 sources.
Format: Use MLA manuscript format. For more about MLA Format, see the Course Directions folder.
Topic Approaches: From your earlier fiction reading, you learned some approaches to generating topics on page 1912-1914. Here is a summation, altered for poetry:
1. Write one of three speaker/poem-focused approaches:
An exploration of a speaker's (or other figure in the poem's) worldview and its consequences.
An exploration of a speaker's development from beginning to end.
An exploration of the nature and significance of a conflict between two or more speakers/figures or elements in the poem (like the conflict between poetic form and content).
2. Analyze your initial response (which you did in a response discussion) think through the elements, (which you did in your essay prewriting), and finally, pose motive questions, like
What element(s) or aspect(s) of this work might a casual reader misinterpret?
What interesting paradox(es), contradiction(s), or tension(s) do you see in the text?
What seemingly minor, insignificant, easily ignored elements or aspect(s) of this text might in fact have major significance?
3. Use research to generate, refine, or test a thesis (described in your text on 1892-1897). Because you are not writing a full research essay, it is much better for you to use research to refine or test a thesis or use a very small germ of an idea from a critical essay (which you credit in your paper) to help you develop your thesis.
4. Another approach (not found in your text) is to begin with a topic raised by the poem—love, growing up, loneliness, or gender roles, for example. Sometimes these topics can come directly from critical theory—race, class, historical, or environmental issues, for example. Then consider what the poem says about the topic (which can be considered a theme or subtheme). In this approach, you next identify subtopics that have to do with the theme you've discovered. For example, a theme like "Difficult war experiences isolate soldiers upon homecoming might have subtopics like war's effect on intimate relationships, effect on friend/family relationships, effect on a soldier's physical health, effect on psychological health (this might have subtopics within it). Ideas like these can become the paragraph topics, just as, in your essay prewriting, ideas like symbolism, setting, or sound effects became topics. In fact, the two approaches are often blended. For example, a paragraph describing the psychological effects of war might use evidence explaining the poem's symbols pertinent to war.
Thesis: The assertions you develop as answers to any of the above are your working thesis.
Sample Thesis statements:
The chaotic imagery of parenting presented in this poem still yields impressive children.
This poem glorifies the natural world while decrying human nature.
The unreliable speaker cannot see that he condemns himself, not his wife.
More discussion of arguable thesis statements and their supporting claims and paragraph development is found in your text reading above.
Samples: Your text has a response paper (with sources) and an ultimate essay informed by the research 722-725. You can see the development of ideas from the initial analysis to essay. Your own analysis, depending on the thesis you develop, may be a good draft for your essay or only prewriting/pre-thinking for a very different paper. Here is a sample from a Sinclair student.
Notes about Research: All of the approaches above can be augmented with source material (you are not writing a full source-based essay). Approaches 1-3 could use literary scholarship and theoretical (from elements of critical theory), historical, or biographical sources. Approach 4 is also particularly suited to applied non-literary theory, like looking up the psychological stages of grief to apply to a character. You must use at least one source per essay and at least four sources overall for your finished anthology project, so it's good to try to incorporate at least two sources per essay as you go.
Follow the Conventions Writing about Poetry
See text description of conventions regarding tenses, titles, and names (pages 1891-1892).
Include author's full name, the title of the poem in quotation marks, and the essay's topic and thesis in the introduction.
Have clear topic sentences that relate to your thesis (often, related words and synonyms from your thesis will appear in body paragraphs—miserly in the thesis? Then perhaps, begrudging, ungenerous, hesitant, hoarding, etc. to explain evidence in the body of the essay).
Avoid use of I or You. Avoid reader-response comments like "This passage reminds me of when we would go to the beach as a family."
Remember MLA citations for page and/or line numbers.
If your short quotes go over line breaks insert a / between the lines.
You may use short block quotes if replicating form is important to your point.
Do not try to cram all your thoughts into five paragraphs—use an appropriate number of paragraphs for the topics you have. Correspondingly, avoid a formulaic three-point thesis. Instead have a global thesis and as many paragraphs or topics as you need to support it. Writing an outline of supporting paragraph ideas (even if there are three) does not entail that they need to be listed in your thesis.
Include a brief conclusion.
